QC

The attention that's being competed over could be redirected towards people trying to figure out if they're genuinely compatible enough to commit to each other. There's still some competition but this game is much more cooperative.

Unfortunately, compatibility testing for long-term relationships requires a very different kind of skill, which perhaps many people have never learned. Under atomization we've lost the habit of relating to each other on the time scale of years.

Were we ever good at relating to each other over the timescale of years, or were we just overwhelmingly more likely to collocate around the same cluster of people over the timescale of years in the past?

Maybe both? I think mostly people didn't used to have a choice, and knew that. You relate to people differently if you're only ever gonna know the same 100 people or w/e, the stakes are different if you can't meaningfully exit.

Yeah - I think right now it's an uphill battle (that we didn't used to have to fight) to *form* committed family-type units. But I have no clue if we're better or worse at sustaining them. Families in the past might've had plenty of dysfunction, even if they would bring you soup.

Pessimistic story is we used to sustain commitments by just taking tons of damage, getting super traumatized and never healing, etc. (e.g. a wife never divorces her husband but just keeps sustaining abuse). You get a kind of stability but at the expense of your soul :/

Slightly more optimistic story is extended families / tribes used to have more checks and balances, e.g. husband abusing wife gets caught by grandparents. This would imply the most abusive period was when people had nuclear families but divorce was still hard / stigmatized.

RE damage - gosh yes, good to see this verbalized. This has been in the back of my mind a lot lately (e.g. recently I heard yet another friend talk about getting out of a marriage that they always knew didn't work for them) as I think about making commitments of my own: