Ruining Your Life:
Salon has a piece they've linked from their front page that wonders, "Does Having Children Ruin Your Life?" (There is also a reply from a male reader.) It enters very nicely into the discussion we were having below.
The list of reasons why it appears to the young lady that children might ruin her life includes:
· The thought of pregnancy and birth is literally horrifying (and I don’t understand why most women don’t feel this way – a HUMAN BEING grows IN YOUR GUTS and then tears its way out of the most sensitive part of your body!!! Aaiiieee!!! I got goose-bumps just typing that -- shudder).
· It’s much too risky to make a lifelong commitment to a human being I’ve never even met, who could very well be someone I wouldn’t like at all, or who wouldn’t like me at all.
· I deeply value and enjoy my romantic/sexual relationship and don’t want to ruin it.
· I strive to minimize my financial obligations in all manners possible and a child is the biggest financial obligation I can think of.
· While dogs and cats bring a smile to my face and make me want to touch and interact with them, I’m indifferent to children.
· I’m philosophically uncomfortable with the lack of consent inherent in parent-child relationships – children don’t ask to be born and certainly don’t ask to be born to their particular parents or raised in a particular household. I still sympathize with the teenager’s outrage at being forced to live by rules they never agreed to.
· When I think back to my own childhood I feel quite bad for my parents and all the sacrifices they made, and certainly would not want to live with my adolescent self.
· I cherish sleep and the idea of not sleeping in on weekends makes me want to cry.
· Human society could very well be worse in the future, and there are too many humans.
· I prefer peace and quiet, I’m a low-energy person, and I’m an introverted type who needs to spend lots of time in my own head.
Most of this is the leisure-first principle that Charles Murray was talking about in his essay of a few days ago.* On the occasions that the young lady considers the issue beyond the question of what pleasures she would have to yield, however, she says something more interesting.
It is clear from the pleasure-oriented passages that she lives in a remarkable garden of ease. Further, it is clear that the world has treated her so gently that she has come to believe that human consent is of fundamental importance. She objects to parenthood, for example, in part on the grounds that the child isn't asked if he wants to be born. That suggests that she simply expects that her consent will be asked for anything that has an effect on her. She lives in a world in which her consent matters.
What is probably invisible to her is the degree to which the world-of-consent is a temporary bubble. There will come a time when disease invades the body in spite of all attempts at prolonging health; the world does not ask if you are ready to die. There is nothing in the structure of the world that suggests that human consent matters at all.
It has come to do so only through a great deal of human will, which has implied a great deal of sacrifice. This bubble of safety is a house built by strong hands and long work. If it cannot last forever, the fact that it exists at all is a remarkable human achievement. It is a gift from previous generations, who found the world worth fighting for, and who made this place in which all the good parts of the world can be had -- and the bad ones held at bay, for a time.
To sacrifice some of those pleasures, for some of that time, is necessary to give the next generation a chance to be born. She points out that no one has asked the child if he wants to be born. She forgets that no one has asked him if he doesn't!
It is true that childrearing the end of a life of consent; you are, from that moment, required rather than asked. Many soft pleasures go away, and you cease to be the center of your universe.
Does that ruin your life, or begin it? It is the point at which you begin to experience life on its terms rather than yours. You can no longer hide your face from death, as you must fear it every day -- not for yourself, but for your child. You can not hide from time, and an awareness that every day is numbered and spent.
This points to the "vigor" of life that we have been discussing of late. It is also the part where you begin to pay back your ancestors for the garden they gave you, by tending its walls for the next generation.
* The Murray quote, since it was a longer piece:
Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize “spreading.” I’m not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
If that’s the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that’s the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really?
