The Fulfillment Question

What makes adulthood, uh, like, um, worth it?

Ted Bauer
5 min readMar 1, 2024

If you spend some time chronically online in the esoteric corners of the Interwebs, you may have seen Brad Wilcox. He is a professor dude at University of Virginia, where he runs some center for marriage and family. Now he has a book, with the basic premise that people should get married because it’s more indicative of a stable society, and he’s making the rounds promoting it and fighting with anti-marriage people and chatting with Savannah Guthrie and all the stuff you do when you have a book that a few people might care to read. He covers a lot of aspects of marriage and relationships, including various cross-sections of research:

Well, the image associated with this post is from Pew Research and not from Wilcox, although I believe Wilcox has discussed it in some of his media hits. The basic idea is that young people think the path to life fulfillment is a job, not marriage or kids. Moral Panic Time! There’s a few things that need to be unpacked here, though.

Achievement vs. Fulfillment

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Ted Bauer

Mostly write about work, leadership, friendship, masculinity, male infertility, and some other stuff along the way. It's a pleasure to be here.