Just watching the battles between the "modern" vs the "trad" women across social media.
On one hand you have all the advocates of freedom, fluid identities, speed dating, casual sex etc in the "modern" camp, while on the other you have the "trad" who espouse traditional family values... which looks like some fantasy roleplay from 1950's Americana.
Let's just start by laughing at both of them.
The modern group are characterised by their juvenile pursuit of selfish satisfaction without boundaries. The whole philosophy is about self. Make yourself happy, follow your own path, discard anyone who disagrees with you, seek your own pleasure, work on yourself blah blah blah. How many ways can you re-package selfishness and sell it to children. Somewhere Jiminy Cricket is getting ready to give Pinochio a giant smack across the back of the head.
The interesting thing is that we are really only reaching the end of the first generation to try this life strategy. I think it started with the free love and first wave feminism in the 1970's. They broke away from the horror that was suburban America and tried to create a new way. This drew from all sorts of radical ideas and started this particular social experiment. The problems they were reacting to were real and only got worse through the 80's and 90's in middle America. The age of greed and personal satisfaction were megaphoned by the all saturating media machine and the boundless greed of the political class to exploit social trends for their own benefit.
Well those people are well into retirement/old age now. They have almost completed their journeys and are only now able to share the wisdom of what they experienced along the way.
If you look carefully, there are still two distinct groups within that cohort. Those who chose a family and those who did not.
Those who chose the family and went the hippy route took their kids and went "alternative" in all the different variations that idea encompasses. For many of them, this created an interesting group of kids but they were still "outsiders" to society. Fringe dwellers. For some of them who mixed drugs and more extreeme practices, it just destroyed their children.
But this is the nature of adaptation. Its only the ones on the outside of the group who have the "nothing to lose" mentality and can pull away from a dying society/group and strike out anew. They see a future.
Contrast this with the group who chose the childless life paths (or had it forced upon them) who are now well into old age. Those who collected money along the way are able to purchase care and attention in the high end retirement system, while those who chose the poverty route are dying under a bridge somewhere alone and un-remarked. For them, there is no future, nothing matters.
And so we get back to sharing wisdom...
What do they say when asked about their lives? What do the next generation see when they look at them? The thing is that very few people are willing to say that they made terrible mistakes and wrecked their lives. Most people can only focus on what they think are the best parts of the path they walked... simply because that's all they know. They cannot tell a different story, they have nothing else to sell.
On one hand we have the selfish ones who lived a life dedicated to themselves and their pursuit of whatever freedom or bullshit philosophy caught their attention. They tell the story of wandering around, having adventures, taking drugs, having "moments", going to concerts, meeting "interesting" people etc etc. When you cook it all down, they simply entertained themselves as best as they could through the long dark of their life. They drifted. None of it is reproducible. There is no plan or framework that can be passed on to anyone so they can reproduce the life that was had. It was all happenstance and accident. Its only the survivors who claim that it was "amazing"... but there were plenty of folk walking the same path that fell along the way. Its not a formula for a successful life. There is no measure of succcess, there is no measure of failure... its simply entertain self. The only measure is internal. Am I happy? Did I get my sugar today? Who sold me my sugar today?
On the other hand you have those who chose family... however well they may have done that...they focused on something other than themselves... even if it was just a little bit. Those who built more successful families were able to measure their success objectively. Families are not all the same, some are groups, some are businesses, some are biological families. The pattern repeats. The stronger "families" are the ones built from biological bonds.
The family oriented people have purpose shaped by their families. Their decisions are focused around their families. This is a pattern that parents have passed on to their offspring for a long time. Its a repeatable life plan with infinite variations...but at its core is family.
The interesting point is that the wisdom of either group will emphasis that their life path was the best.
Anyway, the point I'm making is that within the modern vs trad culture battles that are going on are falling around the lines of those who have families and those who don't. There is a spectrum from tight strong biological families on one end all the way to solitary isolated individuals on the other. At every point along the spectrum, we see people championing their life choices. Can they all be right?
The funniest thing is watching the politicians flitting from one group to the next trying to tell them that each is right while not getting sprung at the scam. Now that the social media companies are playing politics too, they are trying to pick favorites or being manipulated into endorsing one or over others.
Watching the mob turn on one politician after another and tear down one company after another who tries to play the game is endlessly entertaining. Schadenfreude/epicaricacy seems to have become an international sport. (I assume it always was... but it seems to be loud and public at the moment... your perceptions may vary)
Honestly, I assume that nothing has actually changed because people are still people. Just the opportunites to interact with each others and the speed of the interactions has been magnified by technology. People were still able to be dicks to each other in the olden days. I think the main aspect that has suddenly changed is the way consequences happen currently. Technology has alleviated much of the fear of consequences at the moment. I doubt it will continue for too much longer as consequences are about the only thing that has ever forced people to resist the urge to be dicks to each other.
Avoiding consequence is a common thread through history. Accepting consequences, shouldering responsibility, fate whatever. The great circle of life is something that you are aware of at some level. How people deal with it or deny it or avoid it or run from it or live in ignorance of it is the substance of the vast majority of our literature, justice, politics, monetary system and religions.
Anyway, the morning ramble is about over. Understanding consequence and your ability to predict it into the future is a great life skill. I have this theory about the network effect of consequence being a useful measure of human intellect. How many steps down any chain of consequence can a person predict before their mental model collapses. How well can they predict all the outcomes of any decision point and how accurately. Can they play the long game? Can they play a longer game than another person? Must build an experiment to calculate this at some point.
So to bring the ramble full circle. I find it interesting to see people trying to adapt to "modern" life. I see the "modern" group and the "trad" group both trying to figure out how to live in the current world. I don't live in America. I don't live in a highly urbanised environment. I don't live in a highly social media environment. I try to limit my exposure to those petri dishes as I think the chaos factor is very high for the minimal rewards. It takes too much energy and luck to survive in those environments and the quality of life you get is so terribly shitty even when you are winning just makes it not worth playing for average people. Its only those who are damaged enough to think they are a contender who seek out that lifestyle. Poor bastards. Smart enough to play but not smart enough to understand its not worth playing... "Its a trap!".
Once you get outside the dense urban areas, I think the speed of life moves at a more reasonable pace for average people and the majority of them are able to succeed with enough spare resources to share with their family, friends and build a healthy community. That is until the insanity from the urban areas washes over them... but with some resources under your belt and a community around you, you can weather the storm and adapt, while the urban crazies have nothing and no one.
I should ramble about my new definitions of bandits, nomads and other predatory life styles that I see emerging.
If you think about it, banditry is a lifestyle of opportunism. Similarly nomads move around to follow the opportunities in a harsh environment. (Slash and burn agriculture has the same pattern)
If you consider the failure of various low touch law-enforcement cities in the US who are experimenting with the whole "defund the police" and thresholds for shoplifting etc, the people who are living in those environments are simply taking advantage of the opportunities in their environment and becoming bandits. The problem is that banditry has no natural limit. Thieves steal from other thieves and their is inefficient loss and destruction during the process... so no resources or wealth gets created in the process but after a few cycles, all the resources are scattered and consumed by the process. The pattern winds down into chaos.
The stage that they are at is where there is a slow withdrawal of inputs into the system with large retailers (and small) leaving the area. Once there is no trade into the area, then the bandits will start to consume each other. Hopefully the politicians who created the system get consumed first... but that's generally not how it happens... it always works through the vulnerable first.
The problem that follows is that the bandits then spread. They travel from their haven out to rob and pillage surrounding areas. History has lots of examples of bandit havens and governments that lived well off organised banditry. Will be interesting to see if this happens with the urban bandit gangs. If they organise and develop their own self-regulation independant of the current local government.
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