He’s a 72 year old Batchelor who’s once stepped foot outside a Welsh valley. If happiness is a lobotomy then credit to us who don’t choose it.
I'm glad that you've found satisfaction in having children, but that's no reason to put someone else down.
We are mere Spatiotemporal blips of information in the infant universe with delusions of grandeur. So if you have to tell yourself deep in the night that you actualising your reproductive prerogative makes your sad little life more meaningful than the farmer, please grasp at those straws.
How did that really influence you?
We can look back, we are not a magic generation unique to all the other generations before us. We know what's going to happen with us and our legacies.
We have alot more data now, but I am not sure how durable it all is.
I have quite a few DVDs and hard drives that no longer work.
Print the book version on vellum, and you'll preserve it for a few thousand years (or ANSI paper with the infinity sign, which supposedly lasts for at least 750 years).
My mum is the only one who likes to look through our holiday pictures.
They will be there and no one will care.
Only some ml tool to potentially tell my future Familie members that I might have been depressed based on pictures and the ml notes it down for potential medical relevant information.
No one will know what I liked and disliked. No one will see that my life had ups and downs.
I really thought Facebook would be a great thing. Sharing and seeing what my Familie is up to but no one is using it for sharing family pictures. And I myself I'm sometimes annoyed by too many WhatsApp pictures.
I do get why it is like this but realizing and accepting it took a bit
Humans might survive past earth, but oblivion will come for us all the same. We just get to play around in our little imagined worlds of purpose and meaning a little longer all to no avail beyond living one's life.
And that's all any of us can really do, chose how to face existence knowing there is no grand scheme in which each of us is some how important or matters. Choosing to live is equally as valid as choosing not to. We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
All we can do is live a life we are happy(good state) with, be it building stone walls that last or having kids and raising them.
Certainly this could lead one to be a little more circumspect about grand pronouncements.
It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.
Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
I make no such claim. We interpret and navigate the world with the mental models and toolsets we have. If you can do math, you can calculate, estimate, plan, budget....etc. Similarly, some toolsets give you access to insights and paradigms eg: religious toolset might make you interpret the world differently. I merely have a certain toolset which lets me look at the world in a certain way, does not mean this toolset is exclusive, leads to authoritative interpretations or it's acquisition is special in any way.
I could just say "In my humble opinion"
>Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
As always value is in the eye of the beholder, there is no objective value beyond what a subject is able to get out of it. So if you feel truth and knowledge are important, they are. If you feel faith is more important than truth, it is, to you at-least.
One problem I've noticed with the way human beings communicate is that for any given situation, there's no way of knowing whether the person speaking is doing so with an implicit "imho", or whether they mean the things they say literally. In this case, I thought that you were speaking literally.
I wonder how much this phenomenon (and others like it) contributes to the amount of polarization and disharmony we are experiencing in the world right now, or in the past for that matter, all without our knowledge or interest.
on the theorised heat death timescale humans have only been around for less than infinitesimal fractions of quadrillionths of a percent of their potential. what's to say we don't in that time escape it by transiting to a new, younger universe?
For now, we are an incredibly young species who has time and again demonstrated our penchant for chasing after short term incentives at the cost of longterm harm. We are making the earth unliveable faster than we are progressing towards being a multi-planetary species (which seems like an insurmountable leap given the candidates and the cost structure we have to work with). But humans are inventive and resourceful so here's hoping we grow beyond living on earth.
What's the benchmark?
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956
The only true delusion of grandeur is thinking that dwindling others' experiences against the vastness of the universe is enlightenment: If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales, why waste time believing we are mere blips?
We're very far from where we started. We're here because of both people that had kids and because of people that built stone walls. In many cases they were the same people.
Yes, it is more meaningful to have kids than to build a stonewall.
Aren't walls inventions of man, as such, an effect caused by man. How can an effect (invention) of man be equated to the inventor?
Do you compare the effect of human freedom to the effect of unconscious matter in history?
With the current pace of change, having children may no longer be the obvious winner it has been for all of history, but it might still be...
Does that mean we shouldn't just bother, absolutely not, we are given this gift of experiencing life. Something rather than nothingness...etc. But we can do with a little more perspective on how utterly inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things. Having kids seems consequential in the context of human existence, but when human existence is inconsequential (there is no lasting impact or transmission of information beyond our temporary side-effects on the environment) it puts our existence into perspective.
The fact that we've hit upon a certain arrangement of matter which yields consciousness and the ability to manipulate the matter around us is something which seems worth preservation.
I contain the information for how to give life to inert matter. I've done it three times now, and I think it's worthwhile.
It's a consequence of evolution. Right now we are limited yes. But nobody knows future.
> If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales
Feel free to experience your existence without deriding others existence.
I'm completely at peace with the thought that a century from now no-one will think about me one way or the other.
I mean statistically the chain of events that led to me ever existing as me was so small that after winning that hand, it's time to leave the table and enjoy it.
You don't need to leave something behind of course, but the species benefits from it.
So assert that life has no meaning, as alluded to here.
These are axiom-like statements that cannot be proven. Everyone has a faith as to which of these assertions is true.
Life can have meaning because we choose to give it such.
(Passive voice is more apt.)
As for children: being a parent myself, I think it's best not to instrumentalise them by viewing them as a legacy that you'll leave behind after you. They're their own people. They don't owe you that obligation.
Why speak low about him? You're content with your life, and he is content with his... it really is that simple.
You can't go up to an artist and say, "Hey, your painting is crap, you should change x, y, z," because it is the artist's painting, not yours.
For my part, I enjoy modal editors so I think vim is better than emacs and I like the GPL over BSD.
We need more fuel on this fire. What's your take on spaces vs tabs?
Calm down, Satan
It's also a failure of empathy on OP's part - we look at the world through our own lens but we should at least try to look at it through other peoples before accusing them of choosing "lobotomy".
"Yeah, but villageboi is a lobotomized mole. I am sophisticate. You have no frontal lobe"
The peak of discourse. Hahaha. And then depending on which lifestyle you have chosen, people will pick some arbitrary thing to argue about.
"You said villageboi. Actually, I am village girl. And it's not village. It's farm"
"You said lobotomy. Actually, it's a corpus callosotomy"
That's what makes it so entertaining. The idea that people think they're being all this sharp when really they're just offended that their preferences were made fun of.
But you're clearly an Emacs user. See you on your way back from the RSI doctor, nerd!
I had a moment in my 20s where I just stopped and thought, "Every single ancestor I had from my parents back to algae had offspring. What if I don't?"
If you consider the whole Ocean as history, and the present moment as a single solitary wave heading towards the shore, and your life as the surfer on that wave, it doesn't matter what came before you. What matters is the wave. You get to ride it and wipe out. And that's it. I don't care if that wave is a composite of a million unknown ripples in the cast Ocean. It doesn't matter really.
A large proportion of your ancestors offspring didn't themselves have offspring.
The answer to that isn't having material wealth, especially when you get no time left over to appreciate it. So the problem is having enough time when you waste most of it toiling for the dreams of another man, and for next to nothing in return. Because that's the real economy. (If you do, though, then congratulations I guess, but then you're not in the position of most people anyway.)
I think, however, that you'd change your mind about things if you had the freedom, the space, and the ability to grow your own food. Then you'd see how foolish most city dwellers actually are. As for the philosophical musings about whether you should have children... Well, it's your life, man. If you don't want a shot at prolonging your true legacy, then that's up to you. But you're certainly doing a service for everyone else who do want their kind to succeed.
In terms of your moment in your 20s, the way I see it is that it goes beyond my conventional existence as a human: I'm not just the product of all my direct ancestors, but also of all the causes and effects which have effected those ancestors. It's obvious that I am the continuation of my great great great grandfather, however I am also the continuation of my great great great grandfathers lunch that fed him, or doctor that saved him, or the Sun that supported him. Reproduction is an essential component for continued existence of sentient beings, but so is food, so is warmth, so is water. I feel that the Sun is just as much my parent as my biological parents.
It is wonderful.
Tiring, taxing, exhilarating, inspiring.
It works for me. I make no claims for others.
Imagine if someone looked at your comment and denigrated it "oh wow you had unprotected sex with your partner and managed to not kill your kids before they turned 18. Congrats on the achievement!"
It is when I read these stories that I truly consider how short our lives are. I can't stop thinking about how fragile our beliefs are once we hold them up against someone elses values, earthshaking.
Ah, yes. A planet completely ruined by overpopulation. That is your legacy.
Also, your existence is just as meaningless as this farmer's. You probably remember your grandparents, at least you know a little about their lives. What about your grandparents parents, or your grandparents grandparents. They were people with their own full lives, hopes and dreams. Do you even know their names ? Let alone what they were like, what they cared about, what their life was like ?
They are forgotten, just like you will be, regardless of how many children they had.
Under which metric is the planet complete ruined? and why do you think it's overpopulated? what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you, and based on what?
Under lots of metrics, today's planet is a much healthier and prosperous place to live for humankind than it was 100 or even 50 years ago. As an example, for most human history life expectancy was no more than 30 years. Nowadays we are around 70 and quite some countries already over 80. Poverty was common some centuries ago, with around 90% being considered poor. Nowadays it's only around 10% of population. Literacy has also advanced tremendously, with now around 90% of people under 25 being able to read and write.
And all of that has been happening thanks to those that were here before us. Yes, the ones we have forgotten their names, but for whom we live now in the capable and free societies that are most of the western countries.
Having children is an extremely important part of that legacy. They are the immediate inheritors of the ideals and visions of the ones that were here before us.
We have created healthier and more prosperous societies. It is difficult to argue that we have created a healthier planet, yet our long term survival depends upon the health of the planet.
We are having this convo because someone had a child.
If someone really thought and believed life isn't a great thing (equating a stone wall to a human being) he'd be either a dishonest person or a weakling to be alive educating us.
For if he truly believes children and humans are all nothing, then, why toil in vain. Why procrastinate, why suffer at all for nothing.
Why is it that the majority of the humans that live and has ever lived chose to toil and provide for their family? Why is it that many folks that has ever lived are happy to have kids and nurture them. Is it ignorance that has given our ancestors the joy they experienced in child bearing and nurturing?
An "intellectual" that is enjoying the wealth of our ancestors turns to proclaim it all nothing because we cannot remember their names.
Because suicide is vastly different from never having been born at all. Like every animal people have an extremely strong survival instinct. So strong that people have to be under extreme physical or mental pain before they consider taking their own lives.
This is not an argument for procreation but against it. It adds to the absolute horror that is life.
Sleep is good. Death is better, but the best is to have never been born.
Heinrich Heine 1797-1856 Morphine 1835-1836
Nature is being destroyed, we polluted our planet enough that it affected the climate. The air we breathe is filled with ultrafine particles. The water is full of microplastics.
Sure, we are able to afford more things, and we have made advances in the medical field. Our expected lifespan has gone up, but are those last few decades worth it ? Spending your last years in adult diapers and being regularly tortured by doctors in an effort to extend your life as much as possible doesn't seem like a big win to me.
Our good years are spent working longer days than ever, doing unhealthy, stressful work to the point that we have to spend our little free time exercising to keep our health. All the while the majority of humans spend their lives in cities that resemble ant hills more than a space designed for humans. More people than ever suffer from anxiety and stress-related mental health problems.
Is life really a better experience now than it was 100 years ago ?
> what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you
I would say about 10 million people globally.
The improvements to duration of lifespan have also come with improvements to quality of life.
My father’s final year of life started with a cancer diagnosis, and while it was an extremely long way from “fun”, tech gave him mobility, and he’d only lived that long because of half a lifetime of treatment for disease-induced epilepsy.
My mother had a few years of Alzheimer’s — still essentially untreatable, and yet tech made it easy to keep her entertained, and GPS tracking made it easier for us to look after her without her getting lost due to a moment of intention on our parts.
Our good years involve less and easier work, in better conditions, than 1972, much better than 1921, and insanely better than 1871. When did we start mandatory schooling? When did we end actual slavery? Conscription? When was polio vaccination introduced, when was smallpox eliminated, when was anaesthetic easily available for childbirth? So yes, life is much better than it used to be.
Of course, I actually like living in Berlin, metro area population 61% of what you think the entire plant should have.
Why wouldn't older folks' quality of life continue to increase as we develop new medicine and technology? Cancer and Alzheimers will never be cured? We'll never be able to induce cellular regeneration like many other species can, or artificial body parts will never advance beyond their current crudeness?
How many people spend their working years doing mind-numbing or back-breaking manual labor compared to even a century or two ago? How many people back then would have been radically oppressed from birth but even today can pursue their own dreams? Life is still relatively "nasty, brutish, and short" but it is getting better and I see no reason to expect that progress to end, let alone regress.
While you despair over a grim dark future, I look forward to a garden Earth, resplendent in biodiversity, home to fifty billion humans free from disease and material needs, yet with less footprint than we use today. Technology can do this for us, as long as we don't get stuck.
Consider how much man has cost every other living thing on this planet today.
What kind of awful garbage take is this? It's objectively false, people who willingly don't have children are saw as society as second class citizens who are thought of as pathological. The VAST majority of humans have children at some point in their lives. It's true that there's a larger amount of people who willingly forgo having children than in the past, but it's still an incredibly fringe way of life.
>I would know, because I grew up on one.
Not saying that nobody should ever raise children in a rural area but the majority of people I know who grew up in rural areas got heavily involved in drugs and/or alcohol during their youth out of boredom. So there's downsides as well.
The world doesn't have an infinite amount of farmland, you can't raise "a lot of children" on a farm and have their children raise "a lot of children" on a farm indefinitely without running out of farmland. That, by definition, makes it not "ideal."
I would argue that those who leave the most behind are those who are kind and thoughtful to those in their lives. They leave behind one of the most important and precious things that anyone ever could - pleasant memories in the minds and experiences of others. They brought direct happiness to others through their kindness. This is the type of person I strive to be, and I feel enriched and deeply fulfilled when successful in doing so. In some ways, the type of peace that can bring can be one of the few things that you can "take with you" in death, in that you will feel that happiness until your very last moment, which you will most likely not generally do with material possessions.
I’d argue having children is the same. You can do it with zero effort, or you can do it with intention, to leave behind a better off generation, and devoting yourself selflessly as a parent to that cause.
I believe the lifelong quest of high-quality intention is what ultimately is the greatest achievement of life one can chase. Whether that is intentionally treating others with kindness and leaving pleasant memories, or intentionally raising healthy and inspired children who will continue to take up noble intention.
She was very, very happy with her way of living (she lived to about 85 or 86), almost no medical problems in her entire life (apart from the last couple of years), why would she have wanted to give that all away? For some fancy trips to the seaside? That was not what she considered a good way of living.
Unless they go into debt. Then the bank owns them and the farm, and the debt turns into stress and you have the city experience, out in the great outdoors.
I always wanted to do ancestry for my family (family tree?) And I realized and still realize how far away people really become.
My last grandpa will die soon. I know his stories everyone knows but I don't know what he would have voted, what his favorite food is, what music he liked.
He has dementia now and forgets that he is at home and asks go go home.
What do I know from his life really?
He will end in some online tool as a name, two dates an image and lines connecting him to other family members.
I thought about making a legacy somehow and if I would make children I would create a family book and create rules which would share my thoughts with every future generation and everyone gets reached to follow it and enhance it like having Familie values and keeping them.
But at the end of the day I do realize for myself that this will not work as imagined and it doesn't matter at the end anyway.
Still hope the old man wasn't just trolling me.
In fact, having children significantly increases the risk that what you leave behind is actually detremental to the world overall.
It takes a special lack of irony to write a comment like this. One of the most closed minded comments I've ever read.
Hopefully your children will learn how not to judge others for different life choices, perhaps they will be more humble and not assume superiority over others just because they had children.
In case you had not looked around the world recently, having children is no great achievement. Any idiot can have them.
This guy at least got an article written about him, what have you done?
Why not? By definition it would leave you happy, what does it matter?
How many children are optimum?
Ignoring the fact that you are probably not correct scientifically speaking, I think that the constitution of your descendants is figuratively, symbolically, if not scientifically, yours (please pardon my English). It's yours because you played an entirely crucial role in creating this lineage. Whatever path it took after your role in it, that path was shaped by your involvement. You don't have to believe in the spiritual importance of lineage to acknowledge that your actions, and simply being, have some important, significant impact upon it. I find this outlook a bit too modern and nihilistic for me.
This valley dwellers will be there long after the ruins you created swallowed all you touch.