Having basically had 2 dads including a step-dad, commenting on single mother households may sound like it’s “out of my jurisdiction”.
“I do what I want”
People who live their lives angry at the father they never had are falling prey to a type of vice as well. I was considering the qualities of supervised vs unsupervised learning as discussed by the AI scientist Yann Lacun in his conversation with Lex Friedman. In the study of logic and intelligence, supervised learning is questionable as a practice. Supervision may actually be (for humans) forcing discipline on yourself, or learning by emulating the adult. We yearn to accomplish our economic and social dreams by jumping on the conveyor belt that forces us into self learning, even if while on it we drag our feet and become contentious with the machine (university, job, DAD).
You might have had a father, but even then you would need him to work for you- or have a personality fine-tuned for the economic and social elite he is to be delivering you to, so you could learn by example; providing products and services to be delivered both upon request and at the specified dates according to custom. A happy family in perfect equilibrium, furnishing warm feelings of harmony and tranquility that would have created a utopic dream world in which you could have lived smiling and carefree for your entire adult life.
What is a “father” anyways? It’s ideally a relationship where a benevolent dictator bestows knowledge and discipline upon a respectful inferior. There are many uncertain variables that come along with the family unit, and a childhood rife with fights and intrigue would create easily avoidable stress. Mention should be made of the dwindling authority of the father in the household in favor of little victim babies encouraged to "snitch" on their parents.
A public gathering in LA is a lot different than a public gathering in a small community where everyone knows each other. Therefore, the sense of community in a more randomized and geographically local gathering is inversely proportional to the size of the community.
People are eager to chain themselves to a treadmill that will guarantee them a more propitious life, in retrospect they wouldn’t mind having given up their summers in favor of shadowing a respected and skilled business-man, craftsman, or scientist in his daily work. Given up those endless hours of video games and peer to peer socializing in favor of building credentials on a more professional plane. Metaphorically, quit Facebook and lived more of their lives on LinkedIn.
Think of the community spirit on Halloween: couldn’t we just have more Halloween type holidays, that are basically like neighborhood meet and greets? That way people could be exposed to each other on a regular basis which would increase the likelihood of interconnectedness and collaborations for dinners, outings, babysitting, etc. It would help to create realistic expectations of professional demeanor that aren't completely controlled by flashy corporate trends.
You could easily study these dynamics using sprawling data sets that map which social combinations provide the most value for certain parameters. I’ve always thought that encouraging children to contribute to adult conversations is an excellent avenue for faster maturation, because they make so many mistakes which can be easily corrected. You can't learn to play chess by being told that every move you make is the right one, but then again you can't improve systems by being disallowed from questioning their structures. There are undoubtedly subconscious “psy-ops” that children deploy in order to avoid the difficulty of what Daniel Kahneman calls “systems 2 thinking”- I'm sure a lot of dogs, for example, pretend they don't know what the owner is saying because they don't want to "obey".
If people yearn to be chained to the treadmill, there are many opportunities out there which form familial nets and disciplinary instruction, providing structure for a sometimes shapeless and limited foundation. Many adolescents would curse their would-be fathers then promptly rebel against every authority in school to the point that they impede others from learning- showing a lack of respect for the treadmill because apparently they weren’t chained tightly enough to it. Learning outcomes are incredibly unequal in schools yet the government is supposed to be on top of that, whatever happened to the social contract that people give up their kids to the government for 8 hours a day and the government delivers well adjusted and well behaved young adults? They should be especially attentive to these communities which are rife with single mother households, poverty, gang violence, and drug addiction.
In military boot camp you will find mostly obedient privates happy to be pushed for 16 hours per day. And the failures oftentimes lack respect for authority and make infractions that get them kicked out- when even harsher discipline and “staying in” would have been a better option.
But we could be fathered a hundred times over, crammed with love and affection, and riddled with birthday and Christmas presents- at the end of the day you may find yourself schlepped off onto a factory floor mopping barnacles off the rusted cavities off a sputtering industrial machine, while pantsuits clank upon the metal walkway above, trailing perfume and the echo's of legalistic jargon before raining discarded chicken wing bones and candy bar wrappers down upon you while cackling maniacally before disappearing into the vaunted offices which you may never hope to reach..