Yes, but unless your lineage ends quickly, it’s much, much more likely to be all than none. Most peoples’ lineages won’t end.
It wasn’t just having children; dating, relationships, love, sex, marriage, nothing like that ever got talked about. Some people follow their parents’ wishes, some rebel against them, but you can’t do either of those in a vacuum. It’s tough to know how to build a happy life starting from scratch and having to figure out everything on your own. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Plus, at some point those ideas become conspicuous in their absence. What did my parents know about my lack of social potential that they had no thoughts of family or grandkids?
ISTM the Adam and Eve mentioned above belies this. We all have a lineage to one “father” and one “mother.” If that is true now why won’t it be true in 100,000 years?
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t know anyone whose parents told them anything about starting a family (although I occasionally read about it in advice columns where a mother will nag her adult child about “when are you going to give me grandchildren”). I have 6 siblings, my ex-husband had 4, yet neither set of parents, nor any parents of anyone I knew, ever talked about starting a family. They were more concerned about making sure we launched, or at least went to school or got a job, used birth control, and stayed out of jail. During the ages a kid lives at home, the parents just aren’t coaching them in starting their own family. That notion is completely foreign to me as an ex-kid and as a parent.
I’m going to simplify here, but I think there’s some truth to saying that:
EVERYONE has to start from scratch and has to figure everything out on their own. I’m sure there are occasional parents who sit down with their offspring and articulate, in a useful way, all kinds of helpful guidance. But honestly, most of us end up figuring it out on our own even if our parents did try to tell us stuff. Because: If you had parents, they were (to be reductive) either good or bad.
If they were good, you figured out what to do by using them as role models and doing what they did.
If they were bad, you figured out what to do by doing everything the opposite of what they did.
That kinda worked for me. I had a horrible relationship with my mother, never felt I could trust her or that she’d support my ideas and life decisions but would instead criticize and belittle, and so treated my son exactly the opposite of the way I was treated. Son and I have an incrediblely loving, supportive relationship. So that strategy worked for me.
ETA: That may be unreasonably unsympathetic. I know nothing about the OP’s life. For all I know, the OP’s parents were abusive, detached, drug-addled, or otherwise severely damaging to their child(ren). It’s a struggle to flourish as an adult when you had a lousy childhood. But - at some point you look in the mirror and say, “I’m (30, 40, 50, 60, 70) years old. Am I going to define myself through bitter memories of a shitty childhood, or am I going to relish the fact that I am an adult with choices now, and try to live the best life I can?”
MORE ETA: I wish therapy choices and treatment for depression and anxiety were better than they are, too, because those can take a horrible toll. You’re not a bad person if mental health struggles mean your life is more messed up than you’d like.
FINAL ETA: Where is @Spice_Weasel when we need her? She’d give the best answer of all to this subject.
Really, nothing at all; no “let me know if you want to borrow the car”, “don’t stay out too late”, “have you thought about what you want to wear to the prom”? Nothing that even tangentially hinted at having a social life? That surprises me.
There was a Straight Dope column many years ago that mentioned a girl who was discovered at 7 years old who had been kept extremely isolated by her parents, to the point of not even teaching her to speak. Despite all the attempts later, she never really learned anything beyond a very limited vocabulary. (I don’t know there has been anything more discovered about this case, or the subject in general.)
It seems like we need to learn certain things at certain times in our lives. If I didn’t have anyone to learn certain sociall skills from when I was supposed to, I don’t know if I could make it up later.
This may be getting a little off-topic for the thread. If the OP would like me to drop it, I will.
This conversation segues neatly into the fact that most [all?] developed countries’ populations are declining. The US population is predicted to flatline more or less until 2080, mainly due to immigration.
A declining population has many effects, including the ones discussed above. Most concerning is that the balance between the elderly and the young will be distorted.
No, they don’t belie it, because those two are talking about something completely different. Again, mt-Eve is from the purely female line, and Y-Adam is from the purely male line. It is true that, eventually, your line of sons’ sons’ sons’ etc. is likely to die out. But in all of those many generations, some of those sons’ sons’ sons’ will have daughters, too, and some of those daughters’ lines will live on.
I may be missing something.
You, me, everyone can trace our lineage back to two people that we all have in common. One male and one female.
So, even if you have many sons and daughters and they do the same well into the future it seems your lineage will probably die out…at some point no one in the distant future can draw a line back to you regardless of gender. This will be true for almost all of us.
Are you saying if you lived 150,000 years ago someone on the planet today could (in theory) trace their lineage straight to you?
I think we might be talking past each other on this.
I’m of the opinion that, unless you can positively attest to 100% fidelity by EVERY relative in your long lineage, then your genes are still in the pool, perhaps no longer of your name, but def still swimming around.
I’m going to try an example. Lets say Rose and Tony have two children , Anne and Joe. They each have two children , a boy and a girl and those four each have a boy and a girl. Rose , Anne, Anne’ s daughter and her daughter’s daughter will have the same mtDNA. But each of those girls also has their father’s lineage so there are four men whose genes are being passed on - some of Joe’s might make it to his granddaughter. The same goes for y chromosomes and Joe, Brian Brian’s son and his son’s son and the four women whose genes are passed on to their sons.
It’s not that everyone living today will have descendants in 150,000 years- some of those lines will absolutely die out because there will always be some people who don’t reproduce and some of them will be only children. But it’s not almost every line that will die out - I have two parents and four grandparents and eight great grandparents and 16 great-great grandparents and so on. Right there that’s thirty people from whom I descended, Add some more for my children and grandchildren. At some point you have pedigree collapse and the 16 great-great grandparents are only 14 different people - but those 14 people still have descendants living today.
Nope - although I don’t agree that any of those things have to do with telling someone anything about starting a family. I suppose at some point my parents must have given me a time to be home , but it wasn’t their suggestion that I go out to begin with. They occasionally let me borrow the car but they didn’t bring up the subject and I’m not at all sure they knew that I went to my prom. I didn’t learn social skills by my parents telling me things in high school. I learned some very basic ones when I was much younger and most I learned from my peers as I started socializing. I knew very well what my parents wishes/expectations for me were without them ever saying anything explicitly - don’t have sex before you’re married, especially don’t get pregnant before you’re married and marry someone who can support you and however many children you have because you won’t be able to earn enough to support yourself.
What you seem to be missing, is that as well as being descended from those two people, you are also descended from hundreds, maybe thousands of other people who were alive at the exact same time as each of those people. And every one of us has those shared ancestors in common.
Do you understand that your maternal grandfather and your paternal grandmother are just as significant in your ancestry as your maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather?
Well, I say ‘people’. Some of the estimates for the era of the Adam figure could just about mean he wasn’t a modern human.
Of course, I managed to mess up the names - that should be Tony, Joe, Joe’s son and his son’s son.
It remains to be seen whether or not my grands procreate. There are ten of them who are blood kin, but they’re all too young at this point. On the other hand, I have nieces and nephews who bore children, and who in turn have had offspring, so the line isn’t likely to die out any time soon.
I often marvel that my great-grandfather survived the Battle of Bull Run. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.
Going the other way, I believe it’s purely a result of social assumptions that I and my siblings exist. Without the near iron clad assumption that ALL normal women wanted to marry and become mothers (and the relative scarcity of birth control options) I doubt my mother would have had children.
Note: she wasn’t a bad mother at all – not abusive, not neglectful. She was a SAHM except for a couple of years during WWII, then ‘retired’ after my father got out of the Army. In fact, she was the mother who undertook zillions of civic/social tasks: was a Cub scout leader, then a Girl Scout leader, held several Training level positions in Girl Scouts, was head of PTA, all sorts of charitable organizations, on and on.
I even think she loved her children, her oldest son and youngest daughter the most, mainly because of their time as basically ‘only’ children.
But … it was all sort of out of duty. I am a Good Woman, therefore I am a loving and devoted mom because that is what Good Women do.
She was highly organized, energetic, and determined. She LIVED for the training classes she ran and the various charitable drives she organized. I honestly think she would have been a superb business manager or owner…if the idea that she COULD do such a thing had ever been part of the social reality she was born and brought up in.
Going the other way: none of her children has had children – that we know of – and now all the males are dead and the women well past breeding age, so that’s that.
But the OP didn’t mention whether he had cousins or nieces and nephews. My point is that my family name may die with my granddaughter, but our DNA will live on.
“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
~ Fight Club
Of course, I have family that will carry on my general DNA. But my particular branch (me) will not make it past my daughter. Again, not earth-shattering but still a strange thing to think about (for me anyway). I know evolution doesn’t work this way, but in a weird way, it seems a shame that evolution has ‘worked’ so hard to get me here and now that line just evaporates.
You ungrateful wretch! All that work for nothing! (j/k 
)
As noted upthread, I’m in the same situation and I’ve had the same thoughts.
I know, right!? I’m filled with existential dread.