We invented the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave, frozen dinners, online grocery, the robot vacuum, and DoorDash. The married household with young kids spends more total hours on chores and childcare today than it did in 1965.
Dads went from under 10 hours a week to 28.7, the 300% everyone is quoting. Moms went from the high 40s to 42.5, a slide of five or six. Stack the two and the household total rises. A full century of labor-saving invention, and the modern family with toddlers logs more unpaid hours at home than the family that did the laundry by hand.
Here is the part that should stop you. Every one of those machines did its job. Core housework genuinely collapsed. Mothers do roughly half the cooking and cleaning they did in the 1960s. The dishwasher worked. The dryer worked. The hours got freed.
Then the culture spent them. The time the appliances saved flowed straight back into the children. This is the same law that governs every efficiency gain modern life has produced. Faster email bought us more email. Automation at home bought us a higher bar for what a parent owes a kid.
Watch what childcare even means now versus then. In 1965 a kid got sent outside until dinner. Supervision was loose, the neighborhood raised half of them, and a parent hovering every waking hour would have looked unwell. Today the job is continuous. Driving to practice, sitting through homework, managing screens, booking the enrichment, never leaving a small child unwatched. The one activity that exploded is the one no machine will ever touch. You cannot DoorDash attention.
So pull back and the chart stops being about fathers. It is a portrait of a species that refuses to bank its own productivity. Every tool we built to do less at home, we spent on doing more for the kids. The washing machine freed the afternoon. We handed the afternoon to the children and quietly renamed the old, looser way neglect.
We automated the housework and poured every saved minute into the one job we decided can never be done well enough.
Australian World Cup fans were caught chanting:
“Aussie boys are on a bender, Donald Trump is a sex offender.”
The tournament is barely underway and the chants are already in midseason form. 💀
Watch a four-year-old dance. No self-consciousness, no "am i good at this," no checking the room first. They're just fully themselves, at full volume, in love with being alive. And then we spend the next fifteen years teaching them to turn it down. We train the wholeness out of them, gently, with the best intentions.
A person who spends thirty minutes scrolling before bed has not merely lost thirty minutes.
They may have lost the version of tomorrow morning where they woke up sharp enough to write.
They may have lost the version of next week where they finally tolerated boredom long enough for an original thought to appear.
The transaction is invisible because the price is paid in probability.
This is utterly ridiculous clickbait.
What actually happened: the Pope released a 235-page encyclical saying AI needs to be "disarmed" and should NOT be used to "secure geopolitical or commercial dominance" (https://t.co/LR5R22vQWj).
Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei explicitly advocates using AI to establish "robust military superiority" of the West and publicly dreams of an "eternal 1991" of Western dominance enabled by AI (https://t.co/R02pmoOU3M). Anthropic also has $200M in Pentagon contracts in partnership with Palantir, and Claude AI was notably used by the Pentagon to kidnap Maduro (https://t.co/0zyhg5t5GP).
In other words, Anthropic is doing the exact opposite of what the Pope advocates.
Furthermore, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah - who wasn't there as a partner but as one of six speakers alongside cardinals and theologians - told the room that AI decisions "should not be left to people in the industry," and that even well-intentioned researchers operate inside incentives that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing" (https://t.co/UxBgGNqMc0)
So he too is saying, essentially, "don't trust us on finding the way." Which is the exact opposite of "working together to find the way for humanity."
In other words this is the perfect example of taking a quote out of context to make it say the exact opposite of what was meant. The Pope said AI companies like Anthropic are going the wrong way. Anthropic's own co-founder said "don't let us define the way." https://t.co/vKAWCFnLE3 says: "they're announcing they're working together to find the way for humanity." 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
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