Sometimes when I'm struggling with the day to day mundane aspects of early years parenting I reframe it as the work of continuing the human race. Somehow makes it easier to keep pushing on as something so significant _should_ be challenging.
That's just your ego talking. The human race will be just fine with or without you raising kids. Our great great ancestor monkeys and fishes didn't raise their children to push their species to centuries further. They just existed and it's what they do as part of their nature. Trying to project meaning to it just ego at play.
Trying desperately not to project meaning into it, running from your ego... is still just the ego talking, but now through the denial of it, such is the fundamental nature of the ego for the human.
True overcoming of the ego is where it doesn't even bother you if things have meaning or not, since there is no separation between your body and the rest of the world. True overcoming of ego is indistriguishable from true giving-in to ego. Is the ultimate act of letting go.
After this you can choose to raise kids, choose to pursue a career in tech and a hobby in arts. Just because it won't matter you will do it, because now you can choose meaning if you wish. Just because it doesn't matter it does matter. You become the creator.
Well put! I would add that probably nobody achieves this consistently, it's a lifetime practice. So coping strategies like I proposed her can still be useful in the chaos of daily life.
I agree but I'd add that there is nothing to fix. Life is just tough and sometimes you cry because it hurts, and sometimes it fills you with joy and you rejoice. Rinse and repeat until you time has passed and it's now our descendants turn in this world.
Maybe it's clearer in the form of a question: how are you completely sure you are NOT enlightened if you don't know what it is to be enlightened?
Because you don't just hurt, you suffer. Across the spiritual spectrum people report that "enlightenment" brings a radical reduction or elimination of self-inflicted suffering, and a profound inner peace. This jives with my limited experience of it as well.
Someone kicks you in the shin, it causes pain. If it triggers a whole internal loop of fear and worry and anger and revenge and trauma and suffering, then you've hit upon your ego which you're unable to let go of. If your internal experience isn't sticky, then before you know it, the pain has dissipated and you're on to whatever the next present moment brings.
And this is why there is nothing to fix, because it doesn't change anything external. If it doesn't change anything external, if it's only an internal loop, it's the same as the ascetic attitude that Nietzsche describes. You can beat yourself until you're in line with your expectations for your ego, or you change your whole relationship with yourself, more accepting of your flaws and more trusting that you are able to overcome this internal loop eventually, but not today.
It was self-sustaining for months, until I fell off the horse due to being unable to eat (broken jaw). If you find some equanimity in this life you can rest assured that peace will be tested frequently :)
How do I be free? I have tasted the freedom for a short time but I can't sustain it. A new ego has been formed after seeing through the old ego. And it also claims to be free of ego.
I'm not a guide, just a messenger. I'm also just a person.
I can't tell you how you go about your pursuit of freedom, or the pursuit of what it means to live free.
I can tell you what it means to me. I'm free when I can choose everyday to pursue what it means to live free. I'm also free when I choose the limitations in this pursuit, because I don't want the anxiety of the hyperpositive when everything is possible. I'm also free when I consider the other, my kin and when I choose to serve them. I'm also free when I ask for strength to change the things in my life that I can, and for wisdom to accept those things I can't change.
Actually, in a rare exception this isn't my ego for once. I'm well aware my specific kids don't have any special cosmic significance or even just special significance to the human race. However, continuing humanity does seem at least an interesting thing to do and it's a collective effort. It's also best entered into consciously as a human since you can have far more impact on other humans and animals than a fish can. It's also definitely challenging to raise kids, so it's real work I'm doing.
Thinking about continuing humanity is a coping strategy and I can assure you it's more effective than HN rationality when my kid is screaming about their cheerios etc
No they won't. The human race will literally put you in a tiny cage if you don't raise kids how they approve. It makes them seethe, rage, and their skin boil, they do not feel at all fine and they have invented entire apparatus to make sure people who do not raise children as they approve are punished harshly.
Children are great under normal circumstances, its spouses and living with them 24/7 who create friction which easily dissolve even best relationships, one atom at a time.
Many reasons for that, but most I've seen could be summed up as "women expect men to change in marriage, and men expect women to not change", and it fails all over that statement in relationship over time, when kids and responsibilities come knocking at the door of your free time and energy.
Why would I want to? But let's say I want to, we have been here for a few 1000 years and our trackrecord is absolutely horrifying. We kill people not even to eat but for some religious madness... You really believe your offspring will live in a billion years?
Sure, it's a pretty high chance they will go into space. If they use energy storage it could even be trillions of years. It really depends if humanity self-destructs or not.
Also different animals kill each other all the time. It's part of the cycle of life. I don't get why you have such a negative perspective.
I will be childfree, so will my sister. Both of us are queer. As far as I know, all my three cousins (two of whom are queer) feel the same. There's no reason to expect that your children will want to reproduce, and it is pretty selfish to project your own dissatisfaction with life onto another human that way.
Children kind of are scarce, though? Most countries aren’t reproducing at replacement levels. Were that to continue forever, the human population would go to zero.
School districts around me are closing schools because there aren’t enough kids to fill them.
Murray Rothbard argued there should be a thriving market for children. There's certainly something to it, there are so many places where children or at least female ones are viewed as completely without value and yet others who view them as both scarce and valuable. We are currently struggling much in this world with the problem of ensuring children end up where they are most cherished and valued.
It sounds terrible, but I'm inclined to agree with him the children would be better off if there really were child auctions.
Why should somebody consider their own "family line" special? That seems pretty arbitrary - perhaps hardwired in some way but not in any sense a moral imperative.
When there's an imminent danger of the human species ending because of a lack of babies, we can talk about the other point.
Family like any other material possessions is just another building block for the ego. Trying to believe you own something or is something when nothing is permanent and everything is part of everything else.
I find discussions of selfishness interesting in the context of a biological imperative.
Raising kids mostly feels to me like I have a horrible heroin addiction. Loads of cash and time, reduced access to jobs, increased risk of intrusion by authorities and I struggle to see any personal benefit but lots of personal losses. Nonetheless my brain has tricked me somehow into it, at some basic biological level, and it seems this trickery at least at the population level is a necessary condition of life to the point free will is a total joke to consider as part of the equation.
At an individual maybe there is some selfish choice but at a population level having a kid is about the biological equivalent of taking a shit -- people don't take a shit because they are selfish they do it because it is biologically required and humans simply evolved to match this requirement.
This sounds like the free will argument. we're just complex receptors to stimuli, we don't choose anything, we receive inputs and react accordingly. "it's just biology"
in this sense there's no discussion on why humans chooses kids or heroin, or taking a shit. The answer is "they don't"
so this isn't about kids. you've made up your mind about all reality.
>in this sense there's no discussion on why humans chooses kids or heroin, or taking a shit. The answer is "they don't"
This is false equivalence, taking heroin isn't a biologicals imperative, reproduction is obligatory to life.
My thesis is humans have no real choice at a population level not to reproduce, your fallaciously equate that to a reductionist view on everything else including things not obligatory to life.
The way I understand your position is "we're wired to do/choose X"
The big discussion is why have kids. And your position then is we're wired to, just like taking a dump.
It's not a good argument in my mind because the position voids every decision. There are no decisions. No free will. We can discuss that, i suppose.
edit: saw your update. I don't know I think it tracks. Asking why does someone do something implies a choice, to argue it's not a choice is a different argument. A good one even, but it's different.
>I find discussions of selfishness interesting in the context of a biological imperative.
Why is an interesting discussion, but not identical here. The charge I was responding to was specifically addressing selfishness.
I am totally open to the idea one can act selfishly both under the pretext that there is or isn't free will, which moots any attempt you're making here to shoehorn the argument into that.
ok then "selfishness" is now the unanswerable topic. it's too complex. Classic "there is no altruism". All acts are selfish if one derives any benefit from them. are there acts that people do by choice that give them no benefit?
i don't think this is reductionist btw. Philosophy tends to make people eye-roll. These are unanswerable questions! Discussion is the fun part.
Selfish non-choice. Ex: The fetus takes nourishment from the mother, even in the case she would rather abort and doesn't consent to the continued hosting of the fetus.
Selfish choice: Ex: I must take a dump, but the place I choose to take a shit is on my bosse's chair because I don't like that his is better than mine.
Non-selfish choice: Fireman is driving home after his shift ended, saves baby from fire.
Non-selfish non-choice: Woman involuntarily starts screaming after witnessing an unrelated car drive into a lake. Passers-by hear the scream and alert emergency services.
You’re projecting your values. There’s very strong arguments to be made in both directions without being responsible for a family line (however you might choose to define that) or an entire species.
Legitimate and honest question which is not an attempt to insult or devalue you: Do you personally consider 4/5 cousins in a generation of a family being queer (to my understanding this means not heterosexual) to be a statistical anomaly, or have you pinpointed a cause or causes for this outlier?
