Tag Archives: society

boomer marriage

Boomer and Bust

boomer marriage

The love generation keeps on splitting up. Ah, capricious age!

For younger generations, who are getting married less often and later in their lives, the divorce rate keeps going down. It is Boomers (those who came of age in the 60s and 70s) who are tipping the statistics toward that notorious 50% mark.

Since these people have lived together a lot longer than I can say, I will reserve judgement. When Gen X hits their 50s they may go through a wave of divorce, too. It’s a side-effect of people living longer.

But. Does it not seem  inevitable that the original “Me Generation” should be choosing freedom over sta(b)le relationships, even late in life when it’s probably a bad move financially?

What’s behind the uptick in Boomer divorce?

Perhaps it’s just a misguided, old-fashioned attempt to avoid the realities of the onset of old age and death. Sorry, can’t really figure out a way to sugar-coat that one.

Read along in Industry this month. Thanks to my parents for playing along, and not accusing me of intergenerational warfare, and to my brother for originally asking me to “Debunk this 50% divorce rate myth!”

Read Boomer and Bust at issuu.com

Do We Touch Enough?

Do We Touch Enough? | Industry New Jersey | September/October 2015 | On the Science and Visceral Thrills of Making Contact

 

From the article, excerptified:

I was reading somewhere that societies in which people touch each other socially are happier than those in which social touching is more shunned. It is an idea that makes intuitive sense, because of my knowledge of the inherent niceness of touching.

University of California at Berkeley researcher Dacher Keltner writes about pioneering 60s study by Sidney Jourard. “[He] studied the conversations of friends in different parts of the world as they sat in a café together. He observed these conversations for the same amount of time in each of the different countries. What did he find? In England, the two friends touched each other zero times. In the United States, in bursts of enthusiasm, we touched each other twice.” Meanwhile, in France, people touched each other 110 times, and in Puerto Rico, friends touched 180 times.

Touching communicates things often more quickly than other means. Dr. Keltner (and Dr. Matthew Hertenstein) conducted a study in which people touching through barriers, trying to convey in one second an emotion. The responder then had to guess at what the person touching was trying to convey: among them anger, fear, happiness, sadness, embarrassment, love, and gratitude. People touched through squeezes, pokes, taps, tickles and strokes. The easiest feeling to convey to someone by touch alone was compassion.

Studies have also found that athletic teams do better when they are socially bonded through touching, like high fives and chest bumps, and that babies grow more slowly when isolated from touch in incubators.

We have a taboo against social touching, although it could be called a pillar of social development.

Since I’ve learned about this I’ve noticed the phenomenon of touching more, and automatically became more touchy with people.

Read on…

Feminist Mystique

A half-century after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique awakened us to feminism’s meaning and implications, a tally of what we’ve accomplished, and just how far we have to go.

This is also about men who dominate conversations, men’s preternatural self-confidence versus women’s (whose is hard-won, due to a sometimes self-negating tendency to keep harmony), and of course, those who circumvent and misdirect our ambitions. Men don’t get this. They can hardly be argued out of knowing what they want.

Read the rest here in this month’s Industry magazine.

 

Balance of Power


In this month’s Industry, in view of women’s still-lower earnings compared to men’s, I wonder whether women should put off marriage to boost their earning power. Then this argument goes slightly off the rails as larger, more topical social concerns begin to trump these individual worries. Maybe the old battle of the sexes is a bit of a distraction, a bit indulgent, in view of the concerns that have provoked the Occupy protests. In an unfair society, we should work together to improve things for us all.
Read it here:
Balance of Power