DD and boyfriend are wasting their lives

[FiddIedeedee]

DD 27 and her boyfriend (also 27) are proper home bodies. All they seem to do in their free time is go for country walks with their dogs, meals out or Sunday markets 😂

When I was in my 20s I was partying, clubbing and getting up to all sorts, I fear they are wasting their youth!

Last weekend they baked cookies and went on a long country walk with the dogs with a pub lunch. DD spends a lot of time reading and crocheting bits here and there. The boyfriend has started furniture restoration as a hobby. They’re like an old couple honestly!

DD got annoyed with me because I said to them they need to be out enjoying their 20s (and soon 30s) and not acting like a couple in their 60s. DP says leave them be but I just don’t want them to regret not living life to the full. You’re a long time old as they say.

AIBU?

I disagree.
I think "isolated" people don't go out to work and don't go on holiday.
Have you been to the Peak District? They will be talking to people and interacting.
Their life, their choice, even if they don't.

We did a week long tour of the Welsh castles and burial chambers, aged 22!! We must be really boring, we loved it

I agree isolated people don't tend to go on outdoorsy holidays that will involve going to say s country pub or wherever, quiet people doesn't mean isolated.

Saying “27 is old for clubbing” is as unreasonable as saying 20s is for clubbing.

There is no “too old”. Clubbing is fine at any age.

It's not really about equity, though. My mother wasn't an SAHM earth mother, she was just an ordinary working woman doing ordinary things, as my dad was an ordinary working man doing ordinary things. They met friends in the pub, went to barn dances, went to the Lizard on holiday...

They weren't avoiding anything, they were just getting on with their lives. Were they fully happy and fulfilled all the time? I doubt it, but again that's a modern ideal, and a very naive one at that.

My generation (I am bang in the middle of genX) still weren't really the 'gap yah' generation unless you were rather more middle class than I was.

I've done my fair share of travelling and a bit of LSD on the way, whilst still being married with a mortgage and job in my very early 20s. I couldn't afford to do it all on some big 'finding yourself' deal. We did it in bits. We didn't do things we didn't think we'd enjoy, because why would you waste time and money for the sake of it?

I wasn't (and am still not) stuck, trapped or avoiding anything. OK, I've never gone skiing or climbed a mountain, because I didn't want to.

It's impossible to experience everything. It's OK to find your 'thing' early on and stick with it. Those adventurous people still only do things they want to do, that interest them. Nobody is saying to them, 'but have you tried sitting at home reading a book'. That might be pushing them out of their comfort zone.

There have always been people who want to live different lives. I wonder why we find it so much harder to let people choose the life they want now, despite the fact that it's now easier to do. Why we must assume not wanting to rush hither and yon is some form of 'avoidance'?

Having choice means just that. And, despite what some people think, there's a lifetime to live. You don't have to cram it all into your 20s. My parents travelled a lot in later life. It wasn't any less of an experience for them just because it wasn't interrailing with a backpack on.

Let your kids be who they are. Yes, help them if they need a push, if they have expressed a wish for more, but don't let them feel they have to be something they aren't.

It’s getting really common for that generation to be more like that. They’re much healthier than the lot who went out clubbing and binge drinking every weekend.

Mumsnet is very anti drinking and partying and even travelling really, OP.

They do sound dull. Can’t imagine not wanting to travel outside of UK.

But it’s her life 🤷‍♀️ just leave her to it

I mean I don’t disagree but I think you’re missing my point. This couple may be totally happy, fulfilled and living their best life.

plenty aren’t. I have cited my son and his friends as examples. There is a cottage core movement that is very prevalent on instagram that feeds the narrative that the slow life and the simple life is deeply aspirational. It’s not achievable for everyone and for people like my ds it is encouraging him to lean into being emotionally lazy and rather ill equipped for the world and the inevitable challenges it can present. It can also make women who want more feel inadequate because they are not picking hedgerow blackberries and making crumbles for their family every day. the irony is that I am exactly the person that wants to visit national trust properties and whose insta feed is full of thrift hauls and flower pressing - I live for that shit. But… I’m also glad I lived a little and came to this when I knew myself pretty well.

both things can be true - I’m acknowledging that these kids might be golden but I think it would be helpful if people can acknowledge that there may be problematic aspects to this too. I can’t really express myself any clearer than in my previous posts - gleaned from observations and life experience. I find it weird that everything has to be so binary these days 🤷🏼‍♀️

Funny. I’ve found MN is very anti travel, unless it’s an all inclusive by the beach for two weeks.

I think you might have hit the nail on the head with the internet lifestyle promotions. That is one big difference for your son's generation that just wasn't a factor in mine.

We weren't being sold a lifestyle. My life hasn't been entirely conventional, in some ways, but it's been mine, not some dream I have been sold. But that applies across the board. Instagram versions of backpacking, etc, are just as designed to sell an idea.

Nobody's going to be happy with any 'lifestyle' if the desire for it has come from an external source.designed to promote the lifestyle and earn money for the poster.

Is today's generation more likely to be dissatisfied because the lifestyle they bought into is sugar coated? They are bombarded with so much that I just didn't have. But it's someone else's life, and often not even real. Bored homesteaders don't post.

This couple the OP talks of just sound, to me, like ordinary folk doing ordinary things. But I admit, I am not used to looking at things through a 'lifestyle' lens, and will be out of touch in that respect.

Yes Mumsnet don’t tend to like anything in the uk unless it’s centre parcs.

and it’s not a holiday unless you get on a plane.

You've been reading the wrong threads.
I'm amazed at how many MNetters travel long haul to all kinds of exotic places.

Mumsnet is not that at all @Cherrytree86
MN has over 4 million users.

Making those statements is really silly.

They may well be really happy with their choices. I am definitely biased by having a gorgeous ds who is lazy and would lean into this without a second thought but who also knows that it wouldn’t be particularly fulfilling (and admits this).

From a young age he has fantasised about living in the highlands with a dog. This fantasy usually emerges when he is stressed by the demands of everyday life. He doesn’t particularly like dogs. Or the highlands. It is a metaphor for him and means being left alone and allowed to be avoidant.

I see this quite a lot in my work (full disclosure I’m a therapist that works with anxious/withdrawn and avoidant children and teens) and in my kid’s friends. I’m not projecting because I genuinely don’t know about this couple but it is a thing and it is prevalent in under 30s in my experience.

Why wouldn't it be fulfilling, though? I know you questioned the binary nature of responses, but I find it pretty binary to write off some lifestyles as 'unfulfilling'. For your son, maybe.

What is, and is not fulfilling varies from person to person. And there's nothing lazy whatsoever about living remotely. It comes with a lot of challenges.

Which comes back to part of the problem, doesn't it? The Instagram version of that life appears lazy. So yes, there may be 'avoidance' issues with some who choose it. When they find it isn't like that, that's where the discontent comes in. Unrealistic expectations.

Does your son knows that life wouldn't be fulfilling for him, or has he been told it wouldn't be? If he doesn't try it, how will he, or you, know?

Sorry, in my response I misread the but about your son and the highland/dog life. I get it's his fantasy when he's struggling.

But it isn't unfulfilling or lazy for everyone.

I read "alternating working from home" that one of them is in the office and one at home most days so both are in 2 or 3 days socialising with colleagues.

We have a huge group of friends and all of us enjoy meeting for walks, pubs, garden centres and the like. We all have really stressful jobs that put us way out of our comfort zones so in our spare time we like to make it easy.

The OP says they are "boring" in their spare time. What's to say they don't travel the world in their professional lives?

I’m literally not saying it is!

Are they happy?
Time spent being happy isn't time wasted

Being avoidant is never psychologically healthy.

choosing that lifestyle because it suits you/you are a genuine introvert/you never get lonely is an entirely different thing altogether. That is not my son’s motivation at all - hence why I am using him as an example of when it can be unhealthy. Covid lockdowns fucked him over in lots of ways but he is also ND. I would embrace anything that makes him happy but this wouldn’t and both he and I know it.

this isn’t particularly pertinent to the op but I am demonstrating ways in which this wholesome lifestyle may be less emotionally and psychologically healthy than it may appear and giving the op the benefit of the doubt this may be one of her (extremely poorly worded) concerns.

Actually, I hadn’t thought about it till your comment, but I agree. My children and their friends are quite like the OP’s ‘dull daughter’ . Thank goodness!

My kids have worked abroad but they appreciate the mental-healthiness of the sort of lifestyle OP despises.

I wonder though if we are not guilty of overpathologizing the variance of human behaviour though? I remember reading about hermits, convents, monasteries and thinking it would be great if there was a non religious equivalent. I don’t want to be a nun or a hermit but I do want periods of solitude which it can be hard to find in the modern world. I think some people probably suit a slower pace of life (at certain periods of time) but it’s hard to find. Obviously you know your son best - this is more generally.

I do think our inability to understand or accept even the slightest deviations from what is considered a normal personality is why so many people look into it they are ND.

I'm not making a definitive statement here, I'm just offering an interpretation of what the OP has said.

Perhaps we might disagree on whether Isolation is in and of itself a desirable state, and disagree on the advice we would give a young person who wrote here saying "My mother thinks my life would be better and "wholesome" if I spent a lot less time with friends, did crochet or reading and generally limited discretionary contact with others". Isolated people do go to work (and then home again with no water cooler chat and eating lunch alone), they do go on holiday but have superficial or zero interactions, and have (possibly) acquaintances rather than friends.

Being in a place where others are is not any protection against isolation.
I might agree that OP has been kack-handed in what she has written, but the ding ding on her radar is very understandable in my opinion.

Are they much healthier though. (Their livers probably yes! But other than that), are they really any less prone to the physical and mental “slings and arrows” that life is going to throw at them.

How do you know and what makes you say this?

I do think fundamentally we are just approaching this from different perspectives. I don't really see a 'lifestyle' here, I just see a perfectly ordinary couple living as I thought most people did. Working, going on holiday, walking the dog.

I'm not really seeing a couple shutting themselves away, never opening the door, etc. I'm not really seeing 'wholesome' or 'homesteader'.

It might be what the OP sees but hasn't really expressed. I'm just struggling to see from what was actually posted anything other than two people who prefer a pint down the pub occasionally to a big night out and like the UK countryside.

Their lives aren't limited to this tiny window of time, even if they do have children. As I said, my parents did stacks of travelling in their 60s. Maybe not the clubs, but that never was their scene.

I think there's a danger in imagining a problem with a life simply because it isn't what you did, which I think OP is doing.

Perhaps she'll return and give more details around her concern.