The Slow Life

Ugh. While I have long been an advocate for not doing anything useful, this does seem a sad picture of late middle age...

The missing men are also more likely to live alone. Nearly 60 percent are divorced, separated, widowed or never married, up from 50 percent a decade earlier, the Census Bureau reports. Sometimes women who are working throw out men who are not, says Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In any case, without a household to support, there is less pressure to work, and for men who fall behind on support payments, an incentive exists to work off the books — hiding employment — so that wages cannot be garnisheed.

"What happens to a lot of guys who become unmoored from family life, they become unmoored from everything," Ms. Edin said. "They are just living without attachments and by the time they are 40 or 50 years old, the things that kept these men from falling away — family and community life — are gone."

But, then, perhaps this is one of the few vestiges of Protestant work ethic that I've yet to purge; the idea that working, just to work, is better than hanging out at home and doing something that you want to do.

I think that the specter of social disconnect bothers me the most...

... the young Klein has more substantive commentary.