"But what about all my Facebook friends? If I talk to real live people, I may like it and then I'll be ignoring my Facebook friends"

(Yes, sarcasm, I don't Facebook or Twitter)

Part of the problem with being a male (especially white, middle aged) in todays society is we're the reason for all the problems, we are automatically assumed to be a pedophile so mothers snatch their children away if we so much as breathe.

Yes, that is a little exaggeration, but not by much. Me, I've always had a great time getting little kids to laugh or behave in the grocery store. No touching or getting close, just make a face or stick out your tongue. Moms always give me the "hmm what are you trying to do with my child" but then smile, dads always start getting in on the fun.

There is a difference between fun and happiness. Fun offers a short term boost. Buying that car or playing those games offer a short term reward. Happiness is a long term effect. Helping out at a hospital and knowing you made a difference or helping a child mature and become a responsible adult can lead to long term happiness. And an interesting wrinkle is that fun things rarely lead to happiness. In fact most of the things that are rewarding in the long term are completely unrewarding in the short term.

I've always been fascinated how tribal ceremonies (i.e., Navajo sings) could exert such a powerful influence on people and help restore mental balance. The civilizational ties that people feel would have had to be very strong for such solutions to work.

Even Western religions exerted a powerful influence on the faithful. The average Catholic in the Middle Ages believed in the ceremonies of the religion and strove to keep himself right with his God. When was not right with his God, he felt stress and psychological pressure.

With the fracturing of belief systems in general and the advent of modern Western society, the sense of community has been destroyed. Freud theorized about how being part of a civilization exerts pressure on normal human instincts and drives in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Tamim Ansary describes how Muslims from his native Afghanistan look upon Western people exercising their freedom of movement in his book, Destiny Disrupted (recommended). Tribal societies, like the Afghans, cannot understand why a young man would move 3,000 miles from his family to live and work in another city with no friends or family nearby. Or why Grandma is left in a nursing home by herself with no family members there to help her.

We in the West, acculturated to individualism, sometimes fail to understand the pull tribalism has on those raised in tribal societies. We don't get how being "right" with community can be so important that even one's mental health is affected by it.

If they don't blame "men" then who is at fault for their situation? Can't be them? They are "special" or "victims" PREYED upon by MEN.

So not going to happen. Too much money at stake to give them the power to actually be individuals in charge of their own AGENCY.

Of the ridiculous success stories I can relate from observing co-workers over ~25 years, I can show two things about their families: at least one set of grandparents are involved (there's your community), and there is a near-total absence of drugs.

Yes, I work in a for-cause and random drug-screened environment, but notice: not only do extended family members have a role in continuing family traditions, the children of such families do not learn to lie to each other constantly to protect drug use. There is no secret to protect from some family members, visitors and neighbors, the police or the fire department. Family members are not kept apart by squabbling over somebody's habit/addiction. When they stick together, it's amazing what costs disappear.

Imagine the household which can throw a Super Bowl party and not worry about inviting Uncle Bob from down at the precinct - because he won't have to look the other way for anything.

But for some, getting high is more important than the clear conscience; out here, you hear about the failures pretty quickly.

But Rad, you are "blaming the victim", showing your "privilege" (pointing out how proper mores promote healthy relationships), spewing "racist" hate speech (pointing out how drug use common to many minority single parent homes hurt kids), and putting down WIMMEN that do not insist on their partners help raise their kids.

Oh the shame, the shame.

Hum. Drug use flourishes in places where the social, community, and familial fabric is thin, or gone all together.

So - Cause? Or result?

See 'ratpark'

This has been around in the form you've described it for more than 20 years. It's called co-housing.

Why can't it be both Railmeat?

Intact extended families tend to do everything better than splintered problematic nuclear families.

A family unit is always going to be more resiliant with large numbers of responsible people in it. They can either take care of, or cover for, a few dysfunctional members.

Drug and alchohol abuse, and mental illness, didn't originate with the nuclear family.

It exposed it, and exacerbated it, when government stepped in to provide a safety net for people who had detached themselves from their extended family group,

Some of these people were very deserving of help, and others were not. The problem is, that government makes no distinction between those two groups, and at times makes the problems very much worse by enabling behavior that an extended self reliant family either couldn't or wouldnt tolerate.

"I've long thought five families should band together in a sort of collective." Only someone without a family could endorse this cult-like nightmare solution. Even the Muslim concept of polygamy gives each wife the dignity of an independent home. We already have to deal with bloodsucking neighbors as it is. God knows how awful it would be if they actually had some legitimate moral basis for the demands they make. Isn't it enough that we have three levels of government of sticking their fingers into our lives, plus demonic multi-national entities like United Airlines and the soft tyranny of the homeowners association? Why on Earth would we want to add yet one more claimant upon our lives? My nuclear family - me, my wife, my kids, our cats and our dog -- ARE the mutually supportive collective that makes life tolerable. Our private home and our single nuclear family is the haven and the refuge that gives satisfaction and joy to our lives. Appending us to some collective of families, like some amoebic version of Yugoslavia at the neighborhood level, would be about as satisfying as that political abortion turned out to be (for lovely look at how great this arrangement is, try Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or We the Living by Ayn Rand). Return to a hunter-gather model of social order? There is a reason why we left that model of life in the distant past: Because it sucks. It may have been a necessary survival strategy when people were primitive outcasts struggling against a hostile physical environment. But eons of social, political and technological advancements have made life so much better than that savage model. I love my home and I love my family, and it doesn't take a village to maintain them, no matter what Hillary Clinton says (although she probably had a village of servants to help raise Chelsea). We'll stick it out on our own, thank you very much.

Relatives can be a pain. People used to stick together because they needed each other. Families were your insurance policy. Much work that men did needed multiple men--relatives good. Women could and did share child care--relatives good. There was no pizza delivery and a person living alone was pretty much unable to function. But as people have gotten richer, it doesn't seem worth it to put up with family so much. You can hire a babysitter who won't criticize your child-rearing practices like grandma does.
A survey I saw showed than men's satisfaction/happiness over the last 30 yrs has been steady but women's has been trending down. I think all the feminist propaganda has put women in a no-win situation. If they go to work and ignore their family, they feel like they are letting them down. If they stay home they get berated and feel less than human. The constant pressure against marriage also goes against their instincts and leaves them conflicted.

" Drug use flourishes in places where the social, community, and familial fabric is thin, or gone all together."

Or where there's a fun-lovin' hard-workin' population of people with disposable income.

USA! USA! USA!

I think that kind of ends up happening anyways, you tend to make friends with people in your neighborhood who have kids the right age. Then you watch each others kids or pick them up or whatever