I think it’s a good idea for partners to have their own dedicated space that they can decorate for themselves and keep their hobbies in. It helps keep the rest of the house tidy and allows for a little bit of a personal safe haven. Obviously, the traditional conception of a ‘man cave’ isn’t great, but I think that there is a way it can be approached non-toxically
I’d hope that nobody would disagree with this.
The toxic aspect isn’t from wanting space apart from your spouse, it’s in sending signals (even ironically or in jest) that the family you are a part of is something you hate, that your family is cramping your individuality, and that you want to escape from them.
Everyone needs their own time and space. Just because you married another human doesn’t make you any less of an individual, and having healthy opportunity for time apart is essential.
Obviously, the traditional conception of a ‘man cave’ isn’t great
It’s not the “traditional concept”, it’s the juiced up consumerist fantasy. The traditional man-cave is literally just the garage or the basement, where you keep your power tools.
What if I’m not qualified to glue two pieces of cardboard together? Where is my hideout?
In that case, you have a few options:
- The home office/battle station where you can pipe the output from one bash command into another bash command, or set up your media server or just play video games.
- The kitchen where you can knead and bake sourdough, roll your own pasta, braise a hearty stew, or roast a leg of lamb.
- The backyard where you can smoke a brisket, bake a pizza, host a wine tasting.
- The garden or lawn where you can cultivate plants, grow something to eat, design a beautiful landscape, or restore a native sanctuary for migratory insects like the monarch butterfly or birds like a hummingbird or songbirds.
- The gym where you can get ripped, build up your personal stats, and let off some steam through physical activity.
- The closet or bedroom where you can plan out your fashion choices and wardrobe, iron your clothes, shine your shoes, and otherwise make stylish choices.
- Some sort of room or garage where you can jam out with musical instruments.
This guy fucking gets it. Let’s go with hobbies. Show your kids passion and a love of learning, the ability to have fun, and wrap it all in in emotional support and love and everything will be fine. I have an office with a bunch of nerd projects and we’re building out the basement workshop. My 3 year old already “helps” me build stuff and I hope that only increases. Mom has a second husband of her job in athletics, so kiddo is learning about normalizing hard work and athletic endeavors, visits Mommy’s office and weight room, etc.
The meme is funny. A lot of this conversation is definitely not, glad there’s some reasonable takes down here.
Dungeons and dragons was developed in a man cave.
Also, 1 of the guys’ wives thought he was cheating on her. She followed him to a house and thought to catch him in the act, when he went into the basement. Instead, she burst in on him and his friends playtesting D&D in their basement mancave.
If we’re going by this logic, I would say that the personal computer was invented in a “man cave”.
Though I guess those kids weren’t married yet (right? probably?)
It might have been his GF. Definitely his female other half.
The difference between a mancave and a workshop is 90% mentality. A workshop is generally to do a job, or a chore. A mancave is focused on enjoyment. The line is extremely blurry, however. Particularly if you enjoy making stuff.
By example. Developing D&D in a cosy basement, with the intention of having fun, it’s a mancave. By the time you’re using the same basement more for boxing and organising shipping, it’s a workshop. It’s akin to the difference between a bedroom and a brothel.
Oh, I was thinking it may have still been their parents’ garage. But I guess they were a bit older than that (and back then, college dropouts could afford houses with garages).
Also basement.
Online
Fuck. You might be on to something
Wine and nice sayings isn’t a hobby. A sports team you don’t participate in at all isn’t a hobby. Drinking isn’t a hobby.
Maybe not your hobbies (or mine), but these are all examples of an activity that someone does for pleasure when they are not working.
I’m going to start telling people I’m not an alcoholic, drinking is just a hobby of mine
That’s basically what “I’m a social drinker” means, so you can just say that.
Sign saying “Just one glass a day” picturing a giant wine glass the size of a goldfish bowl.
Hilarious.
Also, “live, laugh, love” but it’s aspirational, not what ever actually happens.
“survive, nervous chuckle, obsess”
Internalize, endure, avoid.
Casual alcoholism goes hand in hand with the wife bad/husband bad boomer humor. Tbh we call it boomer humor but most people I’ve heard it from were much younger.
It may be because the boomers are the last generation to consider it funny
They need good role models like their parents who take them to a local brewery and shove an iPad in their face then ignore them while the parents drink craft beer.
Parenting (and childhood) is intense and unrelenting. You can’t expect parents to be on stage continuously and continue to be patient and kind. You also can’t expect a 7 year old to be happy listening to their parents talk about work for 45 minutes. Taking breaks or responsibly drinking a beer is perfectly fine and isn’t going to negatively impact the child any more than allowing them to watch some age appropriate media for the time before they eat.
totally agree that parents need a break and a good drink. hell it is exhausting. but please avoid just putting them Infront of a screen. get the grandparents to look after them, let them sleep over at a friend’s house, organise a nanny. as a society we are already too often starring at screens.
Thats not a critique of parenting its a critique of screens. Which isnt exactly settled. For example my wife and I work in tech, all of our toys are technology of some kind. Its hypocritical of us to tell our kids they shouldnt be on these things. Responsible use has nothing to do with the technology itself, and varies widely from family to family and location to location.
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Don’t hate. Parents are people too and that’s their time. Kid time is the other 22 hours that day.
Eh, you don’t need to do that. You have about 2-3 good every night
Well good for you that you have no chores to do ever. How blessed you must be. What else should us dumb parents do better to manage our times so we can be as amazing as you?
I get it, is hard, but taking your kids to a pub to watch ipad while you drink beer? Come on. There’s other things that is more suitable
I wouldnt personally, I don’t drink, but ive taken them to restaurants and they just were bored no matter what. Sometimes the choice is leaving in the middle of dinner or give them something to keep their attention, especially when they are so young its hard to keep their attention with conversation.
Yeah I wouldnt do it myself but I wouldnt judge anyone for it either.
Well, maybe when my kids have kids, I’ll feel comfortable enough to judge them for it lol but otherwise, no.
I wonder if my perception is fucked or what i have to think about these things. I was once on a date in a restaurant and next to us was a family of 5 and the youngest was maybe 7 and he played Fortnite on an ipad most of the time. My date pointed this out as “rude” and “bad parenting” and i agreed. But it made me thinking. I think i had pretty good parents, and they dragged me and my sister to a lot of places i didn’t want to be. But i was pretty happy as long as i could bring my gameboy. The boy was 7 of course he didn’t want to sit in a restaurant and do conversation with adults.
Now my sister has two children that are 7 and 5 and my perception has changed again. It’s absolutely scary how addicted kids are to phones. It’s like watching crack addicts. They aren’t even allowed on the phone a lot, but the things they would do to not even do anything interesting, and just press buttons and play the worst mobile games and watch the worst youtube videos ever created.
I liked games on my gameboy, and later game gear, but i never liked any game as much as my nephew likes to watch a minecraft video on youtube in a language he doesn’t speak (and he never played minecraft.) it’s truly bizarre, and because he only likes to watch these dumb ass videos and is only allowed to watch a short goodnight story every night if he behaves, he can’t even watch a movie. The concept of something bad happens to a main character blows his mind so much that he never wants to watch a movie with me, and would rather watch elsa getting impregnated by spiderman. He loves the movie cars, and when i showed him cars 3, he couldn’t understand how lightning mcqueen would not win at some point.
my sister has two children that are 7 and 5…
…and would rather watch elsa getting impregnated by spiderman.Who is showing the kid R34 animations?
Oh is definitely an addiction and it seems that’s what modern parenting has become. I definitely remember being bored AF when my parents dragged me to places and am I could do was sit around while they enjoyed their time, but they also had the care to get a babysitter for a couple hours so they didn’t have to drag us around.
Nowadays it just seems everywhere I go there’s always 2 under-7 kids with their noses buried in a phone or iPad blasting loudly in a public place, and their parents ignoring them while they scream and run around.
I had a coworker who would routinely bring their 4 & 6 yr old to a local dive bar while their band plays at 10pm. Both only paying attention to their devices
Those kids shouldn’t have phones.
Giving your child a phone is bad parenting.
Well, its that or they might end up with a family who holds freakish anti-social views like “Love is Love” and “Let kids play dress up, they’re not hurting anyone”.
:(
My wife really wanted a kid. I love my wife.
I gave her no illusions though. This world is fucked. This is either the beginning of another dark(enforced ignorance) age or the end of human civilization entirely. The kid is beyond fucked.
I have more of a “welcome to the shit show, kid” mindset. I can’t protect him from this exploitative hellscape, any more than I could protect myself. Oh and please spare me the cliche “well you need to man up and find a way to give them an awesome life,” as reality isn’t a Disney movie.
I can show him the stuff I like and ways to protect himself a little, but man his generation’s future is bleak.
My husband wants kids, I’m okay without for the same reasons as you and a big disgust of pregnancy. I have a lot of experience with kids in my career and we love kids, but it just seems the kindest thing to do for them is to not bring them into this world. We’re planning on fostering once we’re in a better financial position and hopefully adopting from there. I’d rather grow our family with a kid or toddler that already got the shit luck of being here.
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Holy shit the negativity between these two posts is disgusting. This world is far from perfect but it’s not a dystopian hell scape and it’s far from a lost cause.
Hop offline, touch grass, talk to your neighbors. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that instead of being the world’s biggest wet blankets.
People on the Internet, and specifically reddit/Lemmy, sit and read all this negative shit all day, every day, and then come and regurgitate it for others to do the same. Life has literally never been easy, except for a very select few. I personally think some of the best things in life come from the fact that there are difficulties weighing in opposition (winter and summer, as the most general example). If you don’t want to have kids, that is great, but to say it’s because the world is difficult is just such a copout, because the world has always been and will always be difficult. You need to live for good times, weather the bad times.
the world has always been and will always be difficult
So why do you think a child deserves to be brought into a world where they’re going to suffer?
Other than perhaps what else I addressed that you didn’t quote, are you asking me what the meaning of life is? I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer.
Can we send his wife flowers?
I’m with you calling it out. “His generation’s future is bleak” lol thanks, dad. Half the content on here is screeching about how prior generations failed to save the world, and this guy is leaning full in on “not my choice, not my problem” to a cheering crowd encouraging him to spike his son into the ground.
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I promise I’m not a doomsday prepper or anything, just a person in my 30s who grew up in poverty and has only recently gotten to a point of being slightly above water. We are aware that having a child would immediately bring us back to scraping by, which means that we may not be able to afford any extras for said child. No dance classes, no preschool, no crayons with the sharpener on the back. Just stressed out parents who won’t be able to give as much attention and care due to burnout and survival mode. That doesn’t sound nice for anyone involved… The kinder thing for me to do is either wait till we’re in a better financial state(where aging and inflation works against us) or just accept we won’t have them. Our plan, as I said, is to eventually foster and hopefully adopt from there, because by the time we feel financially stable enough to support another human in our world, I’ll probably be too old for a safe pregnancy.(Which I’m disgusted by as well, but that’s a whole different issue)
This isn’t a situation where I’m worried about the world blowing up, it’s accepting that we’ll either be trapping ourselves and a child in poverty and continuing that cycle we both came from or dealing with a high risk geriatric pregnancy and a baby in our 40s.
Yeah I’m shocked they literally said the best thing we could do for kids is not allow them a chance at life.
How closed minded they must be, to think everyone shares the exact same despair they do, as well as the inability or lack of creativity needed to envision a better future and a path that takes us there.
If thats the perspective they will teach their children, I really hope they prove their parents wrong.
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For what it’s worth I’m not judging them for their decision to not have kids. I don’t care if they have kids or not. That’s their choice. I’m just commenting on their incredibly fatalistic world view. When in reality, in the west at least, we have so many positive things going for us like tech advancements, healthcare/medical advancements, and the education opportunities.
It’s the safest it’s been in a while and even with what’s happening in the middle east and Ukraine, it’s one of the most peaceful times in history.
There are plenty of people in the West, especially in America, that are desperately impoverished. There are millions of people without access to any healthcare, let alone the fabulous new advancements in medicine. Education is also being torn down at the foundations by the GOP fucking with schools, and higher education is extremely expensive. You can only get a college degree with generational wealth or crushing, inescapable student loans.
I don’t blame people who are not financially comfortable for being fatalistic.
There are plenty of people in the West, especially in America, that are desperately impoverished. There are millions of people without access to any healthcare, let alone the fabulous new advancements in medicine. Education is also being torn down at the foundations by the GOP fucking with schools, and higher education is extremely expensive. You can only get a college degree with generational wealth or crushing, inescapable student loans.
I don’t blame people who are not financially comfortable for being fatalistic.
Why do you think the world sucks for half the population? You must be making an awful lot of assumptions. I mean, I barely know if my neighbor is having a hard time let alone 4 billion people who I never see.
How closed minded they must be, to think everyone shares the exact same despair they do, as well as the inability or lack of creativity needed to envision a better future and a path that takes us there.
Lets do a test. Could you imagine supporting:
- Banning of commercial advertising
- Abolishing patents or making them free or extremely low cost to use to quickly adopt new / better technology
- Nationalize all big news and social media companies and turning them over to the democratic control of their own workers (a cooperative)
- Massive wealth and land redistribution
Most people can’t because they have been programmed to see these as “holy touchstones” of their true religion, capitalism. And that means only economic power may rule, and there are no paths to the future except the profitable ones. They rather de-federate call socialists tankies and than to deal with the angry dirtbag left. They prefer to exist in a calm apolitical space with a total war on good vs evil.
So please don’t insult people who can imagine many paths but also have the wisdom why all these paths are shut. It’s just like a physics problem, you can’t overcome the political energy worth trillions of dollars with a few measly millions of dollars of political energy we could muster.
I can imagine lots of great future possibilities without doing any of those 4 things too. Mankind has the technology to do innumerable amazing things now.
Yes but the issue is that any technology will be used to maximize profit, which results in almost always the worst case outcome. We already have the technology for a global post-scarcity civilization with a circular economy.
Those 4 things are just random ideas but anything that is unprofitable or decreases power or destroys massive wealth of capitalists is basically censored in mainstream political discourse. And today effective countermeasures have been developed to make protests useless and reform or revolutions impossible.
But I do agree that this doesn’t justify radical anti-natalism. Just teach your children profitable skills, multiple languages, subsistence farming, electronics and how to build electric motors and windmills, how to build a cozy tiny house or a boat. I also hope for technological advancements (like 3D printers, genetic engineering) that allow for a more democratic industrial base.
PS: Kurzgesagt has a new video on this: Is Our World Broken?. TLDW: We need to tell ourselves a new story (but that requires we stop believing in the old ones)
Aside from global warming the world as a whole has been steadily improving. I think you are confusing the USA with the rest of the world. Empires collapse, it happens, that doesn’t mean the whole world is on fire.
I wonder what romans would have done to the barbarians if they had nukes.
barbarians
I’m sure that type of language helps.
The Romans would have nuked themselves first with how many times they overthrew themselves.
The barbarians weren’t any different than the romans. Same thing as Americans calling groups terrorists so we can kill them.
You would be surprised how other countries (including your favorite role model European ones) are fucking themselves up right now.
I live in Europe, in a country that still has its problems. The truth is though it’s not just us. There are less deaths from war and less poverty throughout the world in general if you actually look at the statistics. This is despite all the bad things you see in the news. The modern news and internet make people more aware of the bad in the world, when the truth is things are actually getting better overall.
Aside from global warming
I get what you are saying. But that improvement has been possible only because of global warming. Today we have more energy (=workforce) at our hands than ever before. This has imported things, but it’s living on bored time Global warming will start to deteriate our world in multiple ways, I fact it is doing so right now.
A collapse of this system build on sand is a very real possibility. And it is a very real possibility that it will take less than a generation to happen.
You’re not wrong, but that’s just growing pains that every technologically capable species goes through. Like every other kind of alien, we have less than 1,000 years to figure out how to move our industry and other energy use and generation off-world before we cook ourselves.
The only thing collapsing is nations that value money more than anything. They don’t fit into the current world, and certainly not in the future.
If you are so tied to the notion that your worth is based on your wealth, I’m sure you would feel despair.
We’re going to have problems if you are attacking caves, who doesn’t desire a cave?
Robin. He’s fucking sick of caves. Do you know what bat guano smells like?
If it means paying less rent, I’d seriously consider cavelife.
Rent is more because the climate control is free
Me desire cave.
Children yearn for the mines
our ancestors spent tens of millions of years burrowing. its in our instincts. its why you want a headboard behind your bed.
its why you want a headboard behind your bed.
I don’t understand… possibly because I’ve skipped the headboard for many, many years of my life. Could you please explain?
As a man who really loves teaching children and helping them solve their own problems, handing them a world full of problems is right up my alley
So is porn good or bad?
All I can say is I recently got into a thing specifically for the porn, and it ended up being a super emotional and not really all that pornographic story which fucked me all up and I haven’t been able to jerk off since.
Porn wouldn’t have done that.
Edit: Adastra for those asking. I just thought it was just a yiff-filled dating sim when I started it.
Katawa Shoujo?
🥹
Cyberpunk Edgerunners?
Profile picture checks out
It’s Shroedinger’s ethics. You can’t really know until you open the upstanding pastor’s secret box and it happens to be full of CSAM and bodies.
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Never really know on Lemmy. The other day a woman was wearing a trashy shirt full of sexual innuendo and swear words in public and lemmys response was “fuck those kids”. But in another thread like this, it’s bad
Mounted to the wall is not great
My TV is mounted to my wall.
In this case I don’t think it’s about the porn but the need to show it off as an integral part of your identity. I think it may even betray a need to reaffirm your heteronormativity hence a bad role model if you happen to get kids that need to learn about who they are rather than what’s expected of them.
So we will always say “porn is bad” is a stupid belief because like in all things when you get in the weeds it’s never going to be easy sorting it out.
How about wine?
Bad. Try alcohol in drinks with good flavor.
Good.
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Depends
Children need exposure to a diverse set of role models or they turn into hateful, close-minded lizards spitting venom at healthy people for their choice in decor.
Reminds me of Jonathan Coulton’s song “Shopvac”
My wife and I reference it at least once a week since we moved into suburbia.
Are we talking about the TV show Married With Children?
And people ask me why I didn’t follow this dream life.
Guess his definition of healthy varies from mine.
It was sarcasm.
I prefer the more literal definition of heteronormal in that there are differing states of what should be expected.
Isn’t Kibblesmith the guy with the terrible New Warriors reboot that never read the original comic because the black guy with guns (Night Thrasher) scared him?
You mean with the queer superhero twins who are called Snowflake and Safe Space?
Drag thinks a story about queer superheroes reclaiming slurs could be great if well executed, but the Marvel Comics audience aren’t the kind of people you shound expect to appreciate subtle art.
garage lined with pornography
Uh what? Yeah I don’t believe anyone is arguing that’s healthy.
You’re supposed to detect the sarcasm when they say a thing that’s very clearly wrong(adjusting to the perspective they’re coming from).
I personally see absolutely nothing wrong or bad about sex, depictions of it, and strong desires, but I’m aware of the norm and how they’re speaking of it.
insulation is a highly practical end state for nudie pages.