Being more stressed in your 30s than your early 20s is probably normal too.

You've got less time on the planet, I've got a wife and three kids to support now, career options are vastly more limited, incurred massive debt to buy a house. But hey, things are going comparatively well for me relative to many of my peers.

It seems really hard to compare between generations. Things are so different, but if mental health is towards the top of the pile of concerns now we should probably address it regardless of whether it's really a bigger issue than today than it was previously.

Normal in the context of how our society is structured, but far from ideal or unavoidable.

For instance, I can compare the experience of my cousin raising two young kids on the east coast of the US with my girlfriend's sister in the same situation in Italy.

In my cousin's case, she had to go back to work almost immediately in order to pay the high rents where she lives, and money's a constant stress because of the price of a decent daycare/preschool. Family's far away, so essentially all the childcare responsibilities fall on her and her husband.

In contrast, my girlfriend's sister had 9 months of paid maternity leave with which she could stay home with the baby without undue financial stress. When she returned to work part time, she didn't have to rely on commercial childcare because her large extended family is close by to share the burden. In general that makes her and her husband's life more relaxed, because if they want to go away for the odd weekend they can leave the kids with grandma.

If you ask me, the work culture is deeply pathological in places like the US and UK. With the rise in technology and automation there's no reason we couldn't live in societies which prioritize our human needs more highly.

Except for the long period of paid maternity leave, there's no reason someone in the US couldn't have what the Italian woman has. I know several parents that live close to their extended family and get help watching and raising their kids all the time.

It's one of the reasons why I haven't moved to Silicon Valley after all these years, because I don't want to leave my familial and friend support network behind. It's resulted in much lower income for me, but that's the trade off.

Although it doesn't have to be necessarily. For example in my case, I could possibly find a well-paying remote job. I'm already working remotely currently, albeit for a company that's local and doesn't pay anywhere near as well.

> I know several parents that live close to their extended family and get help watching and raising their kids all the time.

Anecdotal evidence is a fallacy.

It's equivalent to saying that "smoking a pack each day doesn't kill you because my grandfather smoked until he was 97." As ridiculous as that sounds compared to what you're saying, they are nonetheless equal in terms of evidence.

All I said was that it's possible, I'm not arguing that it happens all the time. I know plenty of people that don't live near their families too.

To say something is possible, all it takes is one result, in which an anecdote is fine. Someone providing an anecdote doesn't guarantee a fallacy in all cases.

It's a choice for people to move away from their safety nets (unless bad things happen to their families, and I certainly know some people who have grown up in broken homes. I dated a few people in that situation). It's not always a good choice, or the best choice, but it's still a choice.

The parent only provided a single anecdote to "show" how things worked in Italy as well. I was just showing how his anecdote wasn't enough evidence to prove his point that things work differently in Italy compared to the US.

Not everyone has the privilege of choosing where to live, or even the possibility of remote work. People go where they can find work, and this often forces someone away from their support network. The cost of having a national labor market is that you can't rely on locally available jobs to match the locally available labor force.

Some lucky person might get the local job that matches their skills, but the 10 other people looking for the same job will be forced to move.

As someone who works for a lot less money than I could be making and in an industry I am not excited about in the least (insurance...technically business process outsourcing but our clients are all insurance companies), I don't know about the word forced. I have been choosing a suboptimal career so I can be near my support network. It's hard sometimes, really hard, especially knowing I could easily be making $100k+ more than I'm making right now and working on something I care about at least a little bit more, but I am making that choice.

I realize it can be extra difficult in some markets. I'm at least near a metropolitan area, so there's some jobs (hardly any that excite me, but there are some). I've worked plenty of shitty jobs in my life and nowhere near the software dev world in order to stay in my hometown . Unless the job market completely dries up in your town, it's a choice that can be made.

It's similar to all the people who get majors in humanities or psychology or marketing and then end up working as a barista at Starbucks once they graduate. It's far from ideal, but sometimes people really don't want to move across the country for their jobs (or can't).

Again, I'm not saying it's a great choice, or the right choice to stay near your support network necessarily. I haven't lived away from them so I don't have any idea firsthand. But I think it's a bit myopic to think you are forced to always go wherever the maximum amount of jobs or money to be made is, support network be damned.

I don't think one is always forced, but I think there is always someone who is forced. As you said yourself, it could be even harder for someone else. If you take the barista job, someone else isn't going to get it. And is a barista job actually going to provide maternity benefits or pay enough to raise a child? "Maybe sometimes" doesn't make a good national policy.

Do you feel that the sacrifice you have made to stay near your support network is worth the value of your support network? By which I mean, if you had a child, is your support network wealthy enough to provide the resources to help you raise that child? For many people, their support network is itself getting squeezed. What do you do if your friends and relatives themselves have to work 60 hours a week and aren't available to help watch your baby while you work?

I don't currently have a child but in the next two or three years I am planning to have one. Other people in the family have had children recently, though, and I am seeing how they are being helped out and they're getting a lot of assistance, including free babysitting, which by itself is crazy expensive (can be more expensive than one person's income nowadays, which is why some people are becoming stay at home parents now).

I also don't know how I'd be able to afford buying a house if I moved to somewhere like Silicon Valley, whereas I've bought a home here, and I'd rather not go back to renting if I can help it.

Also, one of my professional hobbies is board game design and I have built up a pretty good local network for playtesting and have gotten to know several designers and publishers in the area (even got my first game signed), plus I am within driving distance of the two of the biggest game conventions in the US, where I can network even further, so that's another factor keeping me away from the west coast.

So there are other unrelated factors that are influencing the decision, it's not a total black and white affair. Although I was still making the decision to stick around even before these were a thing.

I do agree with you that people's support networks are probably getting squeezed more than in the past (income inequality is on the rise, tuition, health expenses, etc are skyrocketing, so everyone is getting squeezed). I did say it's not necessarily the best decision for someone to make. It might not even be the best decision for me to make. But I'm still doing it, and I see tons of people do it every day, especially once they have families. I also see tons of people choose to move away from their networks, and again that may be the best thing to do, I just don't think sticking around should be assumed to be the wrong decision in pretty much all cases for the country as a whole, which seemed to be the assumption that was made.

I think the problem is precisely that society is being squeezed to the point that many people's support networks are breaking down, forcing them into moving to keep up with labor demand, for the sake of keeping labor supply cheep and powerless in the market. We are being offered a perverse choice at the outset, and being resistant to that coercive influence is the form that privilege takes. For the modestly privileged it's a difficult choice, and for the very privileged it's an easy choice.

> Except for the long period of paid maternity leave, there's no reason someone in the US couldn't have what the Italian woman has. I know several parents that live close to their extended family and get help watching and raising their kids all the time.

This is the part about which we disagree. You are generalizing from several people you know to say there is no reason someone else can't do it. The reason is that not everyone is lucky enough to know the kind of people you do. When you say "someone" it sounds like you really mean just yourself.

Fair enough. I guess using the words 'no reason' went a bit too far. I didn't realize I had done that. Afterwards I repeatedly said that for some people it might not be the best decision for them to make, though, so for me to assert that, clearly there must be some reasons for those people to decide otherwise.

Yeah the maternity leave situation is more structural than the extended family situation for sure. However I'd argue that the fact that people in the US tend to move farther for work stems from the same societal values that result in the lack of political will to enact mandatory paid parental leave.

Well, considering the entirety of the landmass of Italy is approximately the same size as the state of California, it's not really a surprise that Americans tend to move farther away. If Italy was the same size as the US, its centers of industry would probably be much further spaced out as well, as it is in the US.

That would have been more of an argument before the EU. Europeans have freedom of movement within the EEA, so Italy vs US is not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

Of course it's not apples to apples, that's kind of my point. The parent was the one trying to compare Italy to the US.

But for the sake of argument, I don't know to what extent Italians move great distances compared to the US, but I would imagine that most people tend to want to stay stick within their culture if they can get away with it. At least their primary spoken language.

The US provides a large landmass full of pretty much the same culture, same language, etc, somewhat divided between rural vs urban or conservative vs liberal, whereas Italians wanting to speak Italian and live among mostly Italians are going to have fewer options in the EU to choose from.

And I have no idea where the centers of industry are in Europe in general or Italy in specific, so I could not venture a guess as to how far apart they are. But if someone in Italy wants to stay in Italy and work in Italy, they have to go somewhere. And the furthest they can go is about the same distance as the state of California.

I'll say I broadly agree that we should be moving towards a more evenly distributed system, and I'm a huge fan of the idea of basic income for the reason you outlined: giving people options.

The caveat IMO is that having children is an incredibly selfish decision, and that decision shouldn't be publicly subsidized. It should come out of your discretionary spending. If we each get $2000/month and a kid costs you $1000/month, then you have to live off $1000/month, which means not living in overpriced areas.

You can have anything you want in life, but you can't have everything.

Except if no one has kids, then our society collapses. So if society wants to keep its little engine moving, it's GDP going up up up every year, houses being bought, Social Security paid for, etc, it needs to at the very least not discourage the decision to have children so much that hardly anyone does it.

It also seems that government that invest in children tend to have future generations of better educated, better adjusted, and better contributing members of society, which I feel is worth at least some investment.

Truthfully, I think we should be discouraging having children. There's too many people working too late in life that my peer group struggles to find meaningful work.

A generation ago, people retired in their 50s and opened up jobs to the next generation, then died 10 years later and left family money to the next generation that could be used for housing.

I don't have a single friend in my peer group who can afford housing, let alone has the income to raise children, if they don't have family money. Upward mobility into the well paying jobs is non existent, with 20 years of people in between them and executive level careers.

People aren't going to stop having kids. It's too engrained in our society and genes. But with automation and an increasingly elderly workforce, job prospects are bad now and will continue to get worse for kids born in the last 10 years.

> Except if no one has kids, then our society collapses.

Ah, ha! The top 1% are already on it.. they're pumping fortunes into defeating mortality as we speak.

For those of us who can't afford it, I'm sure they'll be happy to extend our lives in return for some kind of "temporary" employment unto them, at least until we've repaid our debt...

/s

But is normal ok?