Dearest readers, for better or for worse, we may have one of the largest singledom waves in the coming decades that the world has ever seen that will not be caused by a devastating war or a high mortality rate disease such as the plague. The average marriage age for people has gone up in the West, the divorce rates are high and, well, in USA things are getting, hmm, interesting. A canary in the coal mine for Western civilization, USA currently has a record percentage of households headed by married couples with children under 18. According to a Bloomberg article found here, this is indeed the case and the number is down by 40 percent since 1970. Whether or not you believe that the nuclear family is the cornerstone of a strong, growing and successful state in the past, now and forever, we are setting up for huge numbers of people who will most likely end up living single in their old age in a world where the prices of food and shelter (decent ones at least) may far outstrip any savings that lifelong singles are typically able to accrue. Who will win, and who will lose in this? What may people end up doing once they are old and single decades from now in a brave new world (pun intended)? Let us explore this a little bit, shall we?
Let us look at who will most likely win here first and foremost, in hopes that our first paragraph after introduction may be an optimistic one. In terms of businesses, gaming and metaverse platforms will benefits from the increased number of mature gamers with more money to spend on games and virtual real estate than when they were kids and only had their allowance or part-time income. On the other hand, I feel that amateur investor trading and speculating will never go away or ever go back to sleep again, so any companies collecting income by providing services related to individual investing, speculating and trading will continue to grow. I suspect the same can be said for education companies. I feel people will still believe that learning is a lifelong process and people will be constantly taking courses to learn new things to improve their career or private life situations and will do it even later in life than ever before. Next, any business focusing on offering experience related services such as tourism, long weekend getaways will flourish and then some. Finally, elder support, elder care, elder networking and end of life management will boom as well; no matter what advances we make over the next few decades to help us stay younger longer, old age comes to us all and besides not everyone will want to spend their entire life measuring it out carefully with a teaspoon- many people will choose to live hard regardless of what that will do to their old age and that is simply a fact of life.
Hmm, I am now not so sure that the above paragraph was overly optimistic. Nevertheless, here comes the bad stuff. More people than ever before will become step parents instead of having kids of their own, which is a tough position to be in because our Western culture and laws makes step parents take on many or all parental responsibilities for step children without having many (or any) of the rights that biological parents have. It is a thankless position to be in and the the social impact will likely be more and more generations of kids traumatized by the often difficult dynamic between their parent and their step parent. The next major problem that comes to my mind is that people will come to refuse any long-term commitment as a norm. Here, I am not only referring to a refusal to go on the ultimately worthwhile roller coaster called the long term relationship, but also the refusal to commit to long term loans unless they are made far less burdensome than they are now. We see more and more people who want to own things outright. People are becoming more and more skeptical about mortgages, long car loans and RRSP's. There is much more transparency about how people with generational wealth can often jump into deals that result in a middle class average annual salary worth of profit rather quickly, and they are losing patience- whether they are justified in losing it or not. I think we are going to see an unprecedented rise of focus on short term opportunities by the majority of people. Finally, we will have a socioecomic drain unlike anything else experienced in peacetime due to aging precariat social class. I talked about this in an older article, but basically the precariat is a new-ish definition for a class of people who live a precarious life, working multiple gig jobs with no security, no stability, no benefits, for small wages, never knowing what the future brings. Oh, and if our countries do not eliminate the need for this class of people to exist in the first place, what do you think will happen when they get older and are single? What happens when they are too sick, injured or weak to do uBer, Instacart and other such gigs? The corporations currently thriving off of the precariat are highly unlikely to pick up the tab when they run so many people into the ground and they break socialized elements of our healthcare system unlike ever before. I really do not want to see this happen to people.
Now, while I am sure that you can probably think of many more good and bad things that will come about in the future due to a huge number of ageing singles, allow me to share with you what I think may come of it. As people lose faith in long-term relationships and grow older while being single, something miraculous might happen. Do you remember how amazing friendships were when you were a kid, before you started chasing the opposite- or same- sex? I think that, in pursuit of relationships, often at any cost and without getting to know partners well enough, in a culture where we are bombarded with lots of information and our attention and memory are shot, we forgot the importance of strong, emotionally intimate friendships with people around us. Brotherhood, sisterhood, solidarity, being there for each other, bonding closely in non-romantic ways? This, dearest readers, I feel has been lacking because of how our society has become set up. I think that we have lost that balance between friendships and relationships and that human quality of being close with other people besides family and romantic partners. I really hope that it will be this huge wave of older singles who will connect, form strong bonds of friendship and solidarity and put the younger generations on a course for a better tomorrow.
If not, well then we are most likely screwed. What do you think?
Let us look at who will most likely win here first and foremost, in hopes that our first paragraph after introduction may be an optimistic one. In terms of businesses, gaming and metaverse platforms will benefits from the increased number of mature gamers with more money to spend on games and virtual real estate than when they were kids and only had their allowance or part-time income. On the other hand, I feel that amateur investor trading and speculating will never go away or ever go back to sleep again, so any companies collecting income by providing services related to individual investing, speculating and trading will continue to grow. I suspect the same can be said for education companies. I feel people will still believe that learning is a lifelong process and people will be constantly taking courses to learn new things to improve their career or private life situations and will do it even later in life than ever before. Next, any business focusing on offering experience related services such as tourism, long weekend getaways will flourish and then some. Finally, elder support, elder care, elder networking and end of life management will boom as well; no matter what advances we make over the next few decades to help us stay younger longer, old age comes to us all and besides not everyone will want to spend their entire life measuring it out carefully with a teaspoon- many people will choose to live hard regardless of what that will do to their old age and that is simply a fact of life.
Hmm, I am now not so sure that the above paragraph was overly optimistic. Nevertheless, here comes the bad stuff. More people than ever before will become step parents instead of having kids of their own, which is a tough position to be in because our Western culture and laws makes step parents take on many or all parental responsibilities for step children without having many (or any) of the rights that biological parents have. It is a thankless position to be in and the the social impact will likely be more and more generations of kids traumatized by the often difficult dynamic between their parent and their step parent. The next major problem that comes to my mind is that people will come to refuse any long-term commitment as a norm. Here, I am not only referring to a refusal to go on the ultimately worthwhile roller coaster called the long term relationship, but also the refusal to commit to long term loans unless they are made far less burdensome than they are now. We see more and more people who want to own things outright. People are becoming more and more skeptical about mortgages, long car loans and RRSP's. There is much more transparency about how people with generational wealth can often jump into deals that result in a middle class average annual salary worth of profit rather quickly, and they are losing patience- whether they are justified in losing it or not. I think we are going to see an unprecedented rise of focus on short term opportunities by the majority of people. Finally, we will have a socioecomic drain unlike anything else experienced in peacetime due to aging precariat social class. I talked about this in an older article, but basically the precariat is a new-ish definition for a class of people who live a precarious life, working multiple gig jobs with no security, no stability, no benefits, for small wages, never knowing what the future brings. Oh, and if our countries do not eliminate the need for this class of people to exist in the first place, what do you think will happen when they get older and are single? What happens when they are too sick, injured or weak to do uBer, Instacart and other such gigs? The corporations currently thriving off of the precariat are highly unlikely to pick up the tab when they run so many people into the ground and they break socialized elements of our healthcare system unlike ever before. I really do not want to see this happen to people.
Now, while I am sure that you can probably think of many more good and bad things that will come about in the future due to a huge number of ageing singles, allow me to share with you what I think may come of it. As people lose faith in long-term relationships and grow older while being single, something miraculous might happen. Do you remember how amazing friendships were when you were a kid, before you started chasing the opposite- or same- sex? I think that, in pursuit of relationships, often at any cost and without getting to know partners well enough, in a culture where we are bombarded with lots of information and our attention and memory are shot, we forgot the importance of strong, emotionally intimate friendships with people around us. Brotherhood, sisterhood, solidarity, being there for each other, bonding closely in non-romantic ways? This, dearest readers, I feel has been lacking because of how our society has become set up. I think that we have lost that balance between friendships and relationships and that human quality of being close with other people besides family and romantic partners. I really hope that it will be this huge wave of older singles who will connect, form strong bonds of friendship and solidarity and put the younger generations on a course for a better tomorrow.
If not, well then we are most likely screwed. What do you think?