Comment by jshpool
2 months ago
Lot of people are becoming more knowledgable and skillful. But purpose is the missing ingredient.
Without purpose or a motivator in life people end up getting trapped in mindless rituals. It keeps the reward circuitry in the brain from decaying.
I once asked my wife, "what is my purpose in life?", and she has been cracking dolphin jokes at my expense ever since.
That's good, at least. She could have said "you pass butter".
Is that a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference?
The original joke I think is a play on porpoise and purpose.
There is another great skit from Rick and Morty on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs).
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I'd thank her for the fish, but it'd send the wrong message.
It's from Rick & Morty
Well, you have a choice there. Ask others, and get dolphins; or follow your heart.
This is such an odd answer. "People are bored so they become degens", is ... not the full picture, I don't think.
But who needs hobbies, or friendship, or nature, when you have TikTok!
Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
A bit off-topic, but it’s interesting how this became the de-facto answer to any question related to “meaning of life” in the last 2-3 years in HN/tech circles. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s a bit weird. Like I’m sure everyone knows that? If a person isn’t having a child in their 30s, they either can’t because of multitude of different reasons, or they decided they don’t want to.
Disclaimer: I’m as pro-kid as you can get, just haven’t met a partner who would be on the same page as me yet.
When I was talking about it with my friends, our guess is, people with kids are getting worried. If others aren’t having kids, then their kids might suffer big time in a long run, thus the renewed pressure to keep suggesting the idea to others. Obviously this doesn’t relate to you, just weird how it started in the last few years.
I'd have to guess the demographics of HN lean rather Millennial, and I don't have to guess that they lean heavily male. I think it's probably just a collective biological clock thing; it's something I've started to feel myself. Intellectually, I want kids less than ever (so it's for the best I never had any), but emotionally, I do sort of understand the urge.
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I think it's a pushback against the emphasis on individualism in our culture, which many find does not lead to real fulfillment. When you start a family, you're giving up your own glory, but in doing so you become deeply integrated into something greater than yourself, which makes you greater by extension.
And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and as someone who used to not be so excited by the prospect, but I've witnessed how it's transformed my friends and family members.
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Like many online sentiments I think it's reactionary, specifically to the stereotype of the liberal atheist DINK milliennial couple.
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Yes, I've noticed it too. The most blaring example was DHH going on a "Just have some kids you'll be happier than you've ever been!" rant in some zoom talk ostensibly about coding that he gave in the past year. it's gross and condescending and not someone speaking as a public figure should be advocating for. IMO, We need better parents, not necessarily more parents, and if you're having kids because you're sad with life then IMO you should reconsider the ramifications of having a kid and then fucking up the parenting process. It's incredibly selfish
Because it's not only extremely fulfilling (well beyond what one might expect) on a personal level but also required on a social level for a culture to persist.
And this is in the context of ever more people complaining of loneliness, lack of fulfillment/meaning, and more. These issues are almost certainly causally related.
Help yourself, help society, and even have a voice (of sorts) in the future of humanity.
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I agree it’s becoming a common sentiment among the online pseudo-intelligentsia, but it’s still rare on a population level, so I will keep spreading the sentiment. I think it’s important, mainly on an economic level (I believe economic growth is impossible without population growth), but I speculate the decline of family-having is at the root of some of our other social-psychological malaises: loneliness, substance abuse, mental illness, increasing interest in extreme politics. Tech people should be most interested in family as an answer to social woes because currently people are blaming either social media and tech for social dysfunction,or the collapse in family-having, or both. If family is the answer then lots of tech will be exonerated.
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> Child rearing
For what purpose?
> it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce
Yes evolution selects for having children survive to reproduce, but that’s not a purpose, that’s just “that which continues, continues”.
> and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
Plenty of species have evolved such that when they sufficiently saturafe their environment and resource carrying capacity, reproduction rates drop through behavior changes based on various signals.
>Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.
Chores are a great way to make you feel a sense of purpose. You can directly observe the fruits of your labor. Your kitchen is shinier after a deep clean. Your baby is no longer crying of hunger after a feeding. The same can't be said for scrolling through TikTok for hours or even a lot of employment. Sure your livelihood may depend on moving items from big boxes into little boxes, but it's hard to feel any sort of accomplishment for that.
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As someone with a young child, it definitely feels purposeful. Also the opposite of a chore, it's lots of fun and what I look forward to after a day of work.
And I'm someone who, for most of my adult life, thought I'd be childfree...
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I would guess the only ones who do not feel it is their purpose are those for whom it happened accidentally.
Anyone who chose to have kids most likely did so with purposeful intent.
Whatever purpose you decide you have, do you think it will come without chores?
Beg the question that a purpose can’t involve chores or unpleasantries much?
Dogs are a chore. Cats too. Oh well.
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The replies are bit harsh. It is a solution to meaningless of life. I am reminded constantly by some of my friends.
But it's also a problem for some. For example, it means moving out of expensive cities, it means worrying about making lots of money (if you live in the U.S.), it means child care is thousands a month, it means health care is thousands a month. It means you have to be responsible and not drink every day. It means potentially not sleeping for a year.
Personally, seeing the stress of my workmates, and how they became more dependent on their jobs, on the shit of the jobs, and how now they're more competitive on the job, and worried... I'd personally choose to write that off.
But I know people who found meaning through child-rearing, as you say!
>most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
Untrue: e.g., in the US, "Among women and men aged 40–49 in 2015–2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men had fathered a child."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf
This is the best answer. From a strictly rational perspective, parenthood makes little sense. The negatives are obvious and intimidating, while the benefits (which are not rational but instinctual) are less clear. Happily, oxytocin is a helluva drug. It will rearrange your universe in the course of an hour, such that all of its substance revolves around a splotchy, squinty little ape.
I highly recommend it.
And then the sleepless nights of screaming will twist it up again. Postpartum depression can affect any gender when it comes to sleep deprivation.
Doesn't this seem like a tautological purpose? Our purpose is to create a new generation of beings who question their own purpose?
It's not tautological because it's objectively wrong.
There is no biological purpose. We are just a multitude of chemical reactions falling down the entropy slope in a slightly odd way.
"Purpose" is a concept entirely made up out of whole cloth for hairless apes who accidentally invented language and that allowed them to do a lot of thinking outside the confines of their biological processes.
We are perfectly free to CHOOSE reproduction as a "purpose", but nothing about biology actually cares. If you don't reproduce, oh well, something else will take that spot in the ecosystem.
That's the most plausible gloss I've heard. The new generation must be capable of framing a question at least as sophisticated as its parents can if there's to be hope of progress in the world. Otherwise we're on the way to "Idiocracy".
A thought.
What if we have judged the healthiest of a society on the wrong metrics. And the right one is birth rate?
We might say things are bad for a society if it’s too dangerous or not enough food so the birth rate goes to near zero and as a result it dies.
How is a society that has people being too busy or occupied with other task that neglects reproducing a better society than the latter?
Obvious too much of a birth rate is bad, but too little could also be a sign of an unhealthy environment.
Basically what you’re saying is that the healthiest society is the one whose population is growing the fastest?
I would think life expectancy would be a better measure of a healthy vs unhealthy environment.
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> jaco6 : Maybe the minority who want to reproduce will be paid to reproduce for everyone else in the future?
This latter comment of yours was down voted by idiots to the point where it's dead, so I could not respond to it directly.
Anyway, specifics aside, it is actually a good idea - for a variety of reasons.
I like the converse: pay certain people to NOT reproduce.
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