The article points this out? It describes how this person was outside of the mainstream of a particular time & place, which was noted for being overly restrictive.

A bunch of those philosophers and others were probably gay (or at least some kind of not straight) IMO. I get that sense from Wittgensteins letters especially.

I’m not saying that they were wearing eye shadow while writing or anything like that, in fact I think that the burden of being different weighed on them very heavily, hence the philosophy.

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Do you think your past has perhaps effected your ability to have a solid relationship? I feel like your post is like someone saying: "I'm never playing basketball again. I have to get new shoes. I have to drive somewhere. I played on a team once and my teammates were assholes. I get tired and sweaty afterwards. I have a lot more time if I don't play basketball". Perhaps basketball could be fun with the right people. I'm not trying to convince you you need a relationship to be happy, but there is a lack of awareness it seems when you say you ar the product of multiple broken relationships and you had a broken relationship of your own and don't connect the dots. I would never want to put my child through what you describe either. There are other options then 3 different step-fathers.

2 years out? Sounds entirely healthy.

But consider that you model healthy relationships for your son more than anyone else, and "giving up women for my son's benefit" is a strong signal.

My parents are divorced as well. It's definitely affected my willingness to enter into long-term relationships.

Finding women to have sex with is fairly easy, finding women who are willing to be equal partners is very hard.

I don’t know how this gets fixed. Women don’t want to self reflect and men don’t want to lower their standards for commitment.

It sounds like you’ve had your fun in the early years, married a woman you loved for over a decade, have healthy children, wealth and top of it of, you had an amicable divorce, something that is extremely rare nowadays.

Unfortunately, your experience does not match the reality of many men these days, divorce is often catastrophic for them, heck even dating is impossible now. I hope you recognize and appreciate your luck and previlage.

It sounds like you’re at peace, I’m genuinely happy for you and I hope the status quo remains.

The year and a half I have spent single as an adult was the worst time of my adult life. I don’t see the point of living unless I have a wife who needs me.

My first marriage was a training experience that lasted five years and ended peaceably. I learned what not to do. My second has lasted 34 years, with a six month separation 15 years ago that clarified for both of us that life is intolerable without each other.

Respect is the blood and vitality of a marriage. Respect is an aphrodisiac and all-purpose cure. Respect inspires service.

We were married to the same person, except I did everything, including her laundry, and the divorce was very much not amicable.

That said: my ex-wife is a narcissistic and introverted human who does not appropriately interact with any other human, including her children; she views relationships as transactional (i.e., what’s in it for her).

While I am beyond damaged from my 25 year relationship with her and all of the insanely hurtful things she did to my emotional and mental well-being as well as my financial stability being she gets an absurd amount of alimony and all of the money she stole from the family over the years, particularly in preparation for divorce, my children need to see what a healthy relationship looks like and by focusing on them as the central point of my being, they may have that opportunity should I find someone else.

You are looking at it from a child and self-protectionist point of view and I’m looking at it from a healing one. They both have merit, but I just wanted to point out that living without a partner isn’t necessarily the only option post-divorce.

What does this have to do with the article? Do you think your experience is representative?

The bits where you talk about doing everything for her sound like you were in service rather than in relationship. I wouldn't want to sign up for servitude again either.

Yet, those sorts of behaviors could easily displace the development of relationship. Part of my being in relationship is also being supportive and doing the work but keeping it balanced has us discussing priorities and leaves us thinking, emoting, and creating together. The question isn't whether I can make a partners life good (I can) but whether they really want to know and partner with me. You may want something else though. Good luck with navigating life, it's tricky, complicated, and nuanced. I have no idea the right path but it stays worth trying to find better paths.

“I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow.”

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The dropping birth rate is neutral, a thing that is happening like the orbit of the Earth, or a rain storm. Every population’s growth curve levels out, and so will ours. Why? Who knows, and it’s an interesting topic to investigate. But understanding something interesting doesn’t mean that we can change it.

Society will adapt. There are positives to work from. For example the horizon for every exhaustible consumable recedes as population growth slows.

You haven't outlined why this is a problem? Population growth overshot with expanding abundance and developed countries are now normalizing to a more sustainable level.

Financialization of society doesn't account for externalities.

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Now you have also identified the driving force behind every expansionist attitude in history.

Rome, British Empire, America (and many others besides) all usurped by an ideal that they are and must be the only true light of life and civilization and no goodness or success can be had outside of their rampantly materialistic perspectives.

It hasn’t just been decades, my friend. It’s the perpetual war with an insidious evil that is captured in the aphorism: all that glitters isn’t gold.

I’d say it applies in a lot of other career paths too. Creating something of quality requires holistic life experience. Otherwise it leads to shallow self-absorbed outcomes. Maybe that’s why enshitification is all the rage nowadays, not just pure shortsighted fast-profit-asap greed.

It's accurate, but lacking context.

The dominant modes of epistemology tend to privilege some facts over others. Facts that can be fit into simple, constrained models are superior to those that require complex models.

You can see this in the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences. The hard sciences are considered "better", and the people who practice them considered smarter. Less-hard sciences like biology are relegated to "stamp-collecting", and sciences that study human behavior are disputed as sciences at all.

In such epistemologies, vast numbers of facts about the universe go from "hard to model" to "not important" to "nonexistent". You lack the ability to be rigorous about them, but that doesn't make them non-facts, just a limitation of how we practice epistemology.

Noticing this is not fundamentally feminist, and there are lots of other philosophers taking different approaches. Compare Kuhn and Feyerabend's work on theory-ladenness: everything we can possibly know about the world is limited by how we conceive the world to take measurements. Things that we don't know how to measure simply don't exist -- more, we don't even think about them long enough to dismiss them. The things we choose to measure are social constructs, not facts of the universe.

Feminist epistemologists note the way this kind of thinking affects marginalized groups of people. Things that matter to them are dismissed as non-facts, and the social construction of facts shuts the entire question out of existing.

This isn't to say that it's easy. The entire point is that we've been engaging in an epistemology of things that are easy. They're asking us to reconsider the assumptions, and that's going to appear "less rigorous" because "rigor" has been defined to exclude things that are hard.

Also might be worth noting the idea does not originate in the feminist school of philosophy

Yet feminists seem to be happy with „affirmative action“ which has very similar logic.

> was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking.

"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" — Wilfrid Sellars, an American philosopher in the 20th century.

Cutting ties with my family and letting in only people I want in my life was the best mental health decision I ever did (forced by events, I don't get any bravery points)

Of course plenty of caveats apply, but mostly I have sufficiently good social skills, no handicaps and I am able to provide for myself or : I don't need a the family safety net.

I really like the friend relationships I maintain now and I am also happy that what is asked of me is only basic human decency (a standard that is curiously applied to strangers but not always to relatives and parters...).

Also I feel able to be much more generous towards others since little is expected of me. Thus I try to model intimate relationships on the basis of friendship as much as my partner emotional needs and cultural norms allow for. Intimate and beautiful relationships are possible outside of marriage. I am not looking forward gettging married nor starting a family. Getting to spend time by myself is amazing too.

My interpretation was that adolescent refers to the maturity with respect to life experiences.

The set of life experiences that a bachelor can experience is smaller than the set of life experiences that a married man with children can experience.

I don't think this is a particularly offensive thing to say, but instead, given that she's from a group whose voice has been historically subdued, I think it's a witty reparatee to refer to that philosophy as "adolescent". I don't think she's calling bachelors adolescent, but for the word of a bachelor with most likely more limited life experience, I do think it's fair to call out that it perhaps isn't the most rounded point of view.

Change continent. It was sad the day I left, but one continent between me and my family was actually healthy.

Once you are out of the dating game you may get married and start a family. That also has a mental overhead, and it can be hard to keep your kids schedules aligned with demands / timelines from work in tech.

I think you learn to bear the load more gracefullly as you age and mature. It also puts life more into perspective.

My main point is you learn to handle it, which is actually a good form of personal growth.

Dating and relationships add to the mental overhead, but navigating a tough marriage and eventually divorce add a whole layer of mental overhead that I can’t even describe. It’s a miracle people manage to stay employed after going through it.

too absorbed in work making money for a corporate overlord to try to breed.

I hope you're working at a startup that you own, otherwise you're just helping fund some executive's Disney vacation with his four kids, while you end up an evolutionary dead-end.

but maybe you'll write something that everyone will use for a couple years, then replace, right?

Pretty much feels like a second job to me and currently in the stage of advancing in my career and learning Rust on the side and more devops things and then the actual job as a Java SWE I already do like a 150%/60+ hour week, I can not have a 250% load.

Staying single is only one of the ways to get out of the dating market.

Lol, you and George Costanza: https://youtu.be/AariEduyb7s?t=56

Several of those philosophers had kids too. Hegel had 3, for example.

Heidegger was with Hannah Arendt for a while, and had several kids from previous relationships. Dude had a few affairs, and one of his kids probably wasn't his.

Machiavelli had like 7 children!

Sounds like "people who are not physically similar to me are p-zombies relative to me". By the same rule even our past selves are p-zombies relative to present selves, they could not possibly imagine our feelings as they lack the experience between then and now.

But if you want your philosophy to encompass most people's lives, it mustshould approach the 'standard model' of family-with-kids, or it's impractical and/or inapplicable.

In order for a philosophy to be completely applicable to human life, one has to have lived the experience, not just viewed it from afar.

And, as with all comprehensive philosophies, compassion must be at its root, or it's irrelevant nonsense constrained solely to the physical world, not the human world.

That’s ridiculous though. It wasn’t “considered impossible” because we hadn’t engineered a solution yet. It was “considered impossible” because of men’s historic tendanxy to view women as incapable.

That’s unfortunate. Philosophy changed my life in an indescribably positive way. I don’t agree with or get value from all philosophy or philosophers, but it’s essentially a foundation of my life now. If I had a think of a familiar parallel, it’s not unlike religion to me. I study it, write about it, practice it, think about it often, and so on.

Something I found helpful was finding schools of thought which emphasized putting the thinking to work as actions in the real world. Some philosophers argue that philosophy is useless or harmful if it isn’t manifested in action, and I agree with that. Reading a lot of philosophy without implementing change in your life isn’t a good use of time. It sounds like you might have encountered the kind of people who do that.

Philosophy should enrich your life and even change you in ways you didn’t think were possible. It should open your mind and teach you about yourself, people, and society.

The worst kind of philosophy and philosophers are those which bring ego and overconfidence to the practice. But there’s so much out there which isn’t like that, and so many people who aren’t as well.

How, where and when in life did you study philosophy? Because that seems like a horrid relationship to a whole field of study.

Next up is the parade of them telling you that the ones you encountered weren't real philosophers and your experiences are mistaken.