This is a stressful stage of life for a lot of people. The quarter life crisis is very real. Young people tend to have young kids, or roommates, or tiny apartments, and working from home is a larger strain, especially at the entry/junior level which is a stressful rat race in many fields. Plus you don't have much wealth built up if you do get laid off, and little experience on your resume to justify being rehired quickly.
When in human history has life for most not been stressful? If anything life for most today (even the young with kids, roommates or tiny apartments) is far less stressful than for most humans in history. There's a complete loss of perspective today.
Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life. That's almost like saying all that matters is if you can eat and sleep. That is not what most people want out of life. They want meaning in their life, respect, and love. Those are all things that are way way way more difficult to get today than at almost any time during human history.
I really don't think so. The people in the past were not getting automatic respect and were not getting automatic love. The marriage was often economic transaction and you often had to live among people who did not respected you. The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love.
Some people's lives had meaning, plenty of others were basically surviving in routine .
>The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love.
This makes it sound like you believe love is a bool that gets set at the beginning of the relationship, but from what I understand love is a float that the couple can work to increase.
No, love don't have to die. But, initial passion, is not love. And people are much different in the first period when they are trying to make best impression and later on after months. In extreme case, many abusers (of both genders) show themselves only after months.
For long term love, it matters greatly whether you two are match by personality and values. And short term engagement make it easy to select wrong partner.
We don't really know this with such certainty. Our records have gaps and only extend a few thousand years back, at most. Even then, we often only have bits and pieces for certain populations. It's a large stretch to generalize over human history.
Personal contact is super important to people. Physical closeness is important. Being able to meet people in person is important for personal relationships. This stuff matters, and it's very hard to get right now.
> Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life.
Stress is the response to every day life. We don't have the coping skills we used to have.
Kids, children, were conscripted, given weapons, and sent to a different continent to fight and die. Twice. After the first time, the Spanish Flu hit and killed millions of people. The kids who lived through that time were mentally tough and capable of coping with the tragedy of both events.
They lived full lives, had purpose, had families. By and large, they had a few things that today's kids don't; religion and nuclear families. To some extent, God is a panacea. Having certainty of one's final destination makes the road there a lot more manageable. They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them.
We are now at the tail end of a "softening". Peace makes for soft people.
> They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them.
There's a competing line of thought that considers the nuclear family to be one of the worst things that's happened to our society. It's created isolated household units, disconnected truly multigenerational households, and created distance and lack of necessity for extended family. By reducing the amount of direct family connections you can rely on for support, it's caused a massive increase in people depending on the government or charity for their emergency needs and arguably further exacerbated the loneliness epidemic.
I think you're misreading what the OP is saying and you two are actually in alignment. They are not saying the nuclear family is an improvement on the multigenerational household. They are saying that the nuclear family is better than what we have today with divorces and single parent homes becoming increasingly common.
The degeneracy is from multigenerational to nuclear and from nuclear to less than nuclear families. Many people who are marxists typically celebrate the demise of both multigenerational homes and nuclear families because the family unit was seen as an opponent of socialist goals.
The US has had constant military engagements for the last 20-30 years, the largest terrorist attack on US soil, the complete economic erosion of the middle class followed by the largest recession since the great depression and now the largest depression since the great depression with the largest pandemic since 1918 where we're also on track for millions dying. This is one of the roughest times in history to be growing up in compared to those times.
Then there is their idea of "effective coping". It was to drink more and smack their wives. Your romanticization of those people is utterly off the mark.
