I found the section at 07.01, "Adulthood and Preparing the Grounds for the 22nd Century", inclusive of the twitter link, especially intriguing.
Adulting101: Education. Move out. Get a job. Pay the bills
Adulting201: Save and invest to become FI
Adulting301: Learn to rely on yourself, not the economy.
Adulting401: Find others pursuing similar goals with other means.
Adulting501: Prepare the ground for the 22nd century.
Obviously, there is a stage of life prior to the commencement of formal Education which is known as Infancy (approximately age 0 to 6.) The most primitive human tribe still in existence, tosses children out to survive on their own at age 3. The most advanced societies currently in existence, such as Scandanavia (or Madison, WI), allow for the Education/Move Out phase to stretch out as far as around age 30. The progression towards Adulthood is not just a matter of an individual making linear climb. It's, obviously, also cyclic as those Adults who are in the role of Grown-Up in the Room hand out fish, pass down fishing poles, instructions for the construction of fishing poles, instructions for creating the instructions for the construction of fishing poles, etc.
I am currently living in an apartment all by myself for the first time in my life at the age of 57. It kind of seems like a wasteful luxury. I recently took part in a conversation about the housing situation in the U.S. and why boarding houses no longer exist. The suggestion was made that I would be good at the job of running a boarding house
My point here being that our society is currently not doing a very good job in the cycle, or providing a wide variety of options, for helping young people with the Move Out step. So, it might be better, more efficient, to move "Move Out" further along in the process?
AnalyticalEngine wrote:Thus, the "rediscovering how your great grandparents did things" aspect of ERE is a lot more powerful than it looks.
Unless your great-grandparent, like one of mine who was born in 1870, was a fairly affluent urban-dwelling salaryman in which case, rather than owning/operating a programmable clothes dryer, he likely had a maid, managed by his homemaker wife, who hung out the laundry to dry for him, as well as a female secretary at work to take care of other routine tasks (and have an affair with- true story- divorced my great-grandmother to marry her.)
With higher specialization, the social and productive life-world of humanity splits into two distinct spheres where the domestic sphere ends up in a more precarious situation, as it increasingly relies on the resources provided from the public sphere. Basically, women end up in need of more outside assistance, and men are the ones to give them that. As such, men gain the upper hand: if a man leaves his wife and children, the family risks starvation, but the man himself, however, does not rely on his wife for his immediate survival. Under the new conditions, one could no longer just gather what one needed from nature, but relied entirely on agricultural products. And since that was provided by the public sphere that men came to dominate, women ended up in an unequal power relation of dependence towards the men. This circumstance, sometimes referred to as "patriarchy", would remain unshaken until the later industrial age. Assisted by modern inventions such as birth control, electrical household appliances, and ready-made food products, along with the circumstance that the men's superior physical strength no longer mattered, women could gradually gain access to the public sphere and thereby retain a more equal status- a process that is yet to reach completion.
- "The World We Create: From God to Market- Tomas Bjorkman
What are some of the modern "inventions" (widely defined) that women in particular need to ensure their continued adult autonomy? Going back to Adulthood 101, I think of one of my recently immigrated female Muslim students who had to stand up to her father in order to be allowed to continue her education beyond the high school level.