On the decline of men...

A short while back, I read an article online about the decline of men, but I can't quite remember where it was.  It could be The New Yorker, or The Atlantic, or Salon.  No matter; apparently, there's even a book written about it.

I haven't felt compelled to write about it because all those articles and books speak mostly in such general terms, about how there are now more girls go to college than boys, how there are seemingly less eligible men available for marriage, and some such. Mostly, they never hit home. I'm like, "yah yah, I've heard that story before, next please."

And then I realize something.

This past summer when we spent the summer in Australia, catching up with a number of old friends and family and relatives, something stacks up.

One story after another - and these are real life anecdotes - it came to me that more than a handful of those good guys have "fallen."  These are guys I know; guys who are only now entering middle age and who seemingly did all the right thing.  They were competitive and ambitious, did well in school, went to college, got a decent job after graduation, started family and now have kids, and they were supposedly on their upward trajectory in both corporate ladder and station in life.  In other words, they are not your average pushovers or weaklings.  These are hunters and seekers; they are survivors.

How then, do we account for the job loss, mostly due to layoff and redundancy, through no fault of their own, resulting in a loss in focus, self identity and ego, all of which commonly tie so tightly with a decent job for men?

No doubt there's something to be said about the economic recession almost universally for the past 4-5 years since the Lehman collapse in 2008; but in a number of cases, the "fallen" stories came way before economy hit a snag.  These are also happening in different parts of the world; some in Asia, some in North America, some in Europe, some in Australia.  There is no geological pattern to this conundrum.

As a result, some family broke up; some resulted in divorce.  The women (with the kids) mostly move on with life; the guys, in their middle age, are stuck in neutral.  Most of the wives (whom we knew personally too) cited the fact that the husbands "have changed so much," but all they would do is to become couch potato.  I have no doubt that quite a few of them probably suffer depression as a result, and it's hard for the wives to adjust to it.

This phenomenon - very unscientifically observed by my own eyes - is different from those that are more easily surveyed, like the declining number of young adult males going to college, and what-not.  All these also fly in the face of the supposedly still rampant income inequality between men and women, which is still a very real issue in the real world.

Sure, corporate structure changes, restructuring happens all too often, and it's not uncommon to see the whole division offshored, or even a whole line of business dropped. Unless you're the chieftains in the corner office who make those decisions, there isn't a lot that average foot soldiers can do; hence, the conundrum of all these good men.

What we can do, and what we should have done, is to prepare for the bad times, precisely bad times like layoff, loss of income, being forced to change fields, or worse. These guys have had such uneventful life (albeit through hardwork, in both school and work), that they and their families never expect such "bad luck" to bestow upon them. As a result, the men are stunned and don't know how to react.  Interestingly, it's almost always the wife who is invariably more flexible and adaptable, and who is also the first to snap out of the bad situation.  Perhaps there's no coincidence that, in 10 out of 10 cases when divorce happens, it's the wife who initiates it.

I'm always very cognizant about such "bad luck."  I've seen it first-hand.  Back in the 1960s when serious riots broke out in Hong Kong, and public confidence had reached such low point that most everyone who could get out of Hong Kong had got out of Hong Kong.  (But of course, the few chieftains, like Ka-shing Li, who stayed the course, had been able to consolidate their power base even more.)

During those riotous days, my dad remained unemployed for more than a year.  How was a family of seven, with five kids to feed, to survive?  Thanks to the foresight and ingenuity of my mom, she had spearheaded some side businesses while the days were still good, so much so that our family could continue to strive during those dark days.

Thankfully, my dad bounced back to work after the '67 riots days, but that family experience stays with me.  No one could have foreseen such geopolitical instability. Certainly no one wants to foresee the main source of family income to vaporize in a flash; but that's quite conceivable, particularly in these days when the source of which comes more often in the form of globalization.

For the longest time since my early 20s, I've made investments. To some, my investments almost take on a frantic pace across different industries. And I've learnt to multi-task, so that I don't have to rely on just one career. That philosophy has served me very well so far.

That would be one of the main things I teach my kids, that they have to learn to deal with uncertainty, be able to multi-task, be flexible and adaptable to changes, and to start investment early on in life. There's much wisdom in the idiom, save for the rainy days. Afterall, as Heraclitus famously put it, "the only constant in life is change."  Those are the disciplines in life that, to me, is much more than telling the kids to go get a college degree.