We've all been there, you're working a job you hate and it seems like everyone around you is having the time of their life. Now for most, you manage to suck it up and focus on things like starting a family, buying a house or for lack of a better term "settling down". Focus: My question to the board is what ideas did you almost act on before you made that decision to settle down? Did you almost take a couple months to bike across the country or spend a year planting trees in the interior of BC? Alternatively, some of you probably did take that road and I and hopefully others will get a kick out of hearing about your experiences.
What does it even mean to "settle down" anymore? I mean I bought my first house in 2008 and am pretty settled about a career, but I'm unmarried and have no kids, so I don't really feel like I've "settled down". I honestly feel like the concept of settling down is something that may have been relevent in the past but doesn't have much meaning in today's world.
I have a wife, house and kid and haven't settled down. Life doesn't end when you do these things, and people that don't know this need to stop treating it like it's suicide. I still get drunk, go on awesome party vacations, smoke pot, and all the other good shit I did when I was single without kids. There's just a time and place for it now. Sure, every guy has a a bachelor party or something (I know I did) but things haven't really changed too much except for what I've already mentioned. It's just different strokes for different folks.
Is this something people decide? Like, they set a firm date for it? I figure I'll either grow out of my self-serving habits and motivations or I won't. If I don't, it seems to me like a long-term relationship with a child and a mortgage is the last thing I should be involved with. I'd be spending the rest of my life behaving a certain way out of obligation, not because it's how I want to live. Isn't that why men have mid-life crises, buy motorcycles and leave their wives? They live with the resentment and lack of personal fulfillment for as long as they can before they burst. Then everyone's screwed because some idiot wanted to feel like an 'adult' before he was ready to accept the consequences of his choices. I hate this, "If you don't have it figured out by Age [X], you'd better get your shit together" nonsense. The whole thing sounds like a recipe for bitterness and regret. Fuck that.
That's how I feel. I don't see myself getting married or having kids ever, but what if one day I do? I don't want to look back on my single days and say "I wish...". My question is: Are parents pushing their 20 something year old kids to graduate, start a career, get married, buy house, have kids, rinse and repeat? Is that why we see so many divorces and mid-life crises?
I bought my first house, by myself, at 26. Got together with my GF a few years later. By the time we met we had done all the crazy shit you are "supposed" to do in your 20's, travel, drink your face off, party, get educated, get decent jobs, etc. We decided a few years later to start having kids and thought we would have one last hurrah before starting a family, so we planned a 3 week trip to Greece. We traveled through Greece together for 2 weeks then met up with friends in Santorini for the last week. It was pretty fun, but it would have been more fun if I hadn't gotten pregnant right before we left and felt sick the entire 3 weeks. I guess you could say after that we "settled down." But, we have so many plans and ideas for the future that I don't feel like we are bored or stuck or even really, settled, we are just comfortable with were we are currently in this stage in our lives and know that we have lots of stuff planned for the future that we are looking forward to.
It's a good point, and it very well could be. Too many poeple nowadays rush things, like it's a pre-req for life or something. I didn't get married until 29 and it was simply a smart thing to do. Though nothing really feels different being married, its still a major decision and shouldn't be spur-of-the-moment. Life isn't Darma & Greg. In my world, there's no such thing as love at first sight or soul mates. Nobody is perfect for each other. It's not just parents pushing, though. It's couples pushing EACH OTHER. Materalism, keeping up with the Joneses and drive is what controls so many young adults today. There's no rush to having kids or getting married. I'm fine with people over 40 having kids, it's their decision. It's anybody's own decision. What I'm NOT fine with are idiots like those fucking Duggar assholes who have 30 kids, obviously cannot give ANY of them the proper parental guidance or support because there are too many of them, and generally belong in prison. If their kids pulled a Menendez on them, I would not bat an eyelash.
I see it as a stage of life that not all of us necessarily go through at a specific point, or at all for some. Sure, I got married at 25, bought a condo, then a house, then we started having kids. Outwardly, these were all the indications of "settling down." But for me, on some level, it scared the crap out of me and I became emotionally detatched and sought solace and escape in booze and drugs. I may have settled down as defined by societal norms, but I didn't really grow up. That's the nature of the disease of alcoholism. It took me hitting my bottom after 20 years to finally start to grow again and begin moving through the maturing stages again. I'm not bitter about it, though. Like "City Slickers," I'm fortunate in that I got a "do-over" at 45. My life has taken on a new meaning, moved in a completely different direction, and I'm the happiest I've ever been. And most importantly, I am extremely grateful that my wife and kids stuck by me through it all. Others who have gone through similar situations haven't been as fortunate.
Whether its external pressure to follow that kind of path or the need to meet internal expectations, it doesn't really matter. The fact is that those kids are compelled to go that route despite obvious doubts and mounting evidence that formulating any sort of reliable 'life plan' right now is folly. I don't mean to offend anyone here, but when 37% of people in the U.S. aged 18-29 are unemployed, and only 41% of those who are working work full time, I think you'd have to be out of your mind to consider 1) having a child 2) taking on a mortgage 3) any other major choice whose success hinges on long-term, stable employment in a time where the only certain thing is that everything is uncertain. If it's what you want, and you're willing to fight for it, godspeed. I mean that. If you can take on that kind of responsibility in the face of the unbelievable shit we've seen and are probably going to see, you're a stronger person than I. But if you're going down that road because you don't have a more creative solution to the lack of direction in your life, you deserve what you get. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
"Settling down" is a pretty broad definition, but to me it means focusing on others before yourself. After settling down, you make a lot more sacrifices for your family. Granted I still do stupid shit, but it's less frequent, and I prefer it that way. At one point you just say "I'm too old for this shit". Probably just a combination new priorities and maturity.
Honestly, it depends. My impression is that immigrant/minority parents do it to a much greater extent than white parents, or those who aren't immigrants. That said, my grandparents were children of immigrants and I sincerely doubt they were pressured to settle down, get married and pump out grand-kids early (they got married in their mid/late twenties and had kids a few years later, which is spectacularly late compared to their parents - they also met on a trip through Europe by mutual friends). My parents haven't pressured me or my siblings to do anything specific beyond the general do-goodery of going to college and having a career and doing something useful with your life. And it's been made explicit my mom's in no rush at all to be a grandmother, not that it made a difference. A good number of people I know whose parents are immigrants / are immigrants themselves, though, are getting constant pressure, and it manifests in different ways. A former roommate of mine got married at the age of 19; he was Russian, and said that in his culture there's a lot of pressure towards getting married young and against pre-marital sex. He's said he's already looking forward to starting a family. Some are being told they should go to med school; others simply take it upon themselves to feel that way. They are also obsessed with getting a husband by the age of 25, having kids by a certain time, etc., but in the short term they don't have boyfriends and consider the common means by which young 20-something people have relationships immoral. So there you go. I guess North American attitudes are largely moving towards delaying marriage and child-bearing in favour of spending time taking advantage of being young. I'll let you know in 20 years if the people who have this attitude do end up dissatisfied in mid-life wishing they hadn't been so obsessed with marriage and kids when they were young (if they're able to nail down a husband at all), or if they're too stultified into thinking outside their own bubble. My guess is that the dissatisfaction won't be explicitly because of the marriage and kids, but because of lives spent putting value on things that are inherently without value; their youth was spent leapfrogging from good grades in high school to a good undergrad to professional school to starting what looks like a nice career, only to discover that once those sources of validation go away, there's really nothing meaningful. Philalawyer said it more succinctly - you can slave away in law school for 3 years, but that's a far cry from slogging it out through a 40+ year career with no identifiable goal keeping you motivated. As for me, I'm more settled down than most people my age. I have a career and am putting into a pension, for Christ's sake, to say nothing of the girl I've been dating for a suspiciously long time (and it scares me a little bit to think I might be one of those losers who dated the same girl all through college; but the current social scene means I'm not missing out on much, frankly). I don't regard any of this as settling down, though. I have a vague goal of moving out to B.C. and working locums part time and making enough money that I can afford to ski through most of the year. Don't know when or if that'll happen, but I think "settling down" for me will be something along the lines of not choosing what's behind the curtain, and sticking to a current lifestyle instead of going after something that could be better.
I was one of those late bloomers. I never had any money to travel or do anything that you'd typically do before settling down when I was in my 20's. I married at 27, bought a house at 28. When I think "settled down" I think the proverbial married with 2.5 kids. Seeing as I have no plans to procreate and I've still got some life left in me, I'm going to live it to the fullest. Problem is, Mr. Pink wants to be practical...case in point, I wanted to take our tax refund money and finally go to Hawaii, especially since we live in the PacNW. Wintertime in Seattle is gloomy, cold and just all around blah, so a tropical vacation would be just what we needed to break out of our winter funks. He said we needed to save the money. I said we only live once and that we'd survive without the cash in savings. Welllll...the cash went into savings. I think the man's settled down.
I almost bought a few hundred cartons of eggs from a guy I probably might have met at the convention I thought about holding for people who give away industrial sized food shipments to casual acquaintances for free. Shame I decided not to. I was gonna fill a kiddie pool on a scorching Death Valley afternoon and turn myself into the biggest human slice of french toast ever conceived. My theoretical wife and kids would have killed me though.
I call horseshit. The two kids I know whose parents did this to them were white Christians who have been here for generations. In both cases it was "Congratulations, you're 18 now! Now you either get the fuck out or start paying rent, and don't even think about quitting school. You have to pay for your own food, your own gas, your own clothes...." Yeah, their parents turned into their roommates. Fuck that noise.
You, sir, have consistent reading comprehension problems. Much greater extent /= to the exclusion of. A friend of a friend got disowned and kicked out of the house by her parents because she went into a program she really wanted to do at this city's "second university" instead of going into the pre-med track at the bigger one. Had she gone with the plan her parents wanted her to do, she would have been fine. Chinese, of course.
I think people on this thread are viewing "settling down" as binary: you either have done it or you have not. And, once you HAVE done it, you can never go back. I busted my ass getting two degrees and working almost full time, then switching to working full-time and part time. I quit it all and was unemployed for two years where I traveled all over the world, volunteered, almost died, lost relatives while I was out of the country and in general had a very a-typical life for other people my age. When it came time to come back to the 'real' world, I did so gladly. I adopted two dogs (animals anchor you almost as much as kids do), bought a house and was finally able to unpack after three years of having my stuff scattered across various storage facilities. You have no idea how nice it is to actually have a straightforward answer to the question, "What is your address?" without having to go through an complicated explanation that involves three different provinces. Now, is it permanent? I don't know. I'm not married; I have no children. Could I see myself getting wild again, selling everything and traveling to different parts of the world? Perhaps. It's important to remember that in life nothing is permanent except death.
I moved there (here). With a dufflebag full of clothes, 1,400 dollars roughly, and a guitar (no-hippie). But I can't really comment on this thread, I'm still young, have never came anywhere close to settling down. Rather, it was just that I saw this future of me living in shitty Northeastern Ohio, 15 minutes from where I had grown up, and felt revolted. To me that felt like settling down. So I bolted.
This thread reminds me of one of my favorite Bill Bryson quotes from The Lost Continent. "When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever." Focus: I've attended/played in music festivals since I was fifteen. My sophomore summer in college I had a chance to perform at a music festival in the Netherlands, but took a banking internship instead. My friends came back with a hundred stories while I stared into excel cells all summer until my eyes bled. Biggest mistake I ever made.