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Comment by aapoalas | Hacker News Reader

A philosopher friend of mine pointed this exact thing: After having children he stopped pondering about the big existential questions.

Paraphrasing his words: "You neither have the time nor the need to think of the meaning of it all: Children give meaning to everything ."

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After having children, it finally clicked to me that the purpose of life is simple - survival of your genes.

It is the only purpose I have thought of so far which makes sense logically - organisms who care about the survival of their genes are more likely to have their genes survive. Organisms who do not care about that are less likely to do so.

I am yet to find a reason for having children that is neither based on a past, now non-existent economic concern, nor could be retorted to with "so would getting yourself addicted to drugs". This article is of the latter variety.

Why WOULD I want to sign up for either an endless bunch of chores, OR a bogus chemical change in my brain - let alone both - to make me stop pondering the meaning of life?

Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-natalist and I support people having kids. Heck I'd pay for people to have more kids! I just want people to stop getting self-important about it. Purely by the numbers of the people who have accomplished child-rearing, it's one of the least special jobs in the world; maybe the least special of all - almost anyone can do it. There's more (real, not drug-like) meaning in agriculture or trash pickup.

Why do you believe there's more meaning in trash pickup? If the argument is that it provides more utility to people in a community, surely raising a child into a responsible, productive member of society is way more utility?

It just always seemed like a curse to me to only be able to ponder such a very very short small & local set of considerations. I think it's amazing that our species can take such grander views. Having children seems to truncate that perspective enormously.

Still want kids, still excited for this future. But man, I think most kids would have much better lives & grow up to be better more interesting people if the parents & adults didn't have to make such enormous sacrifices, if there was some spare capacity left over. And I think capitalism & the world we live in today is especially draining & enmiserating in this way.

> And I think capitalism & the world we live in today is especially draining & enmiserating in this way.

When was it bețter exactly?

When child-rearing was a communal activity supported by friends and extended family.

You need to have a lot of kids for that to happen.

Unpopular opinion: parents get tax breaks, extra paid time off, and plenty of social leeway for blocking sidewalks with strollers / crying babies on planes, etc.

Please don’t ask for more. We who don’t have kids have our own problems.

As George Carlin put it: “speaking as a mother, …”

"Do you want to think about the meaning of life, or double it and pass it to the next person?"

This disgusts me, because I want to think about meaning, and the statement strikes me as a hand-wavy excuse for distracting oneself, as well as an attack on my values. But then, the point raised by the article is that distraction is somewhat similar to meaningful purpose, and the line is a fine one because we adapt to new problem situations. Watching myself go through such adaptation is always somewhat creepy, and the moments of choice before embarking on a momentous project are difficult, not merely for reasons of cost/benefit analysis but because "cost" and "benefit" are liable to redefined by embarking, which is just confusing. Charlie Kaufman wrote a film called "Adaptation" which I thought was about this maybe.

I think being too tired is just a small part of it. A much bigger one is that children give you an enormous sense of mission: to protect them, educate them, shape them. To foster the world around you so that when they grow up, it's not as messed up as it could otherwise be. To be a better person all round, so you can be a better parent to them. You learn things so you can teach them, you learn things from them, you pick up hobbies together to learn alongside.

Whether it's all worth the effort is a separate question, but oh boy it's a boost to existential anxiety for sure.

Yes, that's true, although it's always irritated me slightly because it has a repetitive element, from one generation to the next, an element of "kicking the can down the road" or "passing the buck". Which is not to deny that it all generates knowledge and makes progress, but it (parenthood) generates a lot of churn, too.

> but it (parenthood) generates a lot of churn, too.

That churn is also known as "living".

Well, I prefer to avoid it, whatever it's called.

The thinking-about-meaning is a distraction, too. A rather poor one, I increasingly believe, as I stare down the back side of middle age. That I’d end up flirting with that attitude would have really surprised me at age 20. Or 30, for that matter.

It’s all distractions. Pick a good distraction.

Having written that, do you have a second thought or refinement of it at all? For instance, maybe thinking-about-meaning isn't such a bad distraction, and if that's the distraction I pick, we're back where we started. I could happily admit that our minds are just elaborate functions, and so we might as well get on with it and function: but part of that function is being concerned about meaning (or purpose, a similar but more active term), so this assertion undermines itself.

Death lurks on the far horizon, distracting us and hustling us along, and perhaps tends to bias us toward the "stop worrying and get on with it before you go belly-up" point of view. Which is a shame, but practical.

I mean, I get where you're coming from and as someone who has spent a long time pondering and still wants kids, I can maybe offer you some solace in my conclusions.

A lot of "thinking-about-meaning" for me has transformed into fatalism. I firmly believe that our cognitive faculties demand a higher purpose, though I can't define what that purpose is. I disassemble my thought process, and prod deeper into my logical functions as to why I'm drawn to certain conclusions. At some point, I realize that I need to combat shortcomings and psychological "self-tricks" my mind instinctively employs. I'm prone to wanting shortcuts. In fact, I think this is the default state of non-abberant human thought. Visually, your eyes can hallucinate in the form of optical illusions where it employs predictive generated information based on patterns. Intuitively, you come to a conclusion because you've experienced proximity to similarity. But similarities are not, by definition, identical. In this delta lies all of humanity's greatest accomplishments, exploits, and suffering.

And in this I come to address the fundamental problem of "thinking-about-meaning". We draw experience from similarities, but we don't have a definitive state of 'singularity'. This is the barrier of human thought. You face the insurmountable variance of uncertainty. Cursed to cobble together primitive inference. Barely navigating this incomprehensible reality. You will never have a satisfying answer. You will always be isolated. You will always be alone. You will never be able to 'truly' share this experience with anyone else. And in here we long for comfort the most. We share wisdom and aphorisms. Our little 'shortcuts' in life.

"The young do not know what they have".

"Sex is not all that it's cracked up to be".

"The body is the prison of the soul".

Futility? Perhaps. But we sure are driven to iterate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i think the question of the meaning of life is maybe better answered by looking outward and get inspiration from other sources. look at the various religions and philosophies to find something that resonates. some people spend decades on this journey, so i don't think there is a quick answer, and not finding anything doesn't mean there is anything wrong with you.

i found meaning in the idea that the purpose of the existence of humanity itself is to carry forward an ever advancing civilization.

that means that we work together to make life better for everyone. this can mean raising children, but it also has room for many other activities and contributions that don't involve having children of your own.

having found a satisfactory answer, i don't think about meaning, but i focus on my role in the world to fulfill that purpose, while dealing with my own needs and shortcomings.

Wonderfully written. Thanks

> For instance, maybe thinking-about-meaning isn't such a bad distraction, and if that's the distraction I pick, we're back where we started.

In particular, concern that taking on a great task might demote the prominence of or drive for thinking-about-meaning in one’s life seems to me a sign of having gotten a bit lost in the woods and seeing only trees, if you will.

I think that sort of activity makes a better prologue and occasional footnote than it does a story, and that doing is both greater and much harder than thinking—which is why centering thought per se is such tempting bait. Many great thinkers warn of this :-)

Having meaning beats seeking meaning—the latter’s not much of an end, and doing less of it for having occupied oneself with meaning isn’t a loss.

Forgetting to seek meaning would also be losing one's way. Sounds like balance is probably best. Moderation in some things.

I always find myself between procrastination or escapism. If you do whatever, it most likely can be considered as escapism, if you don't, you're procrastinating what you should've been doing. There's no middle ground.

i think his wording is poorly phrased.

I think that having children put things in a different perspective/context. which makes your analysis of existence quite different.

I know that the day I held my son I felt something click/change in my mind. I can't really describe what changed, just that my priorities changed.

I still cant really aptly describe what changed... and it's been nearly 16 years to the day that he was born. (and I've also had a daughter (13) as well)

oh also, having children is a form of immortality. I know that my impact on the world will carry on, and I'm pretty pleased with the form that it takes.

i was you in my twenties, by my late 30s i figured out there is no meaning and you have to make your own meaning. Kids are the easy button for making meaning.

I heard that one ad nauseam: "the point is, there is no point," they'd* say, when I tried to coax them into discussions about what the point might be. I don't think you figured this out, I think you retreated to it.

Edit: I should be fairer about this. Yes, you "make your own meaning", in a sense, but I'm sure there is also an overarching abstract objective meaning. Even then, it's quite possibly more accurate to say a web or network of objective meanings: it doesn't seem to work very well as a hierarchy with a single value being fundamental, although I'm keen on knowledge-creation as a big one. But because abstract, objective ideas are impersonal and distant, they're not much use: you can't really work out what to do next, which is the basic moral question, from first principles, but instead have to be guided by what you like and what's around you, and this is adapting to the problem situation in which you find yourself (or the problem situations which you may choose to enter into). So to be honest I probably agree with you but just didn't like the way you said it, and I want to make a fuss about the details.

* For any arbitrary value of "them"

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