[flamble]

What I found so frustrating about the comment was how close it was to some sort of insight, while maddeningly not connecting the dots.

He has some vague sense that his unhappiness is related to "workaholism", but is so fixated on gender politics that he twists it to revolve around that. He imagines that women have a "choice of careers, choice of being a mother while the husband provides", apparently oblivious to the economic reality that single-income families are an impossibility for the majority of people, not because of feminism, but because of market forces.

You can see the alienation and the sense of rage and despair engendered by social atomization and hustle worship, only to be channeled not against any of the root causes, but some bogeyman like feminism which, precisely because of the aforementioned dislocation, hits closer to home emotionally.

And the worst of it is hearing echoes of my previous self in the words (projected or not), but being aware of the irony that it's only people who ARE close to you who have a chance of helping you out of that kind of morass.

[wonderwonder]

I don't know OP, but a lot of people just spent a long time all alone with no outside communication except the internet. Lots of them discovered that as soon as in person work was removed that they really had no real friends. That can be quite a terrible discovery finding out you are really all alone. Isolation does strange things to the mind. That coupled with whatever echo chambers people happened to wonder into online probably had a dramatic effect on hundreds of thousands of people coming out of this thing. May take years for some to recover and many will probably never return to the same person they were.

[jansan]

Just the other day I read a comment from a single mother with three children who just sent her children back to school after 15 months of home schooling. Her comment indicated that her views on society did not improve much during the pandemic, either, no workaholism required.

Society has very openly displayed its disrespect for certain groups of people during the pandemic, he clearly has a point there.

[exporectomy]

Feminism was just one of the several things he said.

There are plenty of zero-income families - single mothers. So single-income families are surely even more possible. Usually only women have this choice. Men can't choose family over career.

[schrijver]

How does that work? You get money just for being a mother?

At least the way it works in the countries I’ve lived in is that if you’re on the dole it doesn’t matter if you’re a mother (or a father for that matter)—you still have the obligation to find a job.

And as a man you can totally chose family over career, in the same way that women do. There’s a social stigma against it, of course. And it can be economically difficult—but that’s the case for women as well.

Of course, the pressure for a man to act as a provider and to focus on his career is very real. I think laurent92 isn’t wrong about the pressures men face. It’s weird though to blame that on feminism. I think feminism already helped chip away at the pressure. A stay-at-home dad should be acceptable to a feminist, more so than to someone who never gave pause to these questions. But in the end, it’s not feminism’s job to take care of men’s mental health, that’s really something that requires a movement of its own.

[bluejekyll]

> Men can't choose family over career.

I’m not sure why you think this. I have quite a few friends and families in my circle where the women are the primary breadwinners of the family. Let alone the number of two-mother and two-father households. In almost all cases dual-incomes are the norm.

When you say, “men can’t choose family”, who’s preventing that?