Failing to Launch

Women are more eager to leave the nest than build one.

Readership: Men
Theme: Female Agency and Accountability
Author’s Note: Coauthored with Jack.
Length: 1,700 words
Reading Time: 9 minutes

The Data

Take a look at these headlines. The earliest were written about 9 years ago.

1. Market Watch: Women leave nest, men stay with parents (2013/8/5).
2. Pew Research Center: Male Millennials more likely to live at home than females (2013/8/14).
3. Pew Research Center: Millennials still lag in forming their own households (2013/10/18)

According to articles (1) and (2), young women were itching to go to college for party fun and/or move to the big city and chase after chads, ahem, “careers”. Meanwhile, young men wouldn’t leave their parent’s nest.

Now compare these reports to these articles from 5-7 years ago.

1. Pew Research Center: Record share of young women are living with their parents, relatives (2015/11/11)
2. Pew Research Center: In the U.S. and abroad, more young adults are living with their parents (2016/5/24)
3. Pew Research Center: Increase in living with parents driven by those ages 25-34, non-college grads (2016/6/8)

And these from 3-5 years ago.

1. Pew Research Center: It’s becoming more common for young adults to live at home – and for longer stretches (2017/5/5)
2. Pew Research Center: A record 64 million Americans live in multigenerational households (2018/4/5)
3. Pew Research Center: A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression (2020/9/4)

After first reading through these headlines, we might assume there is a pattern: Young women leave the nest, while young men stay at home. Then after a period of time, everyone’s living at home with mom and pop. Previous generations used to call this, “failing to launch”. If this were the case, we could assume that the same cohort of women reported in the earlier articles failed to make it big in their careers with their worthless degrees in art history, ballet, communications, gender studies, etc. and then returned home with their nails between their legs.

When we consider the history going back farther (see image on right), we find there is more to the story. This trend of young people living with their parents has been rising since 1960!

Now, part of the trend since 2020 can be attributed to the COVID related lockdowns and closedowns. But if we consider the overall trend since 1960, the low numbers of young people living with parents in early 2020 is on the low end.

Furthermore, when we consider Dalrock’s report on Percentage of US population over 15 who were married by sex and race, 1950–2017 (2018/8/27) [Archive], we see that marital status took a nose dive starting in… you guessed it — 1960!

Notice that for all data points since 1960, the number of white marrieds corresponds within 2% with the number of young people NOT living at home. It could be a spurious corellation, but I think it’s safe to say that the increased numbers of young people living with parents is a direct result of the declining marriage rates. IOW, an increasing number of young women are choosing the college and career route (AKA The Feminist Life Script) instead of getting married; young men have less hope of marrying, and thereby both men and women fail to launch.

That conclusion would also match up with what I am seeing when I look around, even with respect to the data I presented earlier. Let me explain.

The Lifestyle that Explains the Data

I know several women who continued to live at home after they turned 18. They all wanted to move out to get away from family and the church. Most wanted to “live in the city”. (I live in a small state, so the few cities we have are a big deal.) Some of these women actually did so. They got roomates in order to afford luxurious apartments that even single men couldn’t afford. And then to make their financial status even more precarious, they would spend every d@mn dollar they made! There was no life plan, no goal of getting married, no savings, no wisdom. Even the super duper church girls who said they wanted to “have a family” — they bought nice cars and a whole wardrobe stocked full of sequined party dresses and stiletto pumps, they went out to the bars and clubs, and they ate at pricey restaurants every single d@mn day, etc. etc. And then to cap off all this ridiculousness, they fully expect that any relationship they might enter will carry them above their current fake standard of living!

A smaller number of these “single” women are a bit more realistic, but not by much. They are constantly in a relationship (i.e. serial monogamy) and live with their boyfriends all the time. There is less of a need for them to move back into their parents’ place unless things go poorly, as in, “having a baby and the guy leaves” poorly.

The one sad thing they all have in common is the CC.

As you might imagine, it doesn’t last long. Some of these women could easily afford leaving their home and buying another because they were nurses earning a decent salary. But for most of them, at the end of the day, it was a stupid financial decision that cost them a ton of money and indicated they were not forward thinking.

The bottom line is — they didn’t leave home for the money nor even the “education” — they did it for the “life experience” — a polite euphemism for living under Satan’s service (viz. “independently”) and getting their wild oats sowed so as to create stem cells for the PTB.

Here’s another thing I have seen among the people I used to go to church with. Their daughters have been single for many years at this point. They tend to leave the faith and engage in gnostic garbage that appeals to their sensuality/emotions such as astrology. They all adopt dogs as their children and post nonstop about their mental illness of pretending Mr. McScruffy is their son. A few months ago, I saw one of the most repulsive things to date — parents now adopting “grand children” dogs to go along with their demented daughters’ delusions.

Meanwhile, younger men who strike off on their own sleep on mattresses without bed frames and don’t have any furniture in their rooms.  Their idea of fun is getting a gym membership or a Play Station.

A Word of Advice to Young Men

I have been saying that we’ve been in a recession since the fall of 2019, and that the later PPP and stimulus relief were measures intended to disguise the dip and get us through. Well, that ended and we never recovered, and it is getting worse.

I don’t know what to expect in the coming months, but I wouldnt be surprised if the housing market will crash. If you have $$$ saved up, you can get a first time home buyers mortgage and take advantage of this situation.  But with no cash, members of both sexes will have to continue living at home, or move back there (provided there are jobs where mom and dad live).

If you don’t have $$$ saved up, then with the state of the economy right now, I think it would be wise for a young man to remain living in his parents’ home if possible, as long as he is busy doing something with his life and is saving up $$$. However, even if a man wanted to stay at home to raise money, in the West it would be frowned upon and considered shameful. Not that I know of many uber masculine guys who do stay at home, but it’s often because they don’t have a choice.

If you don’t have $$$ and if life/work opportunities are scant near home, then a man would probably be doing himself a favor by leaving home and doing something with himself — attending college, or traveling, or working, or whatever — anything that would lead him closer to finding his purpose in Life. Join the f_ck!ng army if you have to!

So whether you live at home or not, get started in your career, save your money, and get ready to “build your field”, referencing OT wisdom and the process where a man becomes established before the gold-grubbing hoes take notice and come along.

Conclusions

In summary, investing in one’s self takes different paths for either sex. But more and more as time goes on, women are pursuing the male path of establishing education and career, while men are defaulting to the female path of being a home body. Thus, we see that women are leaving home during their fertile years to pursue worldly ambitions (AKA “getting an education” / “life experience“). By chance or by choice, somewhere along the line they hear the siren call of the CC, get gamed, perched, and stuffed, and then they eventually fly back to the home roost with few less feathers to show for it. Meanwhile, men have no such ambitions.

Tying this back into our current discussion of women’s moral agency, women are certainly exercising their will to leave home and shinny around the men’s dormitories and/or the bars, clubs, and streets of the big cities during their peak fertile years. But of course, by doing so they recuse themselves from any expression of moral agency, and this is true no matter whatever “moralized” behaviors they may be doing, or say they are doing on a day-to-day basis (attending church, avoiding the party life, “looking for a husband”, etc.).

Finally, and I hate to say it, but it seems that on the whole, men are not showing much moral agency either, at least in terms of where their life trajectory is concerned. Sitting at home with mom and dad doesn’t sound like much of a plan.

Related

• Cane Caldo: A Trebling Delay (2017/11/6)
• Dalrock: US Marital Status Data Through 2017 (2018/8/24) [Archive]
• Σ Frame: The Feminine Dilemma (2018/10/27)
• Σ Frame: YOLO = FOMO (2021/5/19)
• Σ Frame: She don’t need no man!  Except… (2021/8/30)
• Σ Frame: It’s all about her Ego (2021/11/12)