This is scary.

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This guy might be over or underestimating the weight of certain things in the way his relationship dissolved but it seems to follow a narrative that falls right into the sort of thing people like ThinkingApe talk about - ie. the sexes being so different in needs and focus that once environmental hardships or incredibly conservative cultures (for example Islam or various Korean sects of protestant Christianity) you have the basis for relationships easily crumbling in a lot of cases and where for a really depressingly high percentage it seems like love for and dedication to another is a very fleeting thing when compared to even relatively small issues.

Also please don't get me wrong - if this in any of the below ends up sounding one-sided it's strictly an artifact of my gender and experience observing the world as a heterosexual, it's bound to be deeply incomplete and underrepresent equally rich detail from other angles as it develops in others. From that perspective I would invite people to fill what detail they feel is missing as well as they can because IMHO this presents us with a much bigger problem than whether one gender is better than the other on parameter x, y and z.

What bothers me here - it's one thing to say a guy is unsuccessful, can't provide, can't protect, as uncomfortable as it is to admit to what that says about society it has a very rational and understandible basis and it's difficult to argue with if one has to take for granted that this is a largely predatory culture where everyone is in a sort of death race for success or failure, however this seems to show that success can be just as destabilizing for seemingly inflationary reasons and examples like this raise the question - is this something western culture can introspect on and fix or is it something that we're essentially doomed, in a gesellschaft culture, to have constant fragmentation of extended family to nuclear family to the individual being the ward of the state. For example can human beings, let alone the sexes, get along or are we slightly more antisocial than social by enough of a margin that we'd all rather be hermits at the end of the day than deal with each other's differences? The sense of Brave New World creeping in on the tails of this as well while governments and corporations start finding the individual infinitely small in their wake - and we see this taking shape in what western neoliberalism is becoming. Some people would say that the seeds of this were embedded in the core tenets of liberal democracy and especially neoliberalism, that makes sense but the challenge is to figure out - is there anything we can do to reverse that atomization of our culture without going backward on individual liberties? I deeply worry that the later will happen of it's own accord if we can't address this.



There's a guy on Youtube that I'd imagine most people are familiar with by now, ie. Monday FA Monday, who talks about this with the analogy that it's the creation of suburban ghettos, ie. where things 'look' nicer economically but socially it's still the equivalent of trailer parks. I try to think about what that means in terms of the psychological health of future generations and their stability, and then I add to that exponentiated technology like Rob Reid talks about in his TED on the risk of human extinction by synthetic biology.... not good.

Weighty topic, I know, but it raises the question - can we handle this or are we pretty much set up for societal collapse and loss of liberty and is the oppression of nature finally getting the last laugh in how it's twisting us from within?

I'd add - to cave to the impulse to look for villains in this sort of story of 'It's him', or 'It's her', is to really fail at even getting to the point of seeing the fundamental problem long before we can even get to the question of 'what do solutions look like'. Riffing on Gabor Mate, these things have to be emerging from our culture, but the question is what does a culture better calibrated for families and having more uniting us than dividing us look like?