Comment by Loquebantur
3 hours ago
Western societies aren't behaving the way they do around family and care issues because they have a grand plan, but because they don't have one.
In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence.
The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.
Most the young people I meet are quite cynical about the future, affordability, the existence of any pension at all, or the retirement age rising above the life expectancy or something like that. But simply there are a million things to be worried about. Like they are also worried about the climate, about AI and jobs, maybe about other things too.