Yes. Yes? Uh, I dunno.

I love history and sociology and should have been an historian-author or sociologist instead of a gearhead. How can we not find amusement and intrigue in social trends all around us? People are innately social, and the sea change in attitudes, in life, and the world around us during the past 150 years easily outpaced the evolution of attitudes, life, and the world from the previous 2000 years (and well beyond). The case can be made that there was more similarity between Christ’s world and Ben Franklin’s world than between Franklin’s and our own; while technology had evolved a bit and we had entered a new scientific age by the time of Franklin, you can easily argue that technology and social structures and mores have morphed more quickly in the 20^th Century than ever. In this context, please read the following link, an article on the marriage age in modern-day America. In general, most people still want to marry and still want to have kids, but usually only after some token desires and milestones are fulfilled and some good times had. I don’t count myself sorry to be tokening and milestoning up my 20’s and 30’s—no regrets—but this guy makes a good case for how those of us single-folk can better understand the wild and crazy motivations that lead our friends to voluntarily pull themselves off the market "early." (Link immediately below)

"Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?"

To me, this speaks to something more than just statistics, prejudices, attitudes, and desires for fun; it speaks to the whirlwind of societal change in our times. In my parents’ childhood years, folks still married in their late teens and early 20’s, women stayed home, men earned the bread, no one had the time, energy, or inclination to do something so frivolous as to train for a silly event called “triathlon,” and children were popped out of kitchen-tending moms like drunken Clarendon Ballroom collar-poppers bounced out da cluuuub at 2am on a Saturday. That’s only 50 or 60 years of time, but an epoch of social change. Our lives and times never cease to amaze me. Just think about it in terms of technology. 0 AD versus 1776 (1776 years of candle-lit nights and fire-warmed winters). 1776 versus 1950 (174 years, ending with coal furnaces and electric lights—and nuclear weaponry, which really harkened prospects of a new age). 1950 versus today (59 years to nuclear and solar power and a greening of a huge carbon economy). That last, short interval is really something, isn’t it? Technology, social norms, all of it.