While holding my newborn son in my arms last night, after spending five long and agonizing hours in the delivery room with my wife, it occurred to me that THIS is the meaning of life:
For a man and woman to join together to produce a new life, and to raise and care for that child until it is grown and can care for itself and for another and for these two to carry on the cycle. Anything else is either in indirect support of this, or else is window dressing.
Farmers produce food (and sell it) so that others can feed their children. Police provide security so that parents can raise their children without fear. Even politicians do their part in that they help manage the systems of laws that keep civilization peaceful - and a peaceful civilization let more people raise more children better. Parents work at jobs that free other parents to do other things. By dividing the work amongst all of the citizens of civilization, all parents have less actual work to do in securing the basic necessities of life for their children. This gives the parents more time to be parents and do a better job of raising the children.
All of this is rather idealized, I know. Civilization doesn’t work perfectly, and sometimes it seems to directly oppose my views in particular cases (e.g. a single parent working two or more jobs who thereby has relatively little time for the children.) But even in the example, there are still the people in child’s environment who take an indirect parent mode: Teachers, social workers, police, councilors,etc.
The meaning of life:
To have and raise children as well as possible, and to contrive a better civilization so that future parents have even better conditions for having and raising children.
To the moderators:
If you decide that this would be better in MPSIMS, then go ahead and move it there. I just couldn’t bring myself to label something motivated by my son as “mundane.”
By the OP, do you intend to imply that the lives of people who do not desire to have children or people who cannot bear children are devoid of meaning?
while holding my cat in my arms last night, it occurred to me that this is the meaning of life:
for two people to join together to care for a new life, and to raise and care for that kitten until it is grown and can care for itself and for another and for these two to carry on the cycle. anything else is either in indirect support of this, or else is window dressing.
farmers produce food (and sell it) so that others can feed their cats. police provide security so that people can raise their cats without fear. even politicians do their part in that they help manage the systems of laws that keep civilization peaceful - and a peaceful civilization let more people raise more cats better. people work at jobs that free other people to do other things. by dividing the work amongst all of the citizens of civilization, all people have
less actual work to do in securing the basic necessities of life for their cats. this gives the people more time to be people and do a better job of raising the cats.
all of this is rather idealized, i know. civilization doesn’t work perfectly, and sometimes it seems to directly oppose my views in particular cases (e.g. a single person working two or more jobs who thereby has relatively little time for the cats.) but even in the example, there are still the people in cats’ environment who take an indirect person mode: visitors, neighbors, mailpeople, friends, etc.
the meaning of life:
to have and raise cats as well as possible, and to contrive a better civilization so that future people have even better conditions for having and raising cats.
You’re obviously very proud of having a child. You have no reason to be. It doesn’t take any skill or merit to make a baby. Get back to me in 18 years after you’ve raised the child into a fine upstanding citizen and I’ll congratulate you.
In the meantime, GD seems like a fine place for this op. There have been a number of threads in the past here that were posted by people like yourself, parents who felt like life had absolutely no meaning if you didn’t have kids. There were plenty of happy childless people who shot the idea down in flames. Maybe your life was devoid of any meaning before your sperm managed to swim a few inches upstream, but a lot of us are perfectly happy without that trivial accomplishment.
I thought they did it mainly to make money and feed themselves. Did you know that people who don’t have children have to eat food too? Imagine that.
The police are there for all the citizens, not just the children.
I was going to go through each line of that ridiculous paragraph and apply the same rebuttal to each one, but what’s the point. You’re high on the exhileration of having a newborn child and suddenly all of civilization seems to be all about what just happened in your life. Pretty egocentric if you ask me.
As for your thoughts, I don’t mean to belittle your feelings, but relating “the meaning of life” to the propagation of the species is a fairly common idea in biology. It’s actually kind of funny to hear parent after parent, generation after generation, suddenly “discover” this idea – an idea they hold simply because they are genetically “programmed” to, not because it has some kind of inate, objective truth (no matter how much it may feel as though it does).
Yep, the purpose – or “meaning”, if you will – of life is to propagate itself. Because it is part-and-parcel of our survival that we believe something like that.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that every single aspect of human behavior – every urge, every nuance, every common psychological trait that all (or at least most) humans share – is one that maximizes the individual’s chances for reproductive success. The more copies of your genes there are out there, the better your genes are doing. By that reasoning, if we humans have an urge to find “meaning” in our existence, it would make sense that that urge would be fulfilled by something that increases our odds of reproductive success.
So of course the OP concludes that the meaning of life is to create kids from his own genes which will eventually be capable of reproduction themselves. I can explain best by setting up the following scenario: Suppose we have a gene that encourages us to find the meaning of life. Now suppose there are two alleles to this gene, allele A and allele B. People with allele A tend to conclude that the meaning of life is to have and raise children until they are capable of reproducing themselves. People with allele B tend to conclude that the meaning of life is to sit around and scratch your armpits all day.
On average, we would expect people with allele A to have more kids than people with allele B do, since the allele-A crowd attaches such deep meaning to having kids. Obviously, these tendencies aren’t set in stone; allele B does not “doom” all of its posessors to be childless, any more than allele A forces all of its posessors to have kids. But we’re talking about broad population averages here. And here’s the real trick: If you have allele A, your numerous kids will probably inherit allele A from you. If you have allele B, what few kids you do end up having will probably inherit allele B from you. Thus if generation N had a certain percentage of people with allele A and a certain percentage of people with allele B, you would expect generation N+1 to have a higher percentage of people with allele A and a lower percentage of people with allele B. Each successive generation will have a larger and larger percentage of kids carrying allele A and a smaller and smaller percentage of kids carrying allele B, until allele A is present in every person throughout the whole population and allele B is nowhere to be found. (Evolutionary biologists say allele A “sweeps to fixation.” and allele B is “extinguished.”)
So whether or not life really has a meaning, and whether or not that meaning really is to propagate your genes, we humans will continue to believe that self-propagation is the meaning of life (or is part of the meaning of life, or something) for as long as belief exists as part of human psychology.
Actually, no, I am not all that egocentric. You would seem to be. I view civilization as a way to make things better for everyone, and you disagree. That would seem to imply that you view civilization as existing to make your life better. Which point of view is egocentric?
Yes, I am slightly exhilirated by the experience of having a child (our second, by the way.) That is probably the reason that my phraseology is somewhat off tonight. It may also have something to do with the fact that yesterday was a very long and demanding day. At any rate, some things could have been phrased better. In particular, the sentence about the farmer. It should have read more like this: “Farmers produce food and sell it, and others buy it to feed their children.”
Reread the sentence about the police. I did not imply that they only protect children. They protect everyone, which makes it safer to raise children.
Right you are. It takes no skill or merit to make a baby. You just boink the next best bitch and away you go. It does, however, take a certain amount of committment to search for a woman (or a woman to search for a man) with whom you want to raise children, who will also make the committment with you to do what it takes to raise children into the best adults that you can help them to become.
Having a child is anything but trivial. It is hard for the man to stand by and to what little is possible to make the process easier. It is hard as hell for the woman. Having a child is one of the most exhausting and painful things that a human being can take upon herself.
I do not mean to imply that a person’s life is meaningless if he or she has no children, or does not want to have children. I do mean that ultimately, children are what give meaning to life. Look around you. All living things on this planet reproduce. They live and survive, and do this to reproduce. Evolution has caused it to be this way. An organism that does not reproduce dies out and leaves no offspring to carry on the disinclination to reproduce. The thing about human beings is this: We have intelligence, and use it to make our lives easier. In making our lives easier, we make it easier to reproduce. We also make it easier to raise our offspring. Civilization organizes the fruits of our labor and distributes them to others. This is what makes it possible for the life of a childless person to have meaning. A childless person contributes in someway to civilization. This in turn makes it easier for other people to survive. Survival makes it possible to reproduce, and more people then participate in the civilization. The more you can distribute the load of providing for the basic neccessities of life within a civilization, the easier it is for everyone.
A farmer does not have to sell his produce. He could produce just enough to feed himself. It would be difficult to do it using only tools that he could make himself, but he could. If he wants to have better tools, then he must purchase them. To purchase them he must exchange some of his produce for those tools. This makes the farmer’s life easier. He can now either produce the same amount with less work, or produce more for the same amount of work. This also makes the toolmaker’s life easier. The produce he got from the farmer go to feed him and his family (if he has one.) If the farmer has no family, then he does not directly contribute to the care and raising of children. If the toolmaker has children, then he (and his wife) contribute directly to the care and raising of the children and the farmer (with his selfish desire to work less and still have enough to eat) has contributed indirectly by exchanging his produce for tools. If neither the tool maker nor the farmer has children, and neither will ever have children then their lives are pretty pointless. They work, they eat, they sleep, and they die.
This example is simplified in the extreme, since it is unlikely that the farmer and the toolmaker will each have only the other as a customer. It does, however, illustrate how lives are interlocked, and how a childless person’s life does indeed have meaning.
Sorry folks, I did not in any way mean to imply that your life is meaningless if you don’t have children. I know plenty of people who don’t have children and I know that they are happy with their lives. They also mostly do something that in someway helps other people to lead better lives. Even a childless grocery store clerk is helping other people to have a slightly easier life. Ultimately, this helps the human race to have an easier time doing what it is here to do: To reproduce and to survive.
first of all congrats on baby furd. kids are pretty cool, eh?
for me, the meaning of life is much more internal. it has nothing to do with how many kids you have, what you do for a living, what you do for a living, how well educated you are, how much you weigh, or what you own. All of these things are pretty fleeting and can be taken away from you at any moment. i feel that we, in our modern culture, define ourselves by such criteria and this leads way too much stress. the meaning of life is much deeping and much more personal. it has nothing to do with what anyone else has. sit very still and listen. you’ll find it.
but that’s just the way i feel about it.
Thanks for the link. I did like it.
I don’t see your comments as belittling. They show that you understand where I am coming from and what I meant. Yes, it is funny that parent after parent for generations has discovered this. It is also rather reassuring. I would really worry if I were the first to have ever had these thoughts.
If I had to assign a “meaning” to life, it would be for each individual to enjoy the journey of discovery of the world and the self.
If that includes children for you, then so be it. If it does not, then so be it. It’s more of a subjective standard. It just so happens that most people find part of that meaning in reproduction.
Nothing I said implies that I disagree with civilization making life better for us. But you seem to think that an individual has to have children to contribute to society. Countless people have made the world a much better place despite never having offspring. A persons genes do not have to propagate in order for that person to make a meaningful impact on the world. You’ve taken a simple fact of life, that a species must procreate in order to avoid extinction, and attached some sort of mystical “meaning” to it. Like someone said a few replies ago, you have finally made an obvious observation about biology. If that’s all the meaning you need out of life then fine, you’ve got a very simple easy to understand philosophy without a lot of clutter.
But that simplistic view can be applied to other things, as the poster with the cat analogy did. What if I said the meaning of life was death. Everything every single living thing on this planet does eventually leads up to their death. That’s life’s crowning achievement. We only make babies so that death will continue. Silly isn’t it.
I’m not sure if Einstein or Newton or the rest of the great thinkers had children or not. Let’s look at both possibilities. Say that they did not have offspring. Are their accomplishments and contributions to the world diminished because of this? Didn’t their lives contribute to civilization more than the millions of average Joes and Janes who bumped uglies and made another mouth to feed during that time? Simply having children does not benefit civilization except on the very basic level of providing the world with one more generation of humans. What each individual does with his or her life is what matters. Making more babies is at the very bottom of the pyramid when it comes to giving your contribution back to civilization.
Now let’s say that they did have offspring. It doesn’t mean that their kids are going to grow up and be anything special. Just another person with the last name Einstien.
To your life. Not to LIFE. In the big picture, children are simply what give continuation to life, not meaning. If all we are here for is to make more people then the whole thing seems a little absurd to me. We’re no better than a virus.
You got part of it right before, about making peoples lives better. I just don’t see why you think having a baby means you’ve made a contribution to society, or made everyone else’s life better. You’ve just kept the wheel rolling, that’s all.
Thanks for the link. I did like it.
I don’t see your comments as belittling. They show that you understand where I am coming from and what I meant. Yes, it is funny that parent after parent for generations has discovered this. It is also rather reassuring. I would really worry if I were the first to have ever had these thoughts.
gadgetgirl:
Thanks. Kids are cool. This is our second. A son to go along with our daughter-
I agree that it doesn’t matter how many kids you have or even if you have none. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living (except in a few cases of really bad things,) nor how well you are educated, or what you weigh or what you own. The thing I am trying to get at is pretty much a feeling. A feeling that our civilization, sliding and bumping and chaotic as it seems, tends to make survival easier. I am not talking about what you have so much as why you should have it. I buy a coat because I need one to stay warm in the winter (to ease my survival.) I don’t buy it because it has some company’s logo on the back or because it was made by company X. But, even a coat with a logo will keep you warm and help you survive. Even if you bought it because of the logo, it is still a good thing to have. This is what I like about civilization: For all of the strange and superficial things we do as members of civilization, civilization is still a wonderful tool to help mankind in its struggle to survive and grow.
**LokiTheDog:
Nothing I said implies that I disagree with civilization making life better for us. But you seem to think that an individual has to have children to contribute to society. **
Sorry, Loki. I didn’t mean to imply that a person has to have children in order to contribute to society. The original posting probably came off that way because I am a bit excited and exhuberant.
I do mean that civilization boils down to “make it easier for the human race to survive.” That means most especially that reproduction is way up there on the priority scale.
People do contribute, and in quite important ways I might add, without having children. It is just that the end effect is that those of us with children thereby have an easier time having and raising children. And those children may grow up to either have children of their own, or to contribute in some great way to civilization, or both. Yes, just having and raising children is a help to civilization. Children raised to be resonsible adults will, if nothing more, contribute to maintaining civilization. Taking in your correction of my impression of your views, I would conclude that we would both find maintaining civilzation to be a good thing.
Check out some of my other responses to your posts.
P.S.
I am going to stop posting for a while. I am not going off in a snit. It is 1:30AM on Monday morning here in Germany. I realize that you all are in a different time zone and can keep right on posting. I would like to keep answering, but yesterday was a long day and I need to get off to bed.
I think that’s what you were getting at in the op, that’s simple to agree with. But you said this
My problem was with the future parents part. In my opinion it should have read, “so that everyone has better conditions for living.”
Have you ever thought about it in ways relating to other life forms? Like bees for instance. They don’t have ‘parents’ or ‘families’ in our sense of the word. Yet they have civilization. I wonder what the meaning of life is to a bee? Unless you’re the queen or one of her studs, the vast majority of the hive will never reproduce. But the hive would perish without the food they provide. So to a worker bee, collecting nectar is the meaning of life.