If I don’t get an hour to myself for a hobby a day (on most days not every day necessarily) I go crazy. Our kids are very little (3 years and 2 months) but so far this hasn’t been a problem.
Admittedly I have too many hobbies, some more productive than others, but man, is it really so much to ask to get to like read a book in peace?
I say this with love: you are a literal OCD mom whose hobby got so serious it turned into her full time job. I am 0% shocked to see you defending Lyman while also serving as a case study in why he’s wrong 😂
I completely disagree with this general series of takes, because it's not like people used to watch children 24/7, but also my current hobbies other than reading and going for walks are growing food, playing music, learning to bake bread, and carving utensils out of wood- things one might consider productive in some way and that would hypothetically benefit my family if I had one. It would probably be different if I spent all my time playing video games- but even then, one hour really is not a crazy amount of time. This guy spent longer than that on Twitter defending his hot takes.
But you’re enjoying your life! It’s good for kids to see their parents enjoying life! Stop caring about being productive! My dad was obsessed with his record collection of ABBAs and it’s how I remember him to this day 21 years after he died.
If all parents do is obsess neurotically over their children that’s the behavior their children will imitate. If you have a great life full of rich interests (hate this childish word -hobbies) your kids will imitate that. I certainly have tried to imitate the best aspects of my parents lives - which I know of because they showed me. Imagine if my dad stopped listened to music for hours everyday - just because I was born! I would simply not know that side of him and what a shame it would be! He knew all the words to “dancing queen” and “Nina pretty ballerina”, “Rasputin”, it was the best of times!
I agree with this- my parents had their own hobbies and left me alone to read all the time, and while I have issues with how I was raised, that is not one of them. I actually am much more on the pro hobbies for parents side than most people I know- I just think that spending 10 hours a day gaming or some such thing is bad. My point was that I think if your hobbies are beneficial to you as a person or your family there is a different standard than if they are not.
Yeah you say that about video games, but you are making wooden spoons that literally nobody needs while I am helping Indiana Jones punch Nazis in the face.
Yeah, that one isn't a great example. But growing and making your own food gives you access to higher quality and cheaper food than you could otherwise obtain, which is unambiguously useful. (Also, for the record, while I don't have kids, my parents' main hobby was and is gardening, they would often spend nearly entire days that they had free on it, and I never felt neglected as a result- I just enjoyed the fresh fruit.)
Yeah, I’m not sure “doing historically useful stuff from scratch” is much more productive than vidya when industrial economics of scale is a thing 😆 I once made my own play dough. It was in my intensive parenting first time crunchy mom phase. I spent SO MUCH more money and time figuring it out it turned out worse than Play Doh than just buying it. And it ended up being a logistical issue too because you can’t store a big batch of fresh play dough forever (and making small batches is an inefficient time suck). Then I had to buy little food containers for them. Buying little tubs from Play Doh is cheaper and more practical.
I also made hundreds of vocab cards I spent hours printing and laminating and cutting. Should have just bought them. The cost of materials (paper, laminator pouches, electricity, Etsy printable flashcards—would have taken a ridiculous numbers of man hours if I had made my own printable flashcards) alone was more than I would have spent buying the same product. Not to mention I had to have equipment (printer, laminator, maybe cricut if you’re fancy).
And the kids used to get into serious injuries and worse when under supervised. No one cares about your wooden spoons. Your kids might get interested when older. Or, as most kids do, will find their own hobbies & pusuits and find their parents hobbies mildly embarrassing.
I don't have kids and don't know if I ever will. I also notice that everyone is obsessing over the thing I mentioned that is not as useful, versus creating or growing food, which saves money and makes those with access to it healthier.
I think he’s pretty much entirely wrong. I wake up early to have time to myself but that time is also prosocial. I’m simply a better dad when I have the morning run and read a book. Without it I’m kind of shitty after a week.
I'm pretty neutral on the pro-natalism movement (though I think it's good for society to make it easier to have and raise children in a stable environment). The best advocates for it to me are the people who view it as a side hobby and isn't the main focus on their writing. The people who make it their full-time job just seen so universally weird. They seem custom built in a lab to repel the very people who have the capacity to take care of kids, but are on the fence if they want kids.
My parents spent so much time watching TV or reading! Especially when I was in high school (and my sister in middle school) most of the evening was spent with each person in a different room doing homework or on the computer or something. Maybe we were just weirdo neurodivergent but this is not foreign or new to me
I think it depends- does your parenting partner have the same amount of “me time”, and your kids are fed/clean parented? Then you’re good. If not, then you’re sacrificing your partners/kids well being so you can do legos.
Well during my one hour a day the kids are asleep so we’re both relaxing and doing our thing! Sometimes we watch a show together and sometimes we do our separate hobbies.
And all in all, I give my husband more time off than I get because he is the stay at home parent and needs more of a break than I do. He doesn’t have a commute where he can be by himself or a work lunch where he can read a book while eating (though I don’t get as much of the relaxing work lunches as I would like since someone always inevitably interrupts). So I take over child care on the weekends and he gets that time mostly off. He still does all the cooking even on the weekends. No one wants to eat my cooking, him most of all 😂
That is lovely, and always good to have the stay at home parent recharge on the weekends! It boggles the mind when people don’t realize stay at home parents need for breaks is life or death.
I was responding to Lyman’s take that I shouldn’t have an hour for hobbies. The implication from his take is that I should use that free hour to do something more productive and that it is wrong for me to read in peace.
> Admittedly I have too many hobbies, some more productive than others, but man, is it really so much to ask to get to like read a book in peace?
“In peace” is doing a lot of heavy lifting lol if you can read while gently throwing toddlers off you, then yes, reading is possible. My husband beat Elden Ring with two kids smashing his controller during crucial boss fights and using him as a jungle gym 🫡
Yes. At those ages it is too much to ask to be able to read a book in peace. If you are reading your partner will be doing all the work. And they will eventually resent you. As a parent of 3 kids and a total bookworm who very much missed reading, the time will return when you can indeed read a book in peace, and it tends to occur when the youngest child is 4-5 years old.
Reading after my kids go to bed is not in fact dumping any work on my partner who spends that exact same time playing video games or watching TV shows. Sometimes we even use that time to watch TV shows together!
We are very lucky that both of our kids are good sleepers, and we definitely count our blessings about that!
No offense to Lyman, but shit-posting on the Internet or reading Substack would be considered a hobby and not work for most people. He's either participating in that leisure time while "on the clock" or is dependent upon his readers doing it. Reading his articles to their children or treating them like a Barry White record would be an efficient solution, but I would NEVER want to know that about someone.*
As for the merit of his take, people ARE choosing to prioritize their needs over having children when given the choice. I made that choice and am happy with how things worked out, though I'm generally for policies that would make it easier for people to have children during a lengthy training process.
*I like Lyman and hope he is successful in becoming people's hobby and gets lots of money that can be exchanged for goods and services.
Yeah, it’s pretty rich for a dude who’s day “job” is exploring the demographics of Middle Earth to chastise the rest of us about spending too much time on hobbies
I’m going to add that if I had kids, I’d want them to grow up to have happy lives: whether that meant slavish devotion to a job they loved or a shitty job that still gave them time to engage in hobbies they loved. A dynasty of miserable baby-making factories seems pretty distopian
A lot of childfree people chose that because they saw their parents being miserable. Maybe not caused by children, per se, but still miserable. Not enough money, addiction, what have you.
It’s also weird to me he includes fitness in that list, like don’t you want to be able to run around with your kids and live long enough to meet your grandchildren? Yes you shouldn’t be spending 3 hours a day as a gym rat but the idea you should stop exercising once you have kids seems… really bad?
I came here to make the rather obvious point that there is no way that this Lyman guy doesn't spend an hour plus a day scrolling and shitposting if he's coming through with that take.
My serious take on this is that “less than an hour a day of hobby time” is batshit unless you have multiple kids that are toddler or younger. Beyond that point your kids should be engaging in some independent play and that will allow you to have plenty of “you time”.
Both my parents had hobbies for as long as I can remember: my mom crafted and played in a community band. My dad played golf and was in a weekly shotgun shooting league. This was totally fine because when I got home from school I mostly wanted to hole up in my room and build Lego and read books. Parents hovering over me would have been annoying.
I know! I wanted to read, craft, and do other things without my parents hovering! I think today’s helicopter parenting style is unhealthy (hardly an original observation) but if your kids are school aged, are not disabled in a way that requires constant supervision and hands-on care, both you and they will be happier and better off if everyone has independent hobbies. Reading, Legos, golf, gardening, cake baking, whatever brings joy. I think it’s *extremely unhealthy* to be so enmeshed with your kids, once they are kindergarten age or older, to be so up in their business you don’t have time for yourself.
We have for under six and i try and spend 45 minutes before work exercising. Not always successfully. Then we both have an hour or two after they go to bed to read, chill out or walk the dog. I’m not sure if these qualify as hobbies. I basically haven’t played video games since our second was born which i do miss
I have 3 under 4 as SAHM and even on days I’m soloing them I manage at least an hour a day. If you can take advantage of the “not off duty but not quite doing any active childcare of chores” pockets of time, you have… loads, actually. Your kids don’t always want your active engagement. Even my 8 month old is clocking 10-20 minutes playing with her sisters. Figure out a hobby you can pick up and put down. Can be as simple as a set of push ups 🤷♀️ not my jam, but I know I don’t have any excuse for not doing push ups.
Bloody hell, Lyman Stone sounds like the kind of jackass I'd run a mile to avoid. I was hoping the 'vibe shift' would mean fewer self-important twerps yelling 'YOU'RE A BAD PERSON!' at the world, but the Global Twerp Reserve is apparently bottomless.
I've never met him, so I can't say whether you're right. But when someine tells me, 'You're selfish, degenerate, and weak for not sharing my view of the good life', my first instinct is not to give them a second chance.
Hs is...pretty obviously not all that nice or all that chill? Unless the notion is that all of his behavior that you wrote about here somehow doesn't count?
This is one reason I left Twitter. Too many otherwise smart and nice people would post insane or mean-spirited takes because they relished the engagement and debate. It didn’t feel healthy.
In this case, someone who is able to present as smart and nice in a one-on-one situation has revealed himself to get off on declaring everyone else beneath him.
Do you honestly believe that a person can be (1) "super nice and pretty chill" at his core and also (2) be capable of thinking that people who have hobbies that take longer than brewing a cup of tea (in other words, 99% of people who have ever lived or will ever live) are weak degenerates and (3) enjoy publicly shaming people who he views are his moral inferiors and (4) justify it by saying that the more he gets people angry, the more he gets paid?
Absolutely wild that the gym is included in the list of wasteful activities. Sure, if you have little kids you don’t have time for a three hour workout five days a week. But maintaining a decent level of fitness is obviously beneficial to a family. It’s not good for a father to die of a heart attack at 42 or physically deteriorate while still fairly young, or be unable to engage in physical activities with his kids, or be unable to do Man Stuff (sorry, I said it) for the household, or become so physically unattractive that his wife doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore and then the marriage unravels. Devoting some time to your physical fitness has a huge ROI on family life.
Obviously I’m an adult but I’m very envious of my husband because his parents have always taken their fitness seriously. He’s presently hiking in Banff with them. My parents did not devote any thought to their fitness and now we literally can do basically nothing but watch tv together. I don’t need to hike the Rockies with them but I can’t go to a baseball game with my father because he can’t climb the stadium stairs. I would love to take a little trip with my mom and stroll around some quaint scenic little town, windowshopping with a pastry in hand, but she gets short of breath and has to sit down for a while after walking 30 feet. Work out, your family will appreciate it.
And if we’re talking the old village model of extended family and neighbors pitching in to raise kids - or even the people who expect help from grandparents - it’s much easier if the grandparents are in shape. Not gym rats, they don’t even have to GO to a gym, but, if they can’t climb stairs and have to sit down after walking 30 feet, then their ability to watch small children is limited.
Definitely. I don’t have kids but my best friend does and we were talking about this recently. My friend’s mother is too weak to pick her 2-year-old granddaughter up, and it’s such a bummer for everyone.
No one needs to go to the gym to have sufficient cardiovascular fitness to do their normal daily activities. If you play with your kids or do Man Stuff around the house, your body will be conditioned to be good enough to play with your kids and do Man Stuff around the house. Going to the gym is as good a hobby as any, but a hobby is what it is. It certainly doesn’t merit a status above, say, golfing.
That "Lyman" guy's take is completely psychotic, and it's honestly weird that anyone is treating it as anything else. Not to mention that that guy clearly spends at least an hour a day scrolling and shitposting.
Frankly, I would take a "weird trad" pronatalist over this kind of even-weirder pronatalist. That's some Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism shit; I'd find it much easier to be friends with a guy who has some weird retrograde gender roles takes than someone who is that all-in on a weird justification for judging other people. But this really just confirms my prior that pronatalists are fucking weirdos who should be shunned.
I'm interested in the fertility decline debates and am supportive of policies that make parents' lives easier/able to spend more worry-free time with their offspring, but it's been my finding that well over 90% of those who claim they are in the "pro-natalist" movement are really just using fertility as a smokescreen for other cultural critiques (usually coming from a very conservative POV).
Just see Stone's "muh there was some corruption" hand-waiving of the elimination of USAID (much of whose work was literally ensuring starving infants had enough nutrition to sustain their tiny bodies) to see how all of this has nothing to do with moral or logical consistency.
Tbf, Stone has been a very consistent foe of the eugenicist types worried about the wrong people having kids, whatever his crazy takes on other issues.
Hot take: Not having kids because you want more time to yourself and to pursue things you find more personally rewarding or engaging than being around children is fine and laudable, actually.
Like, sorry, but as someone who was raised by parents who made it crystal clear that they did not want to have me and did so solely out of green-card expediency (my dad) and a sense of "well, this is what adults do" (my mom), I can tell you that having children for any reason other than really, really personally wanting to have them is a moral disaster.
Absolutely. If having kids and grinding to build "companies" is what you value in life then knock yourself out, but it's pretty audacious to claim that these are universally the right thing (morally?) for people to aim for in life.
There are plenty of people whose parents should not have had kids; I’m glad that people are giving it more thought, or at least MOST people are giving it more thought, these days, and realizing that having kids is optional and not “just what you do.”
Back in the day, there *was* an economic justification to having kids; they were extra hands on the family farm or workshop, in many cases they could provide for you in old age, in some societies having a son was what secured a woman’s position in life. However, we don’t have utilitarian reasons to have kids now, and, they need much more intensive care and nurturing for far longer than they did 100 years ago, let alone 500. “Really, really personally wanting them” and being prepared to see them through high school AND probably college, and even for life if they have a disability that makes them unable to be independent - that’s the only reason to have them now. So, people who 500 years ago, or even 50 years ago, might have thought utilitarian reasons or even “well it’s only 18 years” might have said “oh well, we will have them” now choose not to. And that is a GOOD thing.
We do have utilitarian reasons to have kids now, it's just that those reasons have shifted from benefiting individual families to the society/economy as a whole more and more. The problem is that too much of the burden is still on individual people who themselves are also the people who make the decision to have kids or not, and so it's a pretty logical conclusion that *they* don't want kids even if more kids in general is beneficial in the long run both for themselves and for others.
The problem is, as you noted, expecting individual parents to take on the heavy lifting of “intensive parenting” a child or children for, let’s say 22 years (through college), then maybe some less intensive parenting for three or four more years, for an abstract societal benefit, is a big, giant, huge ask. That’s the problem. Society as a whole needs to replenish itself but isn’t doing anything to help parents, while at the same time, piling this expectation of intensive parenting with no help on them.
Of course people are going to opt out. Even in Scandinavian countries with generous benefits, people are opting out, or having smaller families. The pro-natalists are right now either shilling the joys of parenting or hectoring young people to have kids, neither of which seems like it will move the needle that much. More draconian and dictatorial measures eventually backfire (the Ceaucescu’s in Romania were lynched; fictional Gilead fell after what was probably less than a hundred years).
Yeah, it is my experience that no one has kids or not have kids for the greater good. Dig deep enough and it’s always selfish. No one has ever been talked into having kids for muh birth rates. Likewise you’ll never talk someone into being childfree for the environment, if they want kids.
Unless we can make it so that benefits of children accrue mainly to the parents, or completely divorce reproduction from biology (so you’ll pay a child tax to have them gestated in artificial wombs and raised by the state. They’re public goods. Just like roads or the military. You pay for their upkeep collectively but individually invest nothing in them), you won’t raise the birth rates.
It’s just like another pronatalist argument I just find utterly silly. “Shouldn’t companies WANT to be family friendly? Don’t they need workers in the future? And customers for their products? Shouldn’t they WANT to provide paid leaves? Shouldn’t childless workers WANT to cover the shifts of parents, because these kids will find their retirements? Shouldn’t you see yourself as freeloading, because you get the same pension as parents but all it costs YOU is an extra shift? So just be grateful”
Um. Were you born yesterday. “Companies” are not a monolith. How many companies even survive to hire your child? How many companies have the cashflow to shell out 60-80% of a non productive staff’s salary AND hiring someone to cover them for 6 months to a year? If your colleague doesn’t have this ONE particular kid, how much would it impact your pension, really? Unless your colleague’s child personally owes you money, how are you individually benefiting from covering his mom’s shift?
Sorry to read that. On the other hand, if they'd just followed their natural inclinations then you presumably wouldn't exist at all, which would be unfortunate.
If I'm being frank, the abuse and neglect I went through as a kid was not worth it. It has taken tens of thousands of dollars in therapy to get to a point where I'm not as affected by it, but it still hurts pretty badly, and when I think about the kid I was and what she went through, I wish she didn't have to do any of that. At any point in my life up until just a couple of years ago, if I could've chosen to be Thanos-snapped out of existence, I probably would've said yes. You can't put a "Well, it was all worth it!" value on that kind of experience, and I think keeping kids from having to go through hell because they were born to families who didn't want them is more important than moral grandstanding about how important it is to Have Children For The Human Race.
I have a newborn and a toddler and I’m going to find time to build a Lego today just so Lyman and those stale brick-hatin’ bitches that divorced a true a(r/u)tist can suck my ass. You do you, Star Wars Lego king.
True. I find that the real reason I don’t have enough time for hobbies is I spend too much time scrolling while I COULD be doing something more fun. Higher energy (so you have to light a fire under your own ass to do it, if you’re sleep deprived and tired from small kids). But invigorating if you can put down your phone. I do think that once you have momentum on something, it’s easier and easier. I found starting a hobby impossible but now that I made some progress on my hobby, passive entertainment is not as appealing. I just want to get back to my project. I look forward to it all day.
Glad to see most people agree how absurd Lyman Stone’s take is. It comes off like moral grandstanding, using his parenting style as a way to flex and shame others for living differently. Whether it’s insecurity or delusion, it’s not a healthy or realistic standard to push on everyone else.
Hot take but anybody who thinks the only valid things to do are work and childcare is probably a secret serial killer. People in 1300 may not have hung out at the Masonic Lodge or built Lego cities, but they still did creative or relaxing things when they had the time.
Also, has anybody else heard that Taylor Lorenz is closer to 40 than 30? Nothing wrong with that, it just gives her posts about 9/11 parties real “how do you do, fellow kids?” energy.
Taylor has got to be pushing 40 if not beyond it, and literally won’t reveal her real age publicly. “How do you do, fellow kids” energy is spot on. She remains a remarkable case study in what happens when your weird middle aged aunt who insists she’s still one of the cool kids gets Twitter brained.
To your first point, one wonders how pubs ever came to be a thing! Who were all the people in the “third spaces” we’ve supposedly lost if everyone was always working or caring for kids?
Yeah, I googled after I posted that to fact-check myself and it looks like the best guess we have is 40, turning 41 this fall. So she would’ve been in high school for 9/11. (I also found a hysterical thread Nate Silver told her he’d publicly debate her about something or other if she added her real age to her Wiki page, and she turned it into “How dare you, a man, try to invade my privacy and endanger my family in this way” like people a thousand times more famous than she is don’t have their birthdays all over the internet.)
I don’t particularly care how old she is or if she’s weird about it, it’s just funny when somebody who could biologically be a grandparent talks like Bush-era America is ancient history.
Taylor is one of those people who thought everyone over 30 was an old hag when she was in her 20’s and now that she’s 40 or so she Simply Cannot Deal. (There’s going to be a whole wave of them once the Zoomers age past 30.)
Besides, since when does putting the twin towers on a birthday cake as a joke make the whole party a “theme?” If I have flowers on my birthday cake does that mean I have a flower themed party? *Are* their pals dressing up as buildings and collapsing under the weight of Jello Shots?
I’m sure that people born on September 11 have learned to grit their teeth and endure the “what a badly timed birthday ha ha” jokes since 2002. In addition to being Virgos, they put up with this!
As a Virgo (a couple days before 9/11, thankfully), I resemble that remark.
And I agree that the cake doesn’t prove anything except that somebody made a dark humor cake once. My guess is that Taylor either entirely made up the idea of 9/11 parties, or saw somebody joking about them and took it waaaaaay too seriously.
It also seems like the young people Taylor Lorenz knows always seem kinda shitty. At some point, you have to mature past trying to recreate the spirit of BuzzFeed in 2014 for the rest of your life.
The folks online extorting others to "grind harder" and go back to the tolling ways of the 19th century are always guys who spent most of their day sitting their ass in a chair, posting online.
You know who doesn't long for those days? Men who actually work physically demanding jobs.
Just look at the resounding success of the GI Bill, which enabled (white) working class men to get college educations.
We are always going to need people - not just men people, but people - to work in the trades, but, there is a reason a lot of trades guys urged their sons to go to college; trades are very hard on the body.
Just read that article, I feel like calling hobbyism a death cult while writing words like this "Unless you are willing to sacrifice your life, you will never live" is extremely self-unaware. I get yearning for greater purpose and a grand project beyond yourself and your own moment to moment enjoyment, but the way they rail against it by calling it moral degeneracy whilst having a strong undercurrent of misogyny really reminds me of "the cult of action for action's sake", the "cult of heroism", and the worship of machismo from Umberto Eco's 14 points.
Re: Hobbies, activities like tennis or serving on the PTA or on a board together are a great way to create friendships. As and when the kids get older, these friendships are really valuable. Lyman, if you're listening were you being a bit tongue in cheek?
It comes across a bit like the manosphere influencers to me, except it's kids and making money instead of steroids and hookups. It's a better set of values IMO but they still aren't the only way to live a good life, he doesn't have the one true path to happiness/moral virtue.
My contribution to "hobby discourse" is that a lot of this revolves around whether or not screen time counts as a "hobby". A dude that spends an hour on Legos but doesn't watch TV is probably making an above-average parental commitment. A dude that spends an hour on legoes on top of two hours of TV is not.
This makes me think of fish picture discourse. The guy who likes to fish on Saturday, but doesn't play video games, is also probably putting in above average parenting. Especially if he takes the kids fishing.
1) Lyman is incredibly wrong on this take, and also wrong historically. Yes, there was a period of time at the beginning of the industrial age when when men just worked 90% day and drank the other 10%, but before that when people were in hunter-gathering/early farming communities, the men had a good deal of free time and basically hung with the bros during the wide majority of it.
2) Cheating often has little to do with relatively physical looks. Look at all the Hollywood actors who cheated on their bombshell wives with middle tier or lower women; Huge Grant's escapade in the 90s is maybe the most infamous example. But I've never really understood it myself. I wouldn't cheat, but hypothetically, a women would have to be elite-tier attractive for me to even be tempted to consider it . .maybe I'm just really shallow! 😆
3) Taylor Lorenz is like what a lab would create if you were trying to make the biggest caricature of the annoying entitled Millennial come to life. And ain't no-one having frikkin 9/11 parties . .she just made that shit up.
About cheating not being about looks, I loved how one YouTuber I follow described Lemonade as having to deal with the feelings of "what if you are LITERALLY BEYONCE and still get cheated on like any other woman."
1) Lyman's dismissal of social clubs ignores the fact that they emerged with industrial urbanism. He pulls a red herring by saying that social clubs weren't a big thing during the dark ages, when people lived in villages and never left the 10 mile radius around where they were born, and lived alongside a few hundred people, all of whom they knew.
As people moved into cities full of alienation, they founded social clubs. They were / are an important institution that has existed since the dawn of the modern era.
2) Any conversation around the cheating habits of male celebrities needs to center the fact that fame makes men attractive. These conversations tend to judge the cheating based solely on appearance. Of course the woman looks better than the man. He's rich and famous, and therefore hot. She looks good, and is therefore hot. They trade in different currencies.
I used to joke that instead of Tiger Woods paying for sex, women should have paid to have sex with him. (But he was paying for confidentiality I suppose, and lookit how that turned out.)
I remember an interview I did back in the 90’s for a “zine” (remember those?) with a professional sex worker. She said that confidentiality IS one reason men go to sex workers (I don’t recall asking her if she had celebrity clients; I was more interested in the nitty gritty of what the job was like). Sex workers are paid to do the deed, go away without complaining or wanting a relationship, and not blabbing.
Another reason some men cheat on even the most gorgeous women is they want something they don’t feel comfortable asking her for, or they want someone they don’t have to treat with the same respect they do a wife or girlfriend, hell there are many, many reasons, and not related to looks.
The *consequences* are what many men don’t foresee. Girlfriend finds out and dumps them. Oops! We don’t know in any given case if the hot girlfriend also had a great personality or what. I would say that cheating on your *pregnant* partner is a shitty thing to do, regardless of your looks or hers.
If I don’t get an hour to myself for a hobby a day (on most days not every day necessarily) I go crazy. Our kids are very little (3 years and 2 months) but so far this hasn’t been a problem.
Admittedly I have too many hobbies, some more productive than others, but man, is it really so much to ask to get to like read a book in peace?
It’s honestly super bizarre messaging from a pro-natalist.
I don’t fully agree with him but I get it, I would have just placed the bar at higher than 1 hour lol
I say this with love: you are a literal OCD mom whose hobby got so serious it turned into her full time job. I am 0% shocked to see you defending Lyman while also serving as a case study in why he’s wrong 😂
I completely disagree with this general series of takes, because it's not like people used to watch children 24/7, but also my current hobbies other than reading and going for walks are growing food, playing music, learning to bake bread, and carving utensils out of wood- things one might consider productive in some way and that would hypothetically benefit my family if I had one. It would probably be different if I spent all my time playing video games- but even then, one hour really is not a crazy amount of time. This guy spent longer than that on Twitter defending his hot takes.
But you’re enjoying your life! It’s good for kids to see their parents enjoying life! Stop caring about being productive! My dad was obsessed with his record collection of ABBAs and it’s how I remember him to this day 21 years after he died.
If all parents do is obsess neurotically over their children that’s the behavior their children will imitate. If you have a great life full of rich interests (hate this childish word -hobbies) your kids will imitate that. I certainly have tried to imitate the best aspects of my parents lives - which I know of because they showed me. Imagine if my dad stopped listened to music for hours everyday - just because I was born! I would simply not know that side of him and what a shame it would be! He knew all the words to “dancing queen” and “Nina pretty ballerina”, “Rasputin”, it was the best of times!
I agree with this- my parents had their own hobbies and left me alone to read all the time, and while I have issues with how I was raised, that is not one of them. I actually am much more on the pro hobbies for parents side than most people I know- I just think that spending 10 hours a day gaming or some such thing is bad. My point was that I think if your hobbies are beneficial to you as a person or your family there is a different standard than if they are not.
Yeah you say that about video games, but you are making wooden spoons that literally nobody needs while I am helping Indiana Jones punch Nazis in the face.
Yeah, that one isn't a great example. But growing and making your own food gives you access to higher quality and cheaper food than you could otherwise obtain, which is unambiguously useful. (Also, for the record, while I don't have kids, my parents' main hobby was and is gardening, they would often spend nearly entire days that they had free on it, and I never felt neglected as a result- I just enjoyed the fresh fruit.)
Yeah, I’m not sure “doing historically useful stuff from scratch” is much more productive than vidya when industrial economics of scale is a thing 😆 I once made my own play dough. It was in my intensive parenting first time crunchy mom phase. I spent SO MUCH more money and time figuring it out it turned out worse than Play Doh than just buying it. And it ended up being a logistical issue too because you can’t store a big batch of fresh play dough forever (and making small batches is an inefficient time suck). Then I had to buy little food containers for them. Buying little tubs from Play Doh is cheaper and more practical.
I also made hundreds of vocab cards I spent hours printing and laminating and cutting. Should have just bought them. The cost of materials (paper, laminator pouches, electricity, Etsy printable flashcards—would have taken a ridiculous numbers of man hours if I had made my own printable flashcards) alone was more than I would have spent buying the same product. Not to mention I had to have equipment (printer, laminator, maybe cricut if you’re fancy).
And the kids used to get into serious injuries and worse when under supervised. No one cares about your wooden spoons. Your kids might get interested when older. Or, as most kids do, will find their own hobbies & pusuits and find their parents hobbies mildly embarrassing.
I don't have kids and don't know if I ever will. I also notice that everyone is obsessing over the thing I mentioned that is not as useful, versus creating or growing food, which saves money and makes those with access to it healthier.
I think he’s pretty much entirely wrong. I wake up early to have time to myself but that time is also prosocial. I’m simply a better dad when I have the morning run and read a book. Without it I’m kind of shitty after a week.
Theyre all weirdos
I'm pretty neutral on the pro-natalism movement (though I think it's good for society to make it easier to have and raise children in a stable environment). The best advocates for it to me are the people who view it as a side hobby and isn't the main focus on their writing. The people who make it their full-time job just seen so universally weird. They seem custom built in a lab to repel the very people who have the capacity to take care of kids, but are on the fence if they want kids.
My parents spent so much time watching TV or reading! Especially when I was in high school (and my sister in middle school) most of the evening was spent with each person in a different room doing homework or on the computer or something. Maybe we were just weirdo neurodivergent but this is not foreign or new to me
I think it depends- does your parenting partner have the same amount of “me time”, and your kids are fed/clean parented? Then you’re good. If not, then you’re sacrificing your partners/kids well being so you can do legos.
Well during my one hour a day the kids are asleep so we’re both relaxing and doing our thing! Sometimes we watch a show together and sometimes we do our separate hobbies.
And all in all, I give my husband more time off than I get because he is the stay at home parent and needs more of a break than I do. He doesn’t have a commute where he can be by himself or a work lunch where he can read a book while eating (though I don’t get as much of the relaxing work lunches as I would like since someone always inevitably interrupts). So I take over child care on the weekends and he gets that time mostly off. He still does all the cooking even on the weekends. No one wants to eat my cooking, him most of all 😂
That is lovely, and always good to have the stay at home parent recharge on the weekends! It boggles the mind when people don’t realize stay at home parents need for breaks is life or death.
Sounds great so why are you complaining about not being able to read in peace? This is a great set up that most people rarely get to experience.
I was responding to Lyman’s take that I shouldn’t have an hour for hobbies. The implication from his take is that I should use that free hour to do something more productive and that it is wrong for me to read in peace.
> Admittedly I have too many hobbies, some more productive than others, but man, is it really so much to ask to get to like read a book in peace?
“In peace” is doing a lot of heavy lifting lol if you can read while gently throwing toddlers off you, then yes, reading is possible. My husband beat Elden Ring with two kids smashing his controller during crucial boss fights and using him as a jungle gym 🫡
Yes. At those ages it is too much to ask to be able to read a book in peace. If you are reading your partner will be doing all the work. And they will eventually resent you. As a parent of 3 kids and a total bookworm who very much missed reading, the time will return when you can indeed read a book in peace, and it tends to occur when the youngest child is 4-5 years old.
Reading after my kids go to bed is not in fact dumping any work on my partner who spends that exact same time playing video games or watching TV shows. Sometimes we even use that time to watch TV shows together!
We are very lucky that both of our kids are good sleepers, and we definitely count our blessings about that!
No offense to Lyman, but shit-posting on the Internet or reading Substack would be considered a hobby and not work for most people. He's either participating in that leisure time while "on the clock" or is dependent upon his readers doing it. Reading his articles to their children or treating them like a Barry White record would be an efficient solution, but I would NEVER want to know that about someone.*
As for the merit of his take, people ARE choosing to prioritize their needs over having children when given the choice. I made that choice and am happy with how things worked out, though I'm generally for policies that would make it easier for people to have children during a lengthy training process.
*I like Lyman and hope he is successful in becoming people's hobby and gets lots of money that can be exchanged for goods and services.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1928835475457880249?s=46&t=XyGoaTNK_gClOdJtjTZ7Vg
Yeah, it’s pretty rich for a dude who’s day “job” is exploring the demographics of Middle Earth to chastise the rest of us about spending too much time on hobbies
I’m going to add that if I had kids, I’d want them to grow up to have happy lives: whether that meant slavish devotion to a job they loved or a shitty job that still gave them time to engage in hobbies they loved. A dynasty of miserable baby-making factories seems pretty distopian
A lot of childfree people chose that because they saw their parents being miserable. Maybe not caused by children, per se, but still miserable. Not enough money, addiction, what have you.
And if want to role model that for them too.
This is one of the greatest “this you” dunks ever.
Yglesias from the top rope, damn
Matt Yglesias, meanwhile, embraces his online shit-posting hobby. And we can see that he's become quite good at it!
It’s also weird to me he includes fitness in that list, like don’t you want to be able to run around with your kids and live long enough to meet your grandchildren? Yes you shouldn’t be spending 3 hours a day as a gym rat but the idea you should stop exercising once you have kids seems… really bad?
I came here to make the rather obvious point that there is no way that this Lyman guy doesn't spend an hour plus a day scrolling and shitposting if he's coming through with that take.
He keeps up a heavy posting presence on Twitter and Substack.
My serious take on this is that “less than an hour a day of hobby time” is batshit unless you have multiple kids that are toddler or younger. Beyond that point your kids should be engaging in some independent play and that will allow you to have plenty of “you time”.
Both my parents had hobbies for as long as I can remember: my mom crafted and played in a community band. My dad played golf and was in a weekly shotgun shooting league. This was totally fine because when I got home from school I mostly wanted to hole up in my room and build Lego and read books. Parents hovering over me would have been annoying.
I know! I wanted to read, craft, and do other things without my parents hovering! I think today’s helicopter parenting style is unhealthy (hardly an original observation) but if your kids are school aged, are not disabled in a way that requires constant supervision and hands-on care, both you and they will be happier and better off if everyone has independent hobbies. Reading, Legos, golf, gardening, cake baking, whatever brings joy. I think it’s *extremely unhealthy* to be so enmeshed with your kids, once they are kindergarten age or older, to be so up in their business you don’t have time for yourself.
We have for under six and i try and spend 45 minutes before work exercising. Not always successfully. Then we both have an hour or two after they go to bed to read, chill out or walk the dog. I’m not sure if these qualify as hobbies. I basically haven’t played video games since our second was born which i do miss
It gets better! 4 under 6 is peak crazy time.
I have 3 under 4 as SAHM and even on days I’m soloing them I manage at least an hour a day. If you can take advantage of the “not off duty but not quite doing any active childcare of chores” pockets of time, you have… loads, actually. Your kids don’t always want your active engagement. Even my 8 month old is clocking 10-20 minutes playing with her sisters. Figure out a hobby you can pick up and put down. Can be as simple as a set of push ups 🤷♀️ not my jam, but I know I don’t have any excuse for not doing push ups.
Bloody hell, Lyman Stone sounds like the kind of jackass I'd run a mile to avoid. I was hoping the 'vibe shift' would mean fewer self-important twerps yelling 'YOU'RE A BAD PERSON!' at the world, but the Global Twerp Reserve is apparently bottomless.
He’s actually super nice and pretty chill, I think he was to some degree enjoying the debate
Kind of like arguing online is his…hobby?
I've never met him, so I can't say whether you're right. But when someine tells me, 'You're selfish, degenerate, and weak for not sharing my view of the good life', my first instinct is not to give them a second chance.
Hs is...pretty obviously not all that nice or all that chill? Unless the notion is that all of his behavior that you wrote about here somehow doesn't count?
This is one reason I left Twitter. Too many otherwise smart and nice people would post insane or mean-spirited takes because they relished the engagement and debate. It didn’t feel healthy.
In this case, someone who is able to present as smart and nice in a one-on-one situation has revealed himself to get off on declaring everyone else beneath him.
Do you honestly believe that a person can be (1) "super nice and pretty chill" at his core and also (2) be capable of thinking that people who have hobbies that take longer than brewing a cup of tea (in other words, 99% of people who have ever lived or will ever live) are weak degenerates and (3) enjoy publicly shaming people who he views are his moral inferiors and (4) justify it by saying that the more he gets people angry, the more he gets paid?
Absolutely wild that the gym is included in the list of wasteful activities. Sure, if you have little kids you don’t have time for a three hour workout five days a week. But maintaining a decent level of fitness is obviously beneficial to a family. It’s not good for a father to die of a heart attack at 42 or physically deteriorate while still fairly young, or be unable to engage in physical activities with his kids, or be unable to do Man Stuff (sorry, I said it) for the household, or become so physically unattractive that his wife doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore and then the marriage unravels. Devoting some time to your physical fitness has a huge ROI on family life.
Obviously I’m an adult but I’m very envious of my husband because his parents have always taken their fitness seriously. He’s presently hiking in Banff with them. My parents did not devote any thought to their fitness and now we literally can do basically nothing but watch tv together. I don’t need to hike the Rockies with them but I can’t go to a baseball game with my father because he can’t climb the stadium stairs. I would love to take a little trip with my mom and stroll around some quaint scenic little town, windowshopping with a pastry in hand, but she gets short of breath and has to sit down for a while after walking 30 feet. Work out, your family will appreciate it.
And if we’re talking the old village model of extended family and neighbors pitching in to raise kids - or even the people who expect help from grandparents - it’s much easier if the grandparents are in shape. Not gym rats, they don’t even have to GO to a gym, but, if they can’t climb stairs and have to sit down after walking 30 feet, then their ability to watch small children is limited.
Definitely. I don’t have kids but my best friend does and we were talking about this recently. My friend’s mother is too weak to pick her 2-year-old granddaughter up, and it’s such a bummer for everyone.
No one needs to go to the gym to have sufficient cardiovascular fitness to do their normal daily activities. If you play with your kids or do Man Stuff around the house, your body will be conditioned to be good enough to play with your kids and do Man Stuff around the house. Going to the gym is as good a hobby as any, but a hobby is what it is. It certainly doesn’t merit a status above, say, golfing.
That "Lyman" guy's take is completely psychotic, and it's honestly weird that anyone is treating it as anything else. Not to mention that that guy clearly spends at least an hour a day scrolling and shitposting.
Frankly, I would take a "weird trad" pronatalist over this kind of even-weirder pronatalist. That's some Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism shit; I'd find it much easier to be friends with a guy who has some weird retrograde gender roles takes than someone who is that all-in on a weird justification for judging other people. But this really just confirms my prior that pronatalists are fucking weirdos who should be shunned.
I'm interested in the fertility decline debates and am supportive of policies that make parents' lives easier/able to spend more worry-free time with their offspring, but it's been my finding that well over 90% of those who claim they are in the "pro-natalist" movement are really just using fertility as a smokescreen for other cultural critiques (usually coming from a very conservative POV).
Just see Stone's "muh there was some corruption" hand-waiving of the elimination of USAID (much of whose work was literally ensuring starving infants had enough nutrition to sustain their tiny bodies) to see how all of this has nothing to do with moral or logical consistency.
There is certainly a logically consistent through-line: eugenics.
Tbf, Stone has been a very consistent foe of the eugenicist types worried about the wrong people having kids, whatever his crazy takes on other issues.
Cool
Hot take: Not having kids because you want more time to yourself and to pursue things you find more personally rewarding or engaging than being around children is fine and laudable, actually.
Like, sorry, but as someone who was raised by parents who made it crystal clear that they did not want to have me and did so solely out of green-card expediency (my dad) and a sense of "well, this is what adults do" (my mom), I can tell you that having children for any reason other than really, really personally wanting to have them is a moral disaster.
Absolutely. If having kids and grinding to build "companies" is what you value in life then knock yourself out, but it's pretty audacious to claim that these are universally the right thing (morally?) for people to aim for in life.
Thank you - I really like my life. I don’t know how I wouldn’t end up resenting kids, so it just … seems like a bad idea?
I’m really glad that I’m gay, because I think if I had married a man I would have just defaulted to “well this is what we do now.”
There are plenty of people whose parents should not have had kids; I’m glad that people are giving it more thought, or at least MOST people are giving it more thought, these days, and realizing that having kids is optional and not “just what you do.”
Back in the day, there *was* an economic justification to having kids; they were extra hands on the family farm or workshop, in many cases they could provide for you in old age, in some societies having a son was what secured a woman’s position in life. However, we don’t have utilitarian reasons to have kids now, and, they need much more intensive care and nurturing for far longer than they did 100 years ago, let alone 500. “Really, really personally wanting them” and being prepared to see them through high school AND probably college, and even for life if they have a disability that makes them unable to be independent - that’s the only reason to have them now. So, people who 500 years ago, or even 50 years ago, might have thought utilitarian reasons or even “well it’s only 18 years” might have said “oh well, we will have them” now choose not to. And that is a GOOD thing.
We do have utilitarian reasons to have kids now, it's just that those reasons have shifted from benefiting individual families to the society/economy as a whole more and more. The problem is that too much of the burden is still on individual people who themselves are also the people who make the decision to have kids or not, and so it's a pretty logical conclusion that *they* don't want kids even if more kids in general is beneficial in the long run both for themselves and for others.
The problem is, as you noted, expecting individual parents to take on the heavy lifting of “intensive parenting” a child or children for, let’s say 22 years (through college), then maybe some less intensive parenting for three or four more years, for an abstract societal benefit, is a big, giant, huge ask. That’s the problem. Society as a whole needs to replenish itself but isn’t doing anything to help parents, while at the same time, piling this expectation of intensive parenting with no help on them.
Of course people are going to opt out. Even in Scandinavian countries with generous benefits, people are opting out, or having smaller families. The pro-natalists are right now either shilling the joys of parenting or hectoring young people to have kids, neither of which seems like it will move the needle that much. More draconian and dictatorial measures eventually backfire (the Ceaucescu’s in Romania were lynched; fictional Gilead fell after what was probably less than a hundred years).
Yeah, it is my experience that no one has kids or not have kids for the greater good. Dig deep enough and it’s always selfish. No one has ever been talked into having kids for muh birth rates. Likewise you’ll never talk someone into being childfree for the environment, if they want kids.
Unless we can make it so that benefits of children accrue mainly to the parents, or completely divorce reproduction from biology (so you’ll pay a child tax to have them gestated in artificial wombs and raised by the state. They’re public goods. Just like roads or the military. You pay for their upkeep collectively but individually invest nothing in them), you won’t raise the birth rates.
It’s just like another pronatalist argument I just find utterly silly. “Shouldn’t companies WANT to be family friendly? Don’t they need workers in the future? And customers for their products? Shouldn’t they WANT to provide paid leaves? Shouldn’t childless workers WANT to cover the shifts of parents, because these kids will find their retirements? Shouldn’t you see yourself as freeloading, because you get the same pension as parents but all it costs YOU is an extra shift? So just be grateful”
Um. Were you born yesterday. “Companies” are not a monolith. How many companies even survive to hire your child? How many companies have the cashflow to shell out 60-80% of a non productive staff’s salary AND hiring someone to cover them for 6 months to a year? If your colleague doesn’t have this ONE particular kid, how much would it impact your pension, really? Unless your colleague’s child personally owes you money, how are you individually benefiting from covering his mom’s shift?
Sorry to read that. On the other hand, if they'd just followed their natural inclinations then you presumably wouldn't exist at all, which would be unfortunate.
It’s not like you’d be around to go ‘ah shit I’m never gonna get born’ though so it seems neutral to me rather than unfortunate.
If I'm being frank, the abuse and neglect I went through as a kid was not worth it. It has taken tens of thousands of dollars in therapy to get to a point where I'm not as affected by it, but it still hurts pretty badly, and when I think about the kid I was and what she went through, I wish she didn't have to do any of that. At any point in my life up until just a couple of years ago, if I could've chosen to be Thanos-snapped out of existence, I probably would've said yes. You can't put a "Well, it was all worth it!" value on that kind of experience, and I think keeping kids from having to go through hell because they were born to families who didn't want them is more important than moral grandstanding about how important it is to Have Children For The Human Race.
I have a newborn and a toddler and I’m going to find time to build a Lego today just so Lyman and those stale brick-hatin’ bitches that divorced a true a(r/u)tist can suck my ass. You do you, Star Wars Lego king.
Update: I built 3 sets. All I had to do was put down Substack while the kids were napping.
True. I find that the real reason I don’t have enough time for hobbies is I spend too much time scrolling while I COULD be doing something more fun. Higher energy (so you have to light a fire under your own ass to do it, if you’re sleep deprived and tired from small kids). But invigorating if you can put down your phone. I do think that once you have momentum on something, it’s easier and easier. I found starting a hobby impossible but now that I made some progress on my hobby, passive entertainment is not as appealing. I just want to get back to my project. I look forward to it all day.
The suggestion that Stone is too busy raising his family to take showers is pretty amusing
Glad to see most people agree how absurd Lyman Stone’s take is. It comes off like moral grandstanding, using his parenting style as a way to flex and shame others for living differently. Whether it’s insecurity or delusion, it’s not a healthy or realistic standard to push on everyone else.
Hot take but anybody who thinks the only valid things to do are work and childcare is probably a secret serial killer. People in 1300 may not have hung out at the Masonic Lodge or built Lego cities, but they still did creative or relaxing things when they had the time.
Also, has anybody else heard that Taylor Lorenz is closer to 40 than 30? Nothing wrong with that, it just gives her posts about 9/11 parties real “how do you do, fellow kids?” energy.
Taylor has got to be pushing 40 if not beyond it, and literally won’t reveal her real age publicly. “How do you do, fellow kids” energy is spot on. She remains a remarkable case study in what happens when your weird middle aged aunt who insists she’s still one of the cool kids gets Twitter brained.
To your first point, one wonders how pubs ever came to be a thing! Who were all the people in the “third spaces” we’ve supposedly lost if everyone was always working or caring for kids?
Yeah, I googled after I posted that to fact-check myself and it looks like the best guess we have is 40, turning 41 this fall. So she would’ve been in high school for 9/11. (I also found a hysterical thread Nate Silver told her he’d publicly debate her about something or other if she added her real age to her Wiki page, and she turned it into “How dare you, a man, try to invade my privacy and endanger my family in this way” like people a thousand times more famous than she is don’t have their birthdays all over the internet.)
I don’t particularly care how old she is or if she’s weird about it, it’s just funny when somebody who could biologically be a grandparent talks like Bush-era America is ancient history.
And good point on pubs!
Imagine someone who was 15 or 16 in 1941 defending the concept of “Pearl Harbor Parties” in 1965.
Taylor is one of those people who thought everyone over 30 was an old hag when she was in her 20’s and now that she’s 40 or so she Simply Cannot Deal. (There’s going to be a whole wave of them once the Zoomers age past 30.)
Besides, since when does putting the twin towers on a birthday cake as a joke make the whole party a “theme?” If I have flowers on my birthday cake does that mean I have a flower themed party? *Are* their pals dressing up as buildings and collapsing under the weight of Jello Shots?
I’m sure that people born on September 11 have learned to grit their teeth and endure the “what a badly timed birthday ha ha” jokes since 2002. In addition to being Virgos, they put up with this!
As a Virgo (a couple days before 9/11, thankfully), I resemble that remark.
And I agree that the cake doesn’t prove anything except that somebody made a dark humor cake once. My guess is that Taylor either entirely made up the idea of 9/11 parties, or saw somebody joking about them and took it waaaaaay too seriously.
My favorite person born on 9/11 is Butters Stotch.
People in the past literally used to waste their time watching dogs and bears fight.
It also seems like the young people Taylor Lorenz knows always seem kinda shitty. At some point, you have to mature past trying to recreate the spirit of BuzzFeed in 2014 for the rest of your life.
I mean, Lyman Stone is aggressively wrong about 75% of the time! Another line of his is that torturing livestock is morally neutral
EDIT: Also, how long has he been an all-lowercaps guy on Twitter? I remember he used to tweet like an adult.
The folks online extorting others to "grind harder" and go back to the tolling ways of the 19th century are always guys who spent most of their day sitting their ass in a chair, posting online.
You know who doesn't long for those days? Men who actually work physically demanding jobs.
Just look at the resounding success of the GI Bill, which enabled (white) working class men to get college educations.
We are always going to need people - not just men people, but people - to work in the trades, but, there is a reason a lot of trades guys urged their sons to go to college; trades are very hard on the body.
Sounds like he needs to chill out. Maybe he should take up a hobby?
So this week is gonna be Hobby Discourse on Substack, isn't it. Thank you for the warning. I shall begin preparing.
Literally after reading this saw Deep Left weighed in on Lyman's side early this morning. Buckle up, it has begun.
Just read that article, I feel like calling hobbyism a death cult while writing words like this "Unless you are willing to sacrifice your life, you will never live" is extremely self-unaware. I get yearning for greater purpose and a grand project beyond yourself and your own moment to moment enjoyment, but the way they rail against it by calling it moral degeneracy whilst having a strong undercurrent of misogyny really reminds me of "the cult of action for action's sake", the "cult of heroism", and the worship of machismo from Umberto Eco's 14 points.
Re: Hobbies, activities like tennis or serving on the PTA or on a board together are a great way to create friendships. As and when the kids get older, these friendships are really valuable. Lyman, if you're listening were you being a bit tongue in cheek?
I think he was. Although to his credit he’s a pronatalist who actually is a really active father instead of one who just puts everything on women
It comes across a bit like the manosphere influencers to me, except it's kids and making money instead of steroids and hookups. It's a better set of values IMO but they still aren't the only way to live a good life, he doesn't have the one true path to happiness/moral virtue.
My contribution to "hobby discourse" is that a lot of this revolves around whether or not screen time counts as a "hobby". A dude that spends an hour on Legos but doesn't watch TV is probably making an above-average parental commitment. A dude that spends an hour on legoes on top of two hours of TV is not.
This makes me think of fish picture discourse. The guy who likes to fish on Saturday, but doesn't play video games, is also probably putting in above average parenting. Especially if he takes the kids fishing.
1) Lyman is incredibly wrong on this take, and also wrong historically. Yes, there was a period of time at the beginning of the industrial age when when men just worked 90% day and drank the other 10%, but before that when people were in hunter-gathering/early farming communities, the men had a good deal of free time and basically hung with the bros during the wide majority of it.
2) Cheating often has little to do with relatively physical looks. Look at all the Hollywood actors who cheated on their bombshell wives with middle tier or lower women; Huge Grant's escapade in the 90s is maybe the most infamous example. But I've never really understood it myself. I wouldn't cheat, but hypothetically, a women would have to be elite-tier attractive for me to even be tempted to consider it . .maybe I'm just really shallow! 😆
3) Taylor Lorenz is like what a lab would create if you were trying to make the biggest caricature of the annoying entitled Millennial come to life. And ain't no-one having frikkin 9/11 parties . .she just made that shit up.
About cheating not being about looks, I loved how one YouTuber I follow described Lemonade as having to deal with the feelings of "what if you are LITERALLY BEYONCE and still get cheated on like any other woman."
1) Lyman's dismissal of social clubs ignores the fact that they emerged with industrial urbanism. He pulls a red herring by saying that social clubs weren't a big thing during the dark ages, when people lived in villages and never left the 10 mile radius around where they were born, and lived alongside a few hundred people, all of whom they knew.
As people moved into cities full of alienation, they founded social clubs. They were / are an important institution that has existed since the dawn of the modern era.
2) Any conversation around the cheating habits of male celebrities needs to center the fact that fame makes men attractive. These conversations tend to judge the cheating based solely on appearance. Of course the woman looks better than the man. He's rich and famous, and therefore hot. She looks good, and is therefore hot. They trade in different currencies.
I used to joke that instead of Tiger Woods paying for sex, women should have paid to have sex with him. (But he was paying for confidentiality I suppose, and lookit how that turned out.)
I remember an interview I did back in the 90’s for a “zine” (remember those?) with a professional sex worker. She said that confidentiality IS one reason men go to sex workers (I don’t recall asking her if she had celebrity clients; I was more interested in the nitty gritty of what the job was like). Sex workers are paid to do the deed, go away without complaining or wanting a relationship, and not blabbing.
Another reason some men cheat on even the most gorgeous women is they want something they don’t feel comfortable asking her for, or they want someone they don’t have to treat with the same respect they do a wife or girlfriend, hell there are many, many reasons, and not related to looks.
The *consequences* are what many men don’t foresee. Girlfriend finds out and dumps them. Oops! We don’t know in any given case if the hot girlfriend also had a great personality or what. I would say that cheating on your *pregnant* partner is a shitty thing to do, regardless of your looks or hers.