More Baby Boomers are living alone. One reason why: ‘gray divorce’
More Baby Boomers are living alone. One reason why: ‘gray divorce’
Rising divorce rates for people over 50 are one reason why an increasing number of older Americans are living alone.
The number of older Americans living alone is on the rise. Nearly 16 million people aged 65 and older in the US lived solo in 2022, three times as many who lived alone in that age group in the 1960s. And as Baby Boomers age, that number is expected to grow even more, raising big questions about the country’s future.
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Every single time the word Boomer is in the title, people rush to comments to make these insults.
The article isn't describing a necessarily bad thing. It's just noting a trend.
There are many reasons behind this shift in our society, including the economic gains women made when they entered the workforce and changing attitudes toward marriage.
Like...this article has absolutely nothing to do with boomers getting their comeuppance. It's just about a shift in societal behavior. People are getting divorced later in life because it's more acceptable to do so now and women can support themselves better on their own than when these people got married.
To be fair, Baby Boomers are actually statistically the reason divorce rates are so high, and also why they've been going down recently.
Not trying to be insulting, just wanting to speak about the statistics I've read, so I'll try to use the full generation title to distinguish.
Speaking about the generation as a general group, Baby Boomers had many marriages and many divorces per capita. Your stereotypical "on my fifth wife" dudes were Baby Boomers and were a disproportionate percentage of marriages that ended in divorce - basically "Divorce Georg".
From a statistics perspective, a large part of the reason divorce rates are going down these days are because as people get older, they tend to settle down and have less energy for those kind of antics basically, and the rate of Baby Boomers marriages and divorces was slowing down in response - with other generations being pretty much stable.
So on that level I'm not particularly surprised that those attitudes towards divorce are still affecting them in old age. It does pose interesting questions for our elder care infrastructure (or lack thereof) though.
This reminded me.
As a kid, I was so used to meeting adults who were on their 2nd or 3rd marriage. It felt super common.
But now im hitting 40 and only a small fraction of my friends are divorced.
Fewer people getting married. A lot of my friends are long-term common-law partners, but never do the actual marriage.
Maybe it’s just the people I know personally, but it seems like very few have gone through multiple marriages. Most seem to just skip the formal marriage thing the second time around, even if those relationships last much longer than the ones that lead to divorce.
Well, the subheadline did say this “raising big questions about the country’s future” which is just bullshit.
The circlejerk of Lemmy is real. It's the same thing that was so visible on Reddit and the irony is that everyone on Lemmy, even the ones participating in the circlejerk are patting these on the back on how better they are than reddit.
Humans doing shitty groupthink things with other humans? I for one am shocked.
This is just what the Internet has become, it's not the specific protocol or hosted site. Years of people crying over how "reddit" behaves as an entity are already starting to complain here but they need to step back and realize it's the nature of the beast.
Acknowledge, adapt and move on.
I spent like an hour typing out a counterpoint to "SFH bad. Cars bad. Owning things bad." Then I just deleted it. Nothing good could possibly come from it. It doesn't give anyone anything to think about, it just labels me a bad guy. Fuck it. Their opinion doesn't hurt me - it'll take decades if not longer to make a shift like that. I don't care where y'all live after I die. So silence it is.
I agree, fellow lemming! Let us follow this path together in solidarity.
It's exhausting, and far worse than Reddit.
