Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows

I was married for 11 years, had three children and am happily divorced. I’m glad I got married and I’m just as glad I was able to get a divorce.

What’s overwhelmingly changed in my lifetime (since 1980) is that young adult people would rather be alone with no children than take the risk on being unhappy or getting a divorce.

The single biggest change is that the average sentiment now in the “global-west” is “why should I risk my current lifestyle for the risk and pain of a family.”

That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons. A lot of it was structural repression and the fact that is gone is an unalloyed good.

However it does mean that the expectations for human communities and population growth that have undergirded humanity since the neolithic no longer apply.

We need to fundamentally rethink what humanity is working towards, at a global scale, if the gross population numbers had peaked for humanity.

We were never gonna scale our population much further anyways. Arguably, the social changes we’ve seen could be a response to our reaching a (very approximate) carrying capacity and experiencing friction against further growth in myriad ways. That’s the way I’ve been thinking about it at least.

> That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons.

I’d be interested to hear more about this if its no trouble. I’m in my twenties so not much knowledge of this stuff.

> I’d be interested to hear more about this if its no trouble.

For women, at least, you could not be independent (legally at least). You needed a man to co-sign applications to open bank accounts/credit cards/etc. Fewer well paying jobs were available to you. All these were worse still if you were a member of a minority.

Effectively what the other response said.

Women in the US were effectively treated like second class citizens across the board and were not permitted to have any kind of independence.

The history of sexism in humans is pretty disturbing and creates a foundational schism in the structure and coherence of society.

The concept of equality and “freedom of opportunity” or “freedom from oppression” is unfortunately not something humans have ever functionally been able to demonstrate (at least in any way that transmits to other cultures or generations)