Bye, Bye Baby

My wife's nephew came by with his wife tonight, which really speaks to how long in the tooth we are getting. But, while we plied them with ice cream, mudcake and fresh raspberries, they had another purpose for stopping by - which was to pick through what remains of Smallsteps' baby clothes, looking for "neutral" styles, of which we have plenty.

Afaik, they are not yet expecting.

But it is good to be prepared.

It is interesting for me to talk with people in their mid-twenties as they prepare to enter the next phase of their lives, as they are at the point that I would have liked to have started a family. Mid-twenties is perfect in my opinion, as it is past the childhood stage, but there is still a mass of energy and hope for the future.

I think these days, a lot of people wait much later in life, because they want to get their careers in order, or don't want to lose their youth to parenting. But, what I find is that no one is really ever ready for it, which means even when people are mid-thirties or forties, they still have the same arguments as a decade or two earlier.

I think this is even more true now, as most people seem to be putting off growing up for longer and longer. Instead, they want to hold onto their habits of youth for as long as they can. Ultimately though, all of us will likely face the fact that everything changes.

There are many reasons to not have kids of course, but I think that many of them are facades to cover fears. I am not talking about the fears of not enough money or climate change, but rather the fear of commitment, because once a baby arrives, there is no going back. And because we live in a non-committal world these days, where everything is on-demand and disposable, commitment to anything even mid-term, let alone something that is meant to be for life, over to death, and perhaps even beyond through the genetic framework itself.

I don't judge those who choose not to have children, because again, especially these days I think a lot of people are far less capable at parenting than those in the past. I think that in the past we had communities and cultures that prepared people to accept the lot of parenthood, and it gave them somehow a sense of duty, but also a sense of need for both the community and the self. Nowadays however, it is more about the needs of the self, and those needs are largely entertainment based in the sense they are for desires to be met at the individual level, rather than at the level of part of something bigger.

And this is something that I find interesting also, as while there is a litany of "social" movements out there that are preying on people's need to belong to a group and get some sense that they matter in the world, the people who often take part are those who are the most self-serving, the ones who believe that they are entitled to have all of their desires met, and not have to face the things that make them uncomfortable, upset them, or go against their personal opinions, which they believe everyone should both respect, and also hold.

What I see as one of the issues with the social movement path to self-fulfillment, is that it ignores a lot of our very biology that binds us to each other and gives us meaning. We are animals and have a need to replicate ourselves in order to survive, but there is more bound up in this process than simply creating offspring.

Because in my view at least, the thing that sets us apart from the animals who are made to just replicate, we are able to imagine into the future, to create what doesn't yet exist, to work with a wide range of people, with a wide range of skills, to solve problems and develop ways forward at scales that no individual or even small group ever could. We are able to take hundreds and thousands of years of learning from the past, and project it into the future with new ideas, new twists.

We evolve ourselves.

However, I also think that this ability to evolve ourselves has been commandeered for profit, which means that the timeline is based on the quarterly and annual reports, rather than whether what is being created is good for society or not. And, because the supply is being driven by demand, I think a lot of people aren't thinking too far ahead about the impact of their actions, or the implications it will have for the generations to come. And, at least by what I have observed, those without children are the ones more likely to take a shorter view of the future, which could be because they don't have to worry about the moral side of their actions.

And this reminds me of a quote I heard from a contemporary German philosopher, whose name I can't remember, talking about a time in the life for every German child around his age, where they learned about Nazi atrocities in school, come home and ask their parents,

"Did you know?"

I have often thought about how that scene would play out, putting myself in the position of the child, and the position of the parents. What would I say as the parent? Would I deny knowing, pretend that I was naive? And in the position of the child, what would I think when I could see my parents where lying? What would I think if they said they knew? Would I listen to their excuses and accept them? Would I ever think of them the same way again?

We have created a world of increasing complexity in so many ways, yet the charge of humanity hasn't changed. We are problem solvers through the evolution of our thoughts and the ways we can build into the future from a long-gone past. We have the ability to do increasingly amazing things, to accomplish what would have been seen as wizardry and miraculous a few generations ago.

But without children, what is the point?

But more than for the good of humanity, or good of the community, perhaps having a child is the most selfish thing a person can do. Not because of the desire to replicate oneself, but because it might be the most love an individual can ever hold in their heart. There is no place on earth, there is no game on earth, there is no product on earth, and no social movement on earth, that compares.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]