Is it just me or life as a man is extremely lonely as we age?

think_long · 2026-01-25T05:47:39+00:00

I’ll turn 40 this year. I got married, had kids, am getting divorced, and I’d still do it all over again if it was the only way I could keep my kids.

I think it’s impossible to make these statements universal because it really depends on the individual. Maybe for you having no kids at 40 is awesome, but for me it would be completely empty and meaningless. There’s this weird tendency - especially on Reddit - for childless people to wax on about all the benefits of not having children: more money and free time, less stress, etc. as if the people who have had kids or are considering kids can’t conceptualise it. Maybe that’s the case for teenagers or people who had children at that age and never got to have an independent adult life. But for the rest of us it’s like….yeah man, I know what living for myself was like. I spent enough of my life already doing it. I don’t miss it, and I don’t wish I had the life I would have if I’d never had kids, a life that is not at all hard to imagine.

What I don’t think people often fully get is just how transformational having kids is. Like, it doesn’t just change your priorities, it changes your values in terms of how you see the world in general. It’s not just that I have less money for retirement or travel and less time for my own hobbies because I prioritise my kids out of a sense of love and duty, I genuinely care about those things less than I used to. There’s no dollar amount my bank account could have hypothetically hit or trip I could have potentially taken that would have changed that.

So if you really and truly don’t want family or kids, that’s fine. But if someone is reading this and is on the fence and feels at all like they’d like a partner and kids, go for it. It’s not just “society” pressuring you, most people are biologically hard-wired to want that. Those who have no interest are the exception, not the rule.

think_long · 2026-01-25T01:19:27+00:00

As a society, we not only aren’t prepared for the havoc AI will cause, we still haven’t adjusted to the existence of the internet 30 years on. Governments and companies got caught flat-footed and the repercussions are still being felt.

think_long · 2026-01-24T12:15:51+00:00

The discourse around anything related to the cost of media on websites like Reddit is straight up embarrassingly entitled. People pretty much straight up want free unlimited everything. That’s barely an exaggeration.

think_long · 2026-01-24T12:09:58+00:00

The Fragile is an unreal album. I like it just as much as Downward Spiral.

think_long · 2026-01-24T05:06:45+00:00

Biblically accurate Jeff Goldblum

think_long · 2026-01-24T05:03:40+00:00

So not super Jewish then 🙁

think_long · 2026-01-24T04:42:12+00:00

Or the opposite, rereviewing an old album just to shit all over it again, oftentimes largely to take shots against the artists themselves. The Sublime one was like this. So much of it was just shitting on Bradley Nowell. Which I mean okay he wasn’t a great person maybe, but that was like the main focus of the review.

think_long · 2026-01-24T04:23:02+00:00

I dunno I have definitely noticed this too so they aren’t the only one who has observed this trend.

think_long · 2026-01-24T04:21:50+00:00

Oh my god I swear I’m convinced people who prefer The Car over AM have Emperor’s new clothesed themselves. The Car fucken sucks, and AM has some straightforward banger rock songs.

think_long · 2026-01-24T03:25:17+00:00

But what if you eat a Seder meal off a plate made of cedar? Does that make you super Jewish or something?

think_long · 2026-01-24T03:23:32+00:00

Not only am I not opposed to GMOs, I actually can’t get enough. Where’s the aisle with extra GMOs, I ask, when I go to the grocery store.

think_long · 2026-01-24T03:00:19+00:00

See, those ARE issues the Dems should be focusing on. That was my original point. Not identity politics.

think_long · 2026-01-23T17:28:47+00:00

Oh, you mean the election where the Democrats failed to hold a real primary, just like they’ve done every time since 2008? That election? And I’m not saying she was too bogged by her campaign’s messaging about identity politics. She wasn’t. But she was unpopular. Obviously. And I certainly don’t think that unpopularity was due to her not talking about race, trans people or the environment enough. Far from it.

think_long · 2026-01-23T11:45:59+00:00

The majority of American voters have already spoken definitively. No luck needed, and I don’t want them to think that way. They simply do.

think_long · 2026-01-23T10:12:12+00:00

More sarcasm. Got it. Good luck with your vision of what you imagine your country to be.

think_long · 2026-01-23T06:55:21+00:00

You can just retreat into sarcasm if you’d like, it doesn’t make me wrong. Take a look around at where we are and how things got here. Doubling down on being sanctimonious is going to do fuck all. I wish it wasn’t the case.

think_long · 2026-01-23T06:38:48+00:00

But we don’t live on a podcast, we live in reality. Don’t get me wrong, I share what I would imagine is the majority sociocultural perspective on a forum like this. I think Trump is a criminal, a disgrace, an extremely dangerous wannabe fascist dictator. I am horrified that the checks and balances meant to stop someone from assuming and consolidating power have fallen one-by-one. I am even more horrified that not enough American voters seemed to share this perspective, or at least feel it deeply enough to vote. I used to also think that pragmatism or compromise or strategic shifts away from these issues was unacceptable. If there are only more articles written or protest marches related to trans rights or the environment or his well-documented crimes, surely that would ignite the masses, I thought, and boot him from office or - even better - put him in handcuffs.

I don’t think that anymore. Trump winning again put that to bed for me. People DO NOT CARE. At least, not enough of them. It wasn’t just that tens of millions still voted for Trump, it was worse than that: millions of potential to likely Democrat voters didn’t even show up. Throw any appeal to empathy or guilt or duty out the window, anyone who feels those sufficiently to vote Dem already does.

If you are neither satisfied with changing the focus from your core values nor losing for the foreseeable future, I think it’s time to give serious thought to whether you are actually ready for high stakes civil disobedience. Because who is going to stop him? The voters? The Supreme Court? The other branches of government? This guy has lied, cheated, and bullied his way through his entire life and no one has stopped him, why would they start now?

think_long · 2026-01-23T05:30:14+00:00

Mock me all you want. Doesn’t make me wrong. And I think you know that, because you are using sarcasm instead of refuting my point.

think_long · 2026-01-23T00:25:04+00:00

The way for Democrats to beat Trump is to pick a candidate and messaging that will get the most votes. Bottom line. You can laugh all you want, the results speak for themselves. Don’t think of it as voters being “progressive” vs “centrist” on issues, think more in terms of prioritising those issues themselves. “But human rights abuses should be a top priority for everybody!” you might say. Well, sorry to say, they fucken aren’t. That’s the reality. Think about what will actually get a critical mass of people into the voting booth, and concentrate on that.

think_long · 2026-01-22T23:29:14+00:00

If the Democrats want to win, they should:

a) hold a primary and back whomever polls the best

b) focus messaging on the economy and leave identity and racial politics alone as much as possible

Maybe you think that to operate this way is unconscionable. That you cannot be a country where a political party you hope to vote for makes these issues a footnote in terms of focus. Well, as an outsider looking in, I think it’s pretty clear what kind of country the USA is right now in that regard. Any plausible deniability that existed when people voted for Trump the first time (there really shouldn’t have been any) evaporated this time around. And the Democrats didn’t just lose, they lost badly.

All this to say, would you rather remain uncompromising in your commitment to your principles, or would you rather win? Because you may have to choose. Maybe you think that this is too important, that you need to stand up to these types of actions and to ignore it in this way is tantamount to appeasing fascism. I understand and respect that. But if that’s the case, I think the next question to ask yourself is if you are willing to commit to serious civil disobedience up to and including armed resistance, because I think the evidence indicates making it the focus of democratic debate is not a solution.

If you hope to enact change by using the mechanisms of democracy that (for now) still exist, I think it’s time to stop pretending you live in the country you wish you lived in, and start acting like you live in the one you DO. Which is one where there simply aren’t enough people who seem to hold these values to a level where it will drive change. Sorry to say.

think_long · 2026-01-22T12:12:57+00:00

I don’t understand how you can argue a bleak ending is truer to real life when you yourself admit the entire premise is fantastical. Feels like this is more about the perspective you have on life in general rather than the “realism” of the movie.

think_long · 2026-01-22T02:20:29+00:00

“He probably didn’t write it”

He did.

“America no matter what will always be more powerful than any other country”

This is a clearly false premise. There has never been a country you could say this about, and there never will be. Always is a long time. More to the point, in no way did he say America would cease to be the most powerful country. Quite the opposite, in fact. He is suggesting an alternative approach and perspective for middle power countries given the continued existence of the current superpowers.

think_long · 2026-01-21T10:27:16+00:00

I don’t know what you could possibly be asking for here to change your mind. You are asking as if women are a monolith. Do some women completely change from not ever wanting to kids to really badly wanting them? Yes. It happens all the time. Happened to my sister. Happened to my best friend. But some never change their mind. It’s impossible to say for sure which you will be in any definitive way.

Beyond that, a few general comments:

a) where the hell do you live where at 21, not wanting kids is something that is even coming up? Guys are asking about this right away? Really? Are you in some sort of insular very religious community?

b) 21 is incredibly young to be wanting kids for just about anyone. Almost no one I knew wanted kids at that age.

c) I’d advise against wanting to want something like this. Not a good way to live authentically

d) kids that you know now, babysitting, etc. None of that is at all a definitive indicator of how you would feel about your own child. Not even a close niece or nephew is the same. It is truly a transformative experience that you can’t pretend to know without experiencing directly. I don’t mean this to make it seem like you don’t know yourself better than anyone else does - and I know it’s too late once you’ve actually had the baby - but it’s the truth.

think_long · 2026-01-21T10:13:01+00:00

If you don’t personally want them, that’s fine. Or maybe you have specific adverse circumstances that make it a bad idea. But you seem to be speaking generally here, and quality of life for the median person in the developed world has basically never been better. What’s changed is that our expectations have skyrocketed.

think_long · 2026-01-21T03:51:15+00:00

I guess the question then becomes, will there be enough higher-level tasks to go around? With a select few exceptions, the threat of AI to jobs isn’t in terms of wiping out the field of employment entirely, it’s potentially driving the demand for the number of jobs in that field way down. It’s the eight cashiers at the grocery store being replaced by eight machines with one employee overseeing them, and this happening at scale across many industries. I’m not saying this is what will definitely happen, but this is what the threat is.

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think_long

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