Comment by pm90
2 days ago
Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to talk/work with whatever at Google interests you most and hand off the gruntwork to minions all the while being treated with deep reverence. It’s not exactly hard to see why he might like it.
One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.
I don't think this is really accurate because the traditional state of society, and one that remains in the 'developing world' which is almost certainly still the wide majority of the world at this point, is families living in multi generational housing with many people contributing. This enables older to generations to comfortably 'retire' when they see fit, and provides financial comfort and security. It's basically like decentralized pensions.
This new world of low fertility, small household size or even people living entirely alone, high external dependence, and the consequent broad insecurity - is still extremely new. And I do not think it will survive the test of time.
I think you might be romanticizing multi-generational households a bit. We introduced social security systems precisely because the family systems failed so frequently. In all but the richest families no retirement as we understand it today was possible. Illness or death of the main bread winners was fatal to the whole household and children were expected to work as soon as possible.
There's a great article on the history of social security here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_...
It was not because family systems were failing. It came about in the era of the great depression, and the idea was rather unpopular at first, particularly among groups like farmers who had no interest in the new taxes that would come alongside it. Some of the arguments in favor of it were it being a way to get older individuals out of the work force in order to make room for younger workers. You have to keep in mind it was introduced at a time when unemployment rates were upwards of 20%. And retirement was and is absolutely possible. When people own their land and house and have basic maintenance skills, your overhead costs become extremely low.
Of course there's also no reason these things must be mutually exclusive. I think the ideal is to learn from the past, which proved its sustainability over millennia, and work to improve it. In modern times we've instead set out to completely replace it - or at least build up something from scratch, and what we've created just doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
You are 100% correct.
Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.
Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
I base my multigenerational dream on the documentary “Encanto”