On Thursday, I wrote about happiness and misery as they relate to children, a subject on my mind already because I have a two-year-old son and am expecting another baby any day (or hour) now, brought into focus by a section Paul Bloom’s essay “First Person Plural” in this month’s Atlantic that outlines how deluded parents are to think their kids make them happy. If you don’t feel like reading the entire original post, the gist of it was: kids are kind of the end of cheap thrills, but create happiness for most parents by giving their lives a sense of purpose.
To which commenter TLL responded:
While the raising of children is, I am sure, an enormously challenging and rewarding experience, I think it is unfortunate to think that people view their children as, and believe their children to be their reason for being. This would lead to the more general, though often unreconized belief that human beings exist entirely – or at lease principally – to procreate and populate. Or at least those who have children do.
Having a child is something that nearly every person on the planet can do. It is a shame that most people do not strive to achieve success – or ‘fulfillment happiness’ – in other good pursuits half so vigorously as they pursue child rearing.
Perhaps part of the delusion that having children makes us happy is that it involves another person, and we cannot cope with reliance on ourselves and our own fortitude as ways to bring about fulfillment. As social creatures, it is easy for us to fill the vacant parts inside ourselves with other people. And from what I understand, children are the least likely to leave those parts vacant once they are used to fill that hole.
I’m thankful for the comment. Of course, in the strictest sense, there’s a term for the “belief that human beings exist entirely—or at least principally—to procreate and populate.” We call it “evolutionary science.”1There’s also the biblical god’s first instruction to the prototype humans he created: “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), if you prefer that kind of thing, which I do not. Any understanding of our lot that does not consider procreation at least one of the primary purposes of our lives leads to some pretty ugly math for us as a species (the purpose of human life=the rapid extinction of human life).
But TLL’s point is taken—when I wrote about fulfillment, I wasn’t talking about fulfilling evolutionary imperatives2nor biblical ones, and neither, I suspect, is this commenter. I’m not trying to argue that people should think of their children as the sole purpose of their lives. In fact, there’s a great deal of pain and frustration and sadness caused by parents trying to live vicariously through their children and forcing their own frustrated hopes and expectations onto the next generation.
But whatever people should feel is kind of irrelevant to what most of us do feel. Some of us try to achieve immortality through our work. Many more would, like Woody Allen, prefer to achieve immortality through not dying. But the vast majority of people, as near as I can tell, realize that the latter is out of reach for them and, as for the former, feel no calling or sense of purpose or direction at all. Is there a cliché more tired and true than the aimlessly restless adult trying to figure out what they were meant to do?3“Trying to find themselves” in Europe or India; having a mid-life crisis; spending a big chunk of their working-for-The-Man salary in the self-help aisle at Chapters…
The key thing about parenthood in this regard, TLL, is that nearly everyone on the planet can do it, as you point out. Sometimes they choose it, sometimes it takes them by surprise. It isn’t that their children are the purpose for which they’ve been searching, it is that they are a purpose. Full stop. You don’t have to strive for parenthood at all, but once it comes, it can be all-consuming and it feels like a valuable contribution to society in a way that, say, operating the cash at Wal-Mart or reorganizing the company’s filing system does not. You may find that sad. I assure you that the people who claim their greatest joy is their children do not. Or, at least, they do not find the joy and satisfaction they take from their roles in their children’s lives to be sad. Indeed, in many cases, it might be the quiet desperation of the rest of their lives that makes their children such a disproportionate source of pride and solace. I’m not about to judge that.
As an aside, I am not among those aimless masses on whose behalf I4Condescendingly? I hope not. make the argument. I am a man of ambitions larger than my self-discipline and possibly larger than my talent5he says, desperately hoping to be wrong, but certainly larger than the available time. I have big dreams and always have had, and before I ever had a child I was content to believe and sometimes loudly proclaim that I’d be happy and fulfilled without any. But as soon as Colum was born he introduced me to an entirely new dimension of human experience—an understanding of unconditional love. It’s a very hard thing to put into words, but: the emotion I called “love” prior to his birth is to how I feel about him roughly what a basement ping-pong game is to the Wimbledon final. That has done nothing to detract from my other senses of purpose or my ambition to fulfill them (though it has occasionally distracted from them). It has just added a whole other happiness-inducing purpose from which I derive meaning. Your mileage may vary, of course.
But my original post was mostly about the meaning of a word6happiness, and TLL’s comment is about the meaning of life. And it’s his or her second major point—that it would be preferable to fill the “vacant parts of ourselves” with personal fortitude and self-reliance—that I really want to argue with. So that’ll be the subject of my next post (which will also include an overdue lament for David Foster Wallace, who was my favourite living writer by several orders of magnitude7Really, what was your first clue? until he killed himself last month).
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