While not everyone in my family is messed up, I come from a pretty messed up family. A lot of people make that claim of course and many can indeed back it up, and I am in that category. However, I don't go into details here, because I have largely moved myself on from it and look forward. The trouble is, forward is looking pretty bleak also and I suspect that the families that are out there today, are often in pretty messed up environments also, where there are significant shortfalls and imbalances across all kinds of healthy family dynamics.
The "Picket Fence" life seems to be dead. The idea of having a secure home, domestic peace, and professional success, seems to have disappeared and replaced with uncertainty, relationship breakdown, and constant grind. As I have often noted, whilst the corporations and investors are hitting all time highs, the way of life the average person experiences is decaying.
Yesterday I was writing about economic demand being driven by population growth, and one of the aspects of that which has changed our way of life, has been women entering the workforce. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing at all, so don't go down that road. But from an economic standpoint, it doesn't shape up to quite the same outcomes as it did earlier.
Because while women are now earning (even if slightly less then men), the demand hasn't necessarily translated into better home conditions. A household having twice as much money doesn't mean it needs to increase its demand two times. Instead, what has happened is that inflation has increased far above wage growth over the years, so that now a family with two incomes is effectively in the same position as one of those stereotypical 1950s households. The difference is, both parents are working.
This means that any benefits there were to having a stay at home parent have largely been lost, but the amount of time spent to earn the same lifestyle has doubled. Again, I will reiterate, this isn't the fault of women, it is just the way the economics have played out. It is similar to making everyone a millionaire, which ultimately means, nothing changes economically.
Except, things do change in terms of lifestyle and wellbeing.
The family dynamics have changed massively, as has the localised community aspects. For instance, "back in the day" women (mostly) were the social glue in the local community, arranging and managing social engagements with friends and neighbours, getting the kids to play, and managing the household, including the finances. Men would go to work and earn, but they weren't the driving decision maker for many of the purchase decisions.
However, now that that women are also working, it means that individuals are making the decisions on how they spend their incomes, which takes away the "connectedness" of the process. It encourages a far more selfish approach, because the money is "mine to spend" as I choose. This also means that demand for individual desire items increases, because there isn't the checks and balances of family life to get in the way. It is more direct,
I earn - I spend.
The breakdown of family has been a boon for driving demand for goods and services, because it pushes up unit prices as effectively, an individual isn't buying "in bulk" and saving at scale. And it isn't just food, because hand me down clothing also doesn't happen as often. And with the changes in who has money, living conditions have also been heavily affected, with far more one-person dwellings than earlier. Single person dwellings used to be rare, with less than ten percent typical. However, in many developed countries, it has surged. For instance in the US, it has gone from around 7% in the 1940s to over 29% today. In the city in which I live in Finland, single-person dwellings account for over fifty percent of the homes.
These changes affect more than just prices, because the shift in culture has fundamentally undermined our social frameworks and made it increasingly difficult to connect and commit. On top of this, people are far less family orientated, less socially equipped, and less likely to make compromises that get in the way of them getting what they want. Told to "not settle" all of our lives, we become very bad at building and maintaining a relationship because ultimately, it is always going to require give and take.
People only want to take.
Some people see the breakdown of the nuclear family as some kind of freeing prize, but in actual fact, it has been a big part of why we have degraded so far as a society and are facing mounting problems with all aspects of our health. The family is the second smallest unit of a society, other than the individual itself, but it is a bridge to the community. Without it, we are just a lot of individuals, disconnected from each other, and reliant on our consumption to satisfy the many gapes in our experience we used to fill with interpersonal interaction.
Perhaps we will evolve as a species to not need social interaction to thrive, but at this point, we are far from that. The family, whether it be direct or indirect is a key part of building a healthy society, and all the trappings that come with it.
We might have pulled down the picket fence, but the barriers to each other are higher than ever.
Taraz
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