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What Made “Family Life” Harder To Establish?

How we’re getting tripped up.

Ted Bauer
4 min readFeb 12, 2025

I think most people know the big culprits, and maybe they shift around the big culprits based on their specific ideology and where they are at in life, but we can still run through a couple of them right now.

I admittedly think about this stuff more than I should, but this particular idea/post/roundup came to me when I was watching this reaction video:

The first clip in that video is an older guy on TikTok (off-brand!) talking about the Demise of the nuclear family, which is a fun thing to poke the bear on and yes, the nuclear family has flaws for sure, but in reality it’s still the default operating mode of most human beings.

That older guy makes a point about men becoming focused on career to the point that family became a “nuisance,” which I somewhat agree with. I see it a little bit more as work provides air cover for men to claim they care about family, but avoid family when it’s convenient. I do think that an over-focus on “nuclear” family probably reduced some of the…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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