The world you grew up in no longer exists, that's true.
It could never exist any longer because your grandparents are dead of old age, you parents are old, you are an adult, and your kids are now the ones growing up in the world. Like a flowing stream, the water itself has moved on. Someday your parents will be dead, you will be old, your kids will be adults, and your grandkids will be growing up in the world. Someday you will be dead, your kids will be old, your grandkids will be adults, and your great grandkids will be growing up in the world, and the cycle repeats and will until the day the human race ends.
So the question becomes, what are you doing to make sure you kids world is one you'd like them to grow up in?
The question came up as I sat with my son on a rocky beach next to a creek. I read Tolkien to him while he gathered rocks and threw them into the water. I couldn't help but think: "This isn't the world I grew up in, but this is a childhood I would have been happy to have."
I don't believe you need to change the entire world to make a world you want your kids to grow up in. It doesn't matter nearly as much as you think what's going on around other continents, or even the national capitol. You can start with your own life, your own home, your own habits.
I was having a discussion about how I'm raising Grayson, and the other person brought up that it must be nice to have money, but then I pointed out that none of the things I'm doing require any particular amounts of money. Walking to the park, walking to the nearby walking paths, a piece of paper and a pen to do lessons, a book you can take out of the library.
"But the parks are all filled with garbage?" -- well cleaning up garbage is free, isn't it? If you do such a thing then quickly the park will no longer be filled with garbage, and the world is a better place. Have you recently done such a thing to make the world a better place?
"But I'm so tired I don't have time or energy to do stuff" -- you have a choice how you spend your time and how you view things, and you can often find energy you didn't think you had for things that are important to you. It might surprise you how much time and energy you find, and you might find it's more of a virtuous cycle than you think. Have you sincerely tried?
"But what if people judge me?" -- you might be surprised, the world may be a lot friendlier than you think.
"It's too hot out or too cold out" -- you might be surprised what you can tolerate when you get into the habit of leaving your climate controlled spaces now and again. Our bodies are surprisingly adaptable to different climates.
"There's nothing good near me" -- you might be surprised, the world may be a lot more interesting than you think when you stop assuming you know all there is to know.
Some people might go "But I don't have a house, I don't have a wife, I don't have kids" and some people might not even have any kind of family or friends. I've been there, I feel you. Right after college, I ended up in a city nowhere near anywhere I'd ever lived before -- no friends, no family, no idea how to build a life. But it's a matter of faith -- you have to keep trying to make your world better, put your home in order, make your community better, and eventually it can pay off. If you do nothing then nothing will happen.
"I can't think of anything!" Think harder. If you're reading one of my posts you're undoubtedly smart enough to think of something. You'll probably have to break patterns of behavior and do things you didn't consider doing.
And for those who don't have kids and think they don't want kids: The future is built by our children. Many people think they don't need to build that future and they'll steal it from someone else, but they're wrong. The future belongs to the children, and the children are raised by their parents. So if we do our duty to the future, then it will be us who guide those children to the future worth living in, and the suicidal ones will simply die out.
Will putting that kind of effort into building the future generations work out? Maybe, maybe not. People say the future is uncertain, but it's never not been uncertain. Mitochondrial Eve is not that far back in human history, and Y-Chromosomal Adam is in a completely different era in time, so not that long ago humanity was reduced to a single common ancestor twice. People say it's immoral to have kids, but that concept is suicidal -- Do you not love yourself? Do you not love your wife or husband? Because your child will be genetically and behaviorally half you and half your partner. Of course you need to take the future as a matter of faith to some degree, but if you don't have faith in that above anything else you'll prove to be a genetic dead-end.
Many people think that our current age of nihilism, hedonism, and decadence is unique. Many people think that this is the first time religion failed. Many people think that this is the first time technology nearly ripped civilization apart. That's an ahistorical view, largely enabled by our postwar focus on the world wars, slavery, and colonialism to the rejection of most of history.
The problems of the bronze age collapse, of the axial age, of the late Roman Republic and later the late Empire, and even crises of post-Roman European society (of which the age of colonization itself was actually a symptom) all have stories to tell about societies that were facing potential collapses, and some of those resulted in collapse (but not the end of the people in most cases), and some led to revolutionary revitalizations. No matter what, the individuals involved needed to continue living even when the societies collapsed. In some cases such as after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the common man actually had huge increases in quality of life -- according to grave records, there was very few times in history where the health of common people improved more than after the collapse of the Roman Empire. So whatever happens we must be preparing for the future -- revolutionary revitalization or collapse.
We live in a world with more mental health issues than any other point in history, and I think the refusal to do the above is one of the reasons. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that we ought to figure out our personal values, and live by our values, and to live authentically. Spending all day every day in a room looking at a screen isn't living authentically. that isn't to say such a thing can't be part of your life (The Internet gives me great joy in many ways), but human beings are embodied creatures, we live in the real world, we were created in the real world, and we die in the real world. A world where we click on mice and clack on keyboards and stare at screens 16 hours a day and sleep 8 isn't an authentic human life. Embodied human beings must participate in the real world at some point. And I while I'm a capitalist, I don't mean in capitalist spaces either. You don't go out into the world to spend money, you go out into the world to spend time.
I've felt it myself -- how much my happiness and life satisfaction has increased despite the fact that our materialist ideology would predict that I should be unhappy having less spare time, less time playing video games, less time chatting online. Why is visiting a playground or a river and reading a book out loud or picking up trash or doing weekly lessons on paper so fulfilling? I think because it means something, and it's real.
It could never exist any longer because your grandparents are dead of old age, you parents are old, you are an adult, and your kids are now the ones growing up in the world. Like a flowing stream, the water itself has moved on. Someday your parents will be dead, you will be old, your kids will be adults, and your grandkids will be growing up in the world. Someday you will be dead, your kids will be old, your grandkids will be adults, and your great grandkids will be growing up in the world, and the cycle repeats and will until the day the human race ends.
So the question becomes, what are you doing to make sure you kids world is one you'd like them to grow up in?
The question came up as I sat with my son on a rocky beach next to a creek. I read Tolkien to him while he gathered rocks and threw them into the water. I couldn't help but think: "This isn't the world I grew up in, but this is a childhood I would have been happy to have."
I don't believe you need to change the entire world to make a world you want your kids to grow up in. It doesn't matter nearly as much as you think what's going on around other continents, or even the national capitol. You can start with your own life, your own home, your own habits.
I was having a discussion about how I'm raising Grayson, and the other person brought up that it must be nice to have money, but then I pointed out that none of the things I'm doing require any particular amounts of money. Walking to the park, walking to the nearby walking paths, a piece of paper and a pen to do lessons, a book you can take out of the library.
"But the parks are all filled with garbage?" -- well cleaning up garbage is free, isn't it? If you do such a thing then quickly the park will no longer be filled with garbage, and the world is a better place. Have you recently done such a thing to make the world a better place?
"But I'm so tired I don't have time or energy to do stuff" -- you have a choice how you spend your time and how you view things, and you can often find energy you didn't think you had for things that are important to you. It might surprise you how much time and energy you find, and you might find it's more of a virtuous cycle than you think. Have you sincerely tried?
"But what if people judge me?" -- you might be surprised, the world may be a lot friendlier than you think.
"It's too hot out or too cold out" -- you might be surprised what you can tolerate when you get into the habit of leaving your climate controlled spaces now and again. Our bodies are surprisingly adaptable to different climates.
"There's nothing good near me" -- you might be surprised, the world may be a lot more interesting than you think when you stop assuming you know all there is to know.
Some people might go "But I don't have a house, I don't have a wife, I don't have kids" and some people might not even have any kind of family or friends. I've been there, I feel you. Right after college, I ended up in a city nowhere near anywhere I'd ever lived before -- no friends, no family, no idea how to build a life. But it's a matter of faith -- you have to keep trying to make your world better, put your home in order, make your community better, and eventually it can pay off. If you do nothing then nothing will happen.
"I can't think of anything!" Think harder. If you're reading one of my posts you're undoubtedly smart enough to think of something. You'll probably have to break patterns of behavior and do things you didn't consider doing.
And for those who don't have kids and think they don't want kids: The future is built by our children. Many people think they don't need to build that future and they'll steal it from someone else, but they're wrong. The future belongs to the children, and the children are raised by their parents. So if we do our duty to the future, then it will be us who guide those children to the future worth living in, and the suicidal ones will simply die out.
Will putting that kind of effort into building the future generations work out? Maybe, maybe not. People say the future is uncertain, but it's never not been uncertain. Mitochondrial Eve is not that far back in human history, and Y-Chromosomal Adam is in a completely different era in time, so not that long ago humanity was reduced to a single common ancestor twice. People say it's immoral to have kids, but that concept is suicidal -- Do you not love yourself? Do you not love your wife or husband? Because your child will be genetically and behaviorally half you and half your partner. Of course you need to take the future as a matter of faith to some degree, but if you don't have faith in that above anything else you'll prove to be a genetic dead-end.
Many people think that our current age of nihilism, hedonism, and decadence is unique. Many people think that this is the first time religion failed. Many people think that this is the first time technology nearly ripped civilization apart. That's an ahistorical view, largely enabled by our postwar focus on the world wars, slavery, and colonialism to the rejection of most of history.
The problems of the bronze age collapse, of the axial age, of the late Roman Republic and later the late Empire, and even crises of post-Roman European society (of which the age of colonization itself was actually a symptom) all have stories to tell about societies that were facing potential collapses, and some of those resulted in collapse (but not the end of the people in most cases), and some led to revolutionary revitalizations. No matter what, the individuals involved needed to continue living even when the societies collapsed. In some cases such as after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the common man actually had huge increases in quality of life -- according to grave records, there was very few times in history where the health of common people improved more than after the collapse of the Roman Empire. So whatever happens we must be preparing for the future -- revolutionary revitalization or collapse.
We live in a world with more mental health issues than any other point in history, and I think the refusal to do the above is one of the reasons. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that we ought to figure out our personal values, and live by our values, and to live authentically. Spending all day every day in a room looking at a screen isn't living authentically. that isn't to say such a thing can't be part of your life (The Internet gives me great joy in many ways), but human beings are embodied creatures, we live in the real world, we were created in the real world, and we die in the real world. A world where we click on mice and clack on keyboards and stare at screens 16 hours a day and sleep 8 isn't an authentic human life. Embodied human beings must participate in the real world at some point. And I while I'm a capitalist, I don't mean in capitalist spaces either. You don't go out into the world to spend money, you go out into the world to spend time.
I've felt it myself -- how much my happiness and life satisfaction has increased despite the fact that our materialist ideology would predict that I should be unhappy having less spare time, less time playing video games, less time chatting online. Why is visiting a playground or a river and reading a book out loud or picking up trash or doing weekly lessons on paper so fulfilling? I think because it means something, and it's real.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 1
- likes
- 3
@sj_zero This is one of the best posts I've ever read on Mastodon and was very much needed, thank you.