One of the things we've told our children "ad infinitum" is "you can be anything you want to be." We have, over time, extended childhood into our thirties, and now into our forties (it seems), which means we're extending the "you can be anything you want to be" to later and later stages of life. We want to say "you can change direction when you're 70!" Part of the reason we have so many singles is everyone seems to sense that marrying and having children preclude other choices, and we're teaching people not to make choices that preclude other choices.
When I was growing up we never argued about where to eat dinner. Now every family I know argues about where to eat dinner...
We feel empowered to not think about the tradeoffs because "it can always be undone." Even in the case of transgender surgery, we run around talking about how it is all reversable. It isn't. There are physical limits. But progressivism is all about transcending physical limits, ultimately, and we live in a moment where, like fish, the last thing we can discover or understand is the progressivism we swim in.
It is true we can miss these career opportunities. But I have found in my own journey of faith with Jesus, that failure to be thankful for what we have is a poison.
We live in a golden age historically speaking. Longer life, more than sufficient food, modern medicine. God could have put us somewhere else in space/time. As Human history goes this is not a bad place to be.
FT is pretty much inaccessible without an expensive subscription, and it's telling this article comes out of the U.K. Some of my early memories are reading in U.S. News & World Report about how dismal England's economy was back before 1973. The EC and particularly the Thatcher years erased most folks memories of this, but they seem to be staring again into the abyss, sadly.
Europeans like to think of America as the Wild West, but there are reasons why we keep reinventing ourselves and they don't. The general premise of the article holds true here, too, but it's a much gentler narrowing of options, and there are countless examples of Americans who totally reinvented themselves later in life.
Re: Kari Lake and abortion. Let's not overthink this. Trump came out with a "leave it to the states" message on April 8. At that moment, MAGA fanatics, in Orwellian fashion, decided that was their stance, also. Had he embraced a different stance, MAGA fanatics would have decided that THAT was their stance, also.
On April 12, Kari Lake followed suit.
Neither Donald Trump nor Kari Lake is a cultural conservative nor a social conservative or anything else. Donald Trump emotes today's stance in public, based on who knows what, and his minions follow suit. Neither Trump nor Lake could define a difference between social conservatism and cultural conservatism, and it is quite possible neither has ever heard the terms used as non-synonyms.
It's a true point about "no more second chances" but for a lot of people, this sort of knowledge might be destructive instead of constructive. It gives them an excuse to wallow in self-pity instead of trying to turn things around. Learned helplessness.
I think the right way to go through life is to recognize that each choice you make constrains your future choices so choose wisely, BUT you also have more agency than you know to improve your situation if you start making better choices and apply yourself through hard work. Maybe that's too nuanced for most to hold inside their minds; they're going to lean towards one of those two thoughts. And I'm inclined to think that of those two, the second is usually the more productive one to carry around.
I'm trying to help an older teen from a broken home in my extended family get a second chance to get on the right path. He already has some hopelessness about the future, based on where he's coming from and some choices he's made. So I suspect telling him "your options in life are narrowing as we speak" is just going to overwhelm him and make him double down on hopelessness. I need to convince him that he can turn things around.
I've taken some hope from "Hillbilly Elegy", which I've just gotten around to reading (still haven't watched the movie). I'm honestly thinking that the best bet for this kid might be a military enlistment, despite agreeing with most of the arguments for why the military is no longer a good place for young men that have been presented by Aaron and others.
Though the experience is from 20 years ago, Vance's book offers a very constructive take on the military for someone in his specific situation: he didn't live up to near his potential in high school due to a crappy childhood full of bad role models, and he was therefore unprepared for college or for independent life as an adult. He was a different man when he left the Marines, ready to take on the world. There's a lot to compare to this kid.
Good on you for helping. But as someone who came from a broken home while managing to avoid most pitfalls of life, the older I get, the more I see the consequences of it all around me. What motivates me is taking a longer view, that though the adults in my life massively failed me in certain ways, I can break the cycle, at least for others. I suppose, if you told 20-year-old me who saw these things as minor annoyances rather than profound conditions, I don't know if I would truly get it. However, giving people false hope and telling them consequences are transitory seems to me how we got in our societal mess in the first place, more than giving people a gut check on where they are headed.
I've got two sons in the military (Air Force and Navy), and I pushed hard for them to get through college and get commissioned, but for some kids, any kind of structure might be just what they need, at least if they have enough self-control to respond positively to the discipline. Just bear in mind a couple things:
Everyone's military experience is different, it can be great or awful (obviously).
The military is a huge bureaucracy, which has tremendous resources and opportunities, but is also capable of doing some very dumb things. Similarly to the U.S. healthcare industry, anyone entering it needs to get as educated and aware as possible about how to successfully navigate it.
Yes, my thought is to sit this kid down with some vets who recently got out that I'm acquainted with, both on the younger and older side. Some will recommend service more than others. But all should have some decent advice on how to navigate the experience and make the most of it.
I can tell from my conversations with him that he's a smart kid with a tremendous amount of wasted potential. I think what he really needs is a reboot to his life, to break free from the environment he grew up in and get a complete change of scenery. Which I don't think is going to happen if he just takes some community college classes (especially as he's now basically flunking high school), or just starts working at Wal-Mart while living in his mom's dysfunctional home.
So how else do you get that sort of radical break from your past as an 18-year-old?
All young men are rough around the edges (a reality that seems lost on most young women these days, who want a husband who ticks every last box), but the way to tell the sheep from the goats is how they respond to earnest discipline.
The good ones will take to it, and thereby start building confidence, essential to their successful entry into adulthood. So yours sounds like a solid plan, not everyone is cut out for academics, but if he learns discipline he'll manage to scrape his way through whatever training he has to, to reach the goal he's set.
I think you have hit the nail on the head in that you pushed hard for your two sons to go into the military. It is incumbent on parents - especially Christian parents - to help guide their children into the right career or position in life. Parents for the most part know and understand the strengths and weakness of each child and their desires.
My father also knew that I wanted to be a soldier when I was very young and that's the direction he strongly encouraged. My daughters were encouraged to be wives and mothers first, but they also were gifted in other areas where we encouraged them too.
To be clear, I didn't push them to join the military. But since that's what they wanted, I tried to steer them toward a good career path. It wasn't easy, but their Mom and I are very thankful it's turned out well for both, so far.
We have tried very hard to support our kids in whatever course they wanted to pursue, as long as they worked hard at it.
One of the things we've told our children "ad infinitum" is "you can be anything you want to be." We have, over time, extended childhood into our thirties, and now into our forties (it seems), which means we're extending the "you can be anything you want to be" to later and later stages of life. We want to say "you can change direction when you're 70!" Part of the reason we have so many singles is everyone seems to sense that marrying and having children preclude other choices, and we're teaching people not to make choices that preclude other choices.
When I was growing up we never argued about where to eat dinner. Now every family I know argues about where to eat dinner...
We feel empowered to not think about the tradeoffs because "it can always be undone." Even in the case of transgender surgery, we run around talking about how it is all reversable. It isn't. There are physical limits. But progressivism is all about transcending physical limits, ultimately, and we live in a moment where, like fish, the last thing we can discover or understand is the progressivism we swim in.
Was this the same men's conference that had the male pole dancer and a really awkward speech by Mark Driscoll?
I believe so.
It is true we can miss these career opportunities. But I have found in my own journey of faith with Jesus, that failure to be thankful for what we have is a poison.
We live in a golden age historically speaking. Longer life, more than sufficient food, modern medicine. God could have put us somewhere else in space/time. As Human history goes this is not a bad place to be.
FT is pretty much inaccessible without an expensive subscription, and it's telling this article comes out of the U.K. Some of my early memories are reading in U.S. News & World Report about how dismal England's economy was back before 1973. The EC and particularly the Thatcher years erased most folks memories of this, but they seem to be staring again into the abyss, sadly.
Europeans like to think of America as the Wild West, but there are reasons why we keep reinventing ourselves and they don't. The general premise of the article holds true here, too, but it's a much gentler narrowing of options, and there are countless examples of Americans who totally reinvented themselves later in life.
Re: Kari Lake and abortion. Let's not overthink this. Trump came out with a "leave it to the states" message on April 8. At that moment, MAGA fanatics, in Orwellian fashion, decided that was their stance, also. Had he embraced a different stance, MAGA fanatics would have decided that THAT was their stance, also.
On April 12, Kari Lake followed suit.
Neither Donald Trump nor Kari Lake is a cultural conservative nor a social conservative or anything else. Donald Trump emotes today's stance in public, based on who knows what, and his minions follow suit. Neither Trump nor Lake could define a difference between social conservatism and cultural conservatism, and it is quite possible neither has ever heard the terms used as non-synonyms.
Thank you Aaron for the marriage age gap data! Very important info for my wife search, really helpful!
It's a true point about "no more second chances" but for a lot of people, this sort of knowledge might be destructive instead of constructive. It gives them an excuse to wallow in self-pity instead of trying to turn things around. Learned helplessness.
I think the right way to go through life is to recognize that each choice you make constrains your future choices so choose wisely, BUT you also have more agency than you know to improve your situation if you start making better choices and apply yourself through hard work. Maybe that's too nuanced for most to hold inside their minds; they're going to lean towards one of those two thoughts. And I'm inclined to think that of those two, the second is usually the more productive one to carry around.
I'm trying to help an older teen from a broken home in my extended family get a second chance to get on the right path. He already has some hopelessness about the future, based on where he's coming from and some choices he's made. So I suspect telling him "your options in life are narrowing as we speak" is just going to overwhelm him and make him double down on hopelessness. I need to convince him that he can turn things around.
I've taken some hope from "Hillbilly Elegy", which I've just gotten around to reading (still haven't watched the movie). I'm honestly thinking that the best bet for this kid might be a military enlistment, despite agreeing with most of the arguments for why the military is no longer a good place for young men that have been presented by Aaron and others.
Though the experience is from 20 years ago, Vance's book offers a very constructive take on the military for someone in his specific situation: he didn't live up to near his potential in high school due to a crappy childhood full of bad role models, and he was therefore unprepared for college or for independent life as an adult. He was a different man when he left the Marines, ready to take on the world. There's a lot to compare to this kid.
Good on you for helping. But as someone who came from a broken home while managing to avoid most pitfalls of life, the older I get, the more I see the consequences of it all around me. What motivates me is taking a longer view, that though the adults in my life massively failed me in certain ways, I can break the cycle, at least for others. I suppose, if you told 20-year-old me who saw these things as minor annoyances rather than profound conditions, I don't know if I would truly get it. However, giving people false hope and telling them consequences are transitory seems to me how we got in our societal mess in the first place, more than giving people a gut check on where they are headed.
I've got two sons in the military (Air Force and Navy), and I pushed hard for them to get through college and get commissioned, but for some kids, any kind of structure might be just what they need, at least if they have enough self-control to respond positively to the discipline. Just bear in mind a couple things:
Everyone's military experience is different, it can be great or awful (obviously).
The military is a huge bureaucracy, which has tremendous resources and opportunities, but is also capable of doing some very dumb things. Similarly to the U.S. healthcare industry, anyone entering it needs to get as educated and aware as possible about how to successfully navigate it.
Yes, my thought is to sit this kid down with some vets who recently got out that I'm acquainted with, both on the younger and older side. Some will recommend service more than others. But all should have some decent advice on how to navigate the experience and make the most of it.
I can tell from my conversations with him that he's a smart kid with a tremendous amount of wasted potential. I think what he really needs is a reboot to his life, to break free from the environment he grew up in and get a complete change of scenery. Which I don't think is going to happen if he just takes some community college classes (especially as he's now basically flunking high school), or just starts working at Wal-Mart while living in his mom's dysfunctional home.
So how else do you get that sort of radical break from your past as an 18-year-old?
All young men are rough around the edges (a reality that seems lost on most young women these days, who want a husband who ticks every last box), but the way to tell the sheep from the goats is how they respond to earnest discipline.
The good ones will take to it, and thereby start building confidence, essential to their successful entry into adulthood. So yours sounds like a solid plan, not everyone is cut out for academics, but if he learns discipline he'll manage to scrape his way through whatever training he has to, to reach the goal he's set.
I think you have hit the nail on the head in that you pushed hard for your two sons to go into the military. It is incumbent on parents - especially Christian parents - to help guide their children into the right career or position in life. Parents for the most part know and understand the strengths and weakness of each child and their desires.
My father also knew that I wanted to be a soldier when I was very young and that's the direction he strongly encouraged. My daughters were encouraged to be wives and mothers first, but they also were gifted in other areas where we encouraged them too.
To be clear, I didn't push them to join the military. But since that's what they wanted, I tried to steer them toward a good career path. It wasn't easy, but their Mom and I are very thankful it's turned out well for both, so far.
We have tried very hard to support our kids in whatever course they wanted to pursue, as long as they worked hard at it.