A successful businessman on vacation was at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman proudly replied, “Every morning, I go out in my boat for 30 minutes to fish. I’m the best fisherman in the village”.

The businessman, perplexed, then asks the fisherman “If you’re the best, why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish? What do you do the rest of the day?”

The fisherman replied “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, spend quality time with my wife, and every evening we stroll into the village to drink wine and play guitar with our friends. I have a full and happy life.”

The businessman scoffed, “I am successful CEO and have a talent for spotting business opportunities. I can help you be more successful. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats with many fishermen. Instead of selling your catch to just your friends, you can scale to sell fish to thousands. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to the big city, where you can oversee your growing empire.”

The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the businessman replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the fisherman.

The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The businessman said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, spend time with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your friends.”

The reason to accumulate wealth is for security. The fisherman's current income could disappear any day. He could be injured, the area could be overfished, a glut of foreign fish could reduce prices, etc.

This is just the story of the ant and the grasshopper in reverse.

But the fisherman rents and when his generous landlord sells to a real estate corp that capitalizes on market inefficiencies, he'll find himself out on the street and replaced by a remote software developer.

When he gets heart disease in 20 years, he'll find himself in an underfunded public hospital too.

When his kids grow up and he wants to send them to uni, he'll find himself taking out a 100K loan.

Then he'll find himself fishing all day long just to pay off the interest on his debt/to stay afloat and he'll regret no capitalizing on his younger days, but it's too late because all the fish are gone thanks to foreign fishing trawlers.

Wow, this is such a harsh (but true) rebuttal to that story (which I've heard dozens of times before).

It is a bit Pollyannaish, but I guess, it comes from a good place

I've heard this story so often that if I just say "the fisherman story", most people know I mean this one.

I enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of the fisherman. My humble little website works well, and though I could build other things, I'd have to start setting an alarm and making phone calls again. I'd rather not. If you reach a point in your life where you can stop turning the crank and still enjoy a good life, by all means do it.

> I've heard this story so often that if I just say "the fisherman story", most people know I mean this one.

I almost posted the "parable of the stonecutter" too.

That's a cute story. However there are vast differences in reality. The fisherman is likely an uncultured bigot and xenophobe with life experiences that reinforce this condition, and who will suffer terribly from the ailments of aging that the businessman's wealth can afford respite from. For example.

While we are making things up, I submit that the fisherman is an extraterrestrial who keeps his space faring ship in the sea. Every day he paddles out to check on his alien family before returning to his social studies back on shore.

It looks like elitism never changes, and rural people will never shake the scorn of city people, internet or no internet.

Unless that's sarcasm of course.

I think the scorn goes both ways.

Perhaps, but what I've witnessed: (in the broadest strokes of unspecificity)

Rural: "I don't like what the city folk are doing. They should change."

Urban: "I don't like what the country folks are doing. This is how we should change them."

You're getting a tug-of-war of downvotes/upvotes, let me see if I can expand too:

Rural: "The city-living ways don't work out here so well, but there's too many of you guys for me to even begin to tell you how to act or what to do, so as a compromise just let me be"

City: "Rural folk live really unsustainably/unculturably/deplorably but they don't know any better, its up to us to make them understand. Anyway the urban center provides more value than what the countryside provides, we should be dictating the path of progress in this county/state/country/continent.

The locus of power has always been around cities though, so that is where elites and elitism will always centralize.

Your comment says way more about you than it does about some hypothetical small town fisherman

You’re assuming the CEO is not an uncultured bigot and xenophobe with life experiences that reinforce this condition.

He's almost certainly exposed to more cultures, though you are right: he could be extremely bigoted and xenophobic. It's just less likely, even if marginally.

"The bourgeoisie are probably smarter, better people than the proletariat"

This isn’t about bourgeoise vs proletariat. It’s about a completely asinine allegory that elides tons of real world context in order to push the ridiculous narrative that the simple country folk know something the rest don’t.

No, it's about you calling someone a xenophobic bigot because they're a country bumpkin and assuming someone else is probably not a bigot because they're a city person.

Side note, you do know the definitions of the words "xenophobic" and "bigot" are right?

One of the reasons that this is quite beautiful is that it portrays the ideal of having just enough, living simply, and being grateful. There is something also stoic about the character described.

I imagine the farmer you're telling us about doesn't want attention, material possessions, or any kind of excess at all. This person is happy to build something slowly over time, in small increments. They're happy with what they have, who they are, and that they exist.

I think there are elements in your portrayal that we can all strive for, whether this person was a farmer, carpenter, or programmer, doesn't really matter.

This man exemplifies the saying

A rich man is not he who has a lot, but he who needs little.

I don't know this guy, but I know the area a bit and it is not so different to where I live about 70 miles away...

>A rich man...who needs little

This guy is rich in several ways. A farm in Wales is still a pretty valuable asset, especially in a valley rather than on a hill. Owning a farm gives you a lot of financial independence, which can take a lot of stress away!

It was a lovely article, but...An old country man told me that the three rarest things were

1) a dead donkey 2) a red headed parson 3) a contented farmer

Here are the tests I would apply before I would agree he had reached some zen state of contentedness

1) how would he feel if a parcel of land came up for sale next to his. Would he itch to buy it. Most farmers would move heaven and earth.

2) How would he feel about me walking through his fields to share what he has got?

3) Is his stocking rate excessive?

4) If someone told him that by managing his flock differently he could damage the ground less and improve water quality in the river, would he take that advice?

5) If there was an awkward corner of his land next to my house that was not useful to him, but it was perfect for me, would he sell it to me at a fair price?

6) Why is there no succession plan. When he dies his sister will move into a home and the farm will be liquidated, the flock of sheep sold, the land broken up, the house sold off...because he didn't let anyone else in.

I'm afraid I have met enough like him to remain cynical.

I’m not sure about 1-5 but I was actually worried about his succession plan when I read about his stroke.

The fact that he went into hospital and came back out to a functioning farm suggests that he has a good relationship with his neighbouring farmers. My guess would be that he's planned for exactly what will happen to his livestock and farm when he passes.

Yeah, this makes sense.

This tenant is true at so many levels. In the everyday ratrace that we are all living, the "financial freedom " we all strive for is nothing but our passive income being enough to cover our expenses.

Most of us race to increase our passive income, when maybe the healthiest choice would be to run to decrease our expenses.

Do both, and you get there much quicker.

I love this comment, but also had a chuckle at the contrast between “not wanting attention” and having a newspaper article about yourself being discussed worldwide on hacker news. I understand you were referencing someone else’s story they were telling in another comment, but still found it amusing.

Ah, legacy. It always makes me happy to listen to Carl Sagan's words on his text "The Pale Blue Dot":

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

Thank you for your comment and the video link. I really enjoyed it.

The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe

Highly recommend this documentary, one of my favorites

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-farthest-voyager-in-space-qpbu...

I respect the simplicity and contentment of his life, but it seems to stem from a base of incuriosity that I find harder to respect.

The complete lack of variety in his dining routine in particular is something I'd never want to emulate. This man is basically a low tech Soylent bro, using food as just a source of nutrients. He raises sheep (and is not a vegetarian) yet never even eats mutton or cheese?

This man is independent. The powers that are, hiss in horror at his sighting, because they want him in a cubicle and in debt.

I don't think the "powers that are" would care much about what this dude does, they probably have a lot on their plate already.

Have you seen what China did to all their farmers in the last few decades?

I’m not too lazy to search but is there something specific?

They are basically building urban apartments and trying to entice them to move.

A Japanese director made a documentary about one of the poorest regions in China.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GgWZDvgW9OA

There are English subtitles.

I watched your link, it is one-sided. Who knows if there is real opposition. Sure, this video is not showing any behaviour worth criticizing. Maybe it is true, and everybody really does love moving to the city. But just given the fact that it comes from a region with no free press, I can't trust them on that.

I am alluding to the forced migration to city life (including malls to spend money at). This was simultaneously done while razing the villages and all of their history, interestingly, China as we know it, with all of their history erasing going on, is only about 70 years old.

He's not independent. Caretakers, probably state funded, come and provide care to his sister. The "powers that are" are providing for both of their general wellbeing.

Not only that but UK farming is subsidised quite heavily. A farm with 71 sheep isn't viable without those subsidies.

Who in particular?

Tax collectors

His sister gets tax-funded care, multiple times a day, freeing up his time to do farm work. The tax collector might be alright.

Beautifully written

I appreciate the romance, but those of us who have children leave behind much more than stone walls we built in our 20s.

He’s a 72 year old Batchelor who’s once stepped foot outside a Welsh valley. If happiness is a lobotomy then credit to us who don’t choose it.

Can you please not post shallow dismissals or personal attacks or generic tangents or flamebait, or call names, in HN comments? You did all of those things here.

I'm glad that you've found satisfaction in having children, but that's no reason to put someone else down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Children as your legacy are no less consequential or meaningful than this man's stone walls. In the end you are grasping for empty meaning and purpose in the same way the farmer is, your children will perish, their children will perish, you will be forgotten and so will they like the rest of human existence. Our lives have no larger purpose or meaning beyond what ever we pretend gives meaning to your life, like children or stone walls.

We are mere Spatiotemporal blips of information in the infant universe with delusions of grandeur. So if you have to tell yourself deep in the night that you actualising your reproductive prerogative makes your sad little life more meaningful than the farmer, please grasp at those straws.

I made a conscious choice to not have children for personal reasons (deeply fucked up family and while I know I'm not callous and cruel like my father I simply couldn't rule it out enough to be willing to risk it).

I'm completely at peace with the thought that a century from now no-one will think about me one way or the other.

I mean statistically the chain of events that led to me ever existing as me was so small that after winning that hand, it's time to leave the table and enjoy it.

A different perspective is - why do I need to leave something behind (children or otherwise)? What matters is how I spent the little time I have on this planet, while I am alive, isn't it? Why do I care what happens after I am gone? There are enough things to think about, to work on, while I am alive. As long as I am happy and helpful while I am alive, that seems more important to me than anything else.

The human species relies to some degree on people leaving things behind, new discoveries being one of the more important ones.

You don't need to leave something behind of course, but the species benefits from it.

You don’t need to. But entire worlds are destroyed every day, and if you should fall in love with one, you might find yourself interested in it’s preservation.

Yet, our very existence is a consequence of reproduction, even if we may have forgotten our ancestors.

The only true delusion of grandeur is thinking that dwindling others' experiences against the vastness of the universe is enlightenment: If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales, why waste time believing we are mere blips?

I'm not dwindling others experiences against the vastness of the universe. I'm merely pointing out the absurdity of the parent comment that somehow elevates the meaningfulness of having kids over building a stone wall. My position is neither is any less or more meaningful beyond individual experience.

Of the people that lived 100K years ago, we have almost nothing. Possibly some cave paintings, though the vast majority of art from then must be gone. However, every single person alive today is descended from people who lived then. You may or may not find that meaningful, but it would be hard to disagree that having children was the most impactful course of action available to anyone alive then. The same is true for nearly all of human existence.

With the current pace of change, having children may no longer be the obvious winner it has been for all of history, but it might still be...

Fossilised remains in the sediments on earth are all that remain of the species that have come and gone before us. Many species are lost to time, because they weren't fossilised or their effects preserved. And our fossilised remains will be lost to the cosmos as well. You experiencing humanity in the midst of it might make it seem substantial. But we are a genus a mere 2 million years old and a species as young as 200000 years. For comparison, the dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years. All of human history is 200000 years, again seems of consequence to us because we are participants in it but on the grand scale really isn't.

Does that mean we shouldn't just bother, absolutely not, we are given this gift of experiencing life. Something rather than nothingness...etc. But we can do with a little more perspective on how utterly inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things. Having kids seems consequential in the context of human existence, but when human existence is inconsequential (there is no lasting impact or transmission of information beyond our temporary side-effects on the environment) it puts our existence into perspective.

The vast overwhelming majority of matter in the universe is inert.

The fact that we've hit upon a certain arrangement of matter which yields consciousness and the ability to manipulate the matter around us is something which seems worth preservation.

I contain the information for how to give life to inert matter. I've done it three times now, and I think it's worthwhile.

You thinking it is worthwhile is all that should matter, just as a farmer thinking it's worthwhile to build a wall that lasts. Both instances are us giving meaning to self actualisation of individual drives be it preservation or propagation of genetic information or building something that will outlast you.

Hmm... Since when did we reach this height of "enlightenment" that children (humans) are now being compared to a stonewall in relevance, no matter how sophisticated the wall might be?

Yes, it is more meaningful to have kids than to build a stonewall.

Aren't walls inventions of man, as such, an effect caused by man. How can an effect (invention) of man be equated to the inventor?

Do you compare the effect of human freedom to the effect of unconscious matter in history?

A stone wall has no chance to beat its fate. Humanity, however unlikely that might be, does stand a chance.

We're very far from where we started. We're here because of both people that had kids and because of people that built stone walls. In many cases they were the same people.

Agreed, and no matter if we manage to beat our fate or not, doesn't make this thing called life any less precious.

> Yet, our very existence is a consequence of reproduction

It's a consequence of evolution. Right now we are limited yes. But nobody knows future.

> If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales

Feel free to experience your existence without deriding others existence.

As a descendant of the Saami, I agree. We leave our heritage in everything we touch. Child or stone, no difference. Our ancestors are everywhere.

Strikes me as a fallacy that in order for something to be meaningful it must persist. Meaning can exist and perish in a moment.

Some assert that life has meaning.

So assert that life has no meaning, as alluded to here.

These are axiom-like statements that cannot be proven. Everyone has a faith as to which of these assertions is true.

Existentialism to the rescue!

Life can have meaning because we choose to give it such.

That relies on a supernatural belief as well (free will).

Nah. I just choose, regardless whether the choice is apparent or real.

Apparent choices happen :)

(Passive voice is more apt.)

I can't tell if you're trolling, but in case you're not and unless you think there's a mathematical certainty to your argument, you might do well to spread your bets.

Does it matter if they are not forgotten?

Legacy implies transmission of information. So forgotten not in terms of memory, but a total loss of information (genetic, memory or otherwise).

What if you're wrong?

I don't know what specifically you are referring to but, the sun is going to be a red giant in 4.5 billion years, earth cannot sustain life. Deep into the future, all the stars will eventually burn out and there will be no more new ones born. The night sky will be dark. The only radiation emitted will be black holes slowly evaporating on a time scale so huge we can't even meaningfully comprehend it. There is no energy to sustain life. Then there is the heat death of the universe to look forward to.

Humans might survive past earth, but oblivion will come for us all the same. We just get to play around in our little imagined worlds of purpose and meaning a little longer all to no avail beyond living one's life.

And that's all any of us can really do, chose how to face existence knowing there is no grand scheme in which each of us is some how important or matters. Choosing to live is equally as valid as choosing not to. We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)

All we can do is live a life we are happy(good state) with, be it building stone walls that last or having kids and raising them.

A short story that explores this premise:

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

> We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)

Certainly this could lead one to be a little more circumspect about grand pronouncements.

It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.

Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.

> It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.

I make no such claim. We interpret and navigate the world with the mental models and toolsets we have. If you can do math, you can calculate, estimate, plan, budget....etc. Similarly, some toolsets give you access to insights and paradigms eg: religious toolset might make you interpret the world differently. I merely have a certain toolset which lets me look at the world in a certain way, does not mean this toolset is exclusive, leads to authoritative interpretations or it's acquisition is special in any way.

I could just say "In my humble opinion"

>Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.

As always value is in the eye of the beholder, there is no objective value beyond what a subject is able to get out of it. So if you feel truth and knowledge are important, they are. If you feel faith is more important than truth, it is, to you at-least.

> I could just say "In my humble opinion"

One problem I've noticed with the way human beings communicate is that for any given situation, there's no way of knowing whether the person speaking is doing so with an implicit "imho", or whether they mean the things they say literally. In this case, I thought that you were speaking literally.

I wonder how much this phenomenon (and others like it) contributes to the amount of polarization and disharmony we are experiencing in the world right now, or in the past for that matter, all without our knowledge or interest.

we will have left earth (and inevitably our sun) long before 4 billion years away, most probably as a hybrid species by then

on the theorised heat death timescale humans have only been around for less than infinitesimal fractions of quadrillionths of a percent of their potential. what's to say we don't in that time escape it by transiting to a new, younger universe?

Or, you know an asteroid hits us causing the 6th Extinction Level Event killing humanity. As long as we are doing wild speculative Sci-Fi the Great filter in our future is a real possibility to consider.

For now, we are an incredibly young species who has time and again demonstrated our penchant for chasing after short term incentives at the cost of longterm harm. We are making the earth unliveable faster than we are progressing towards being a multi-planetary species (which seems like an insurmountable leap given the candidates and the cost structure we have to work with). But humans are inventive and resourceful so here's hoping we grow beyond living on earth.

> But humans are inventive and resourceful

What's the benchmark?

How much do you rally know and remember from your ancestors which is more than a handful and always the same stories?

How did that really influence you?

We can look back, we are not a magic generation unique to all the other generations before us. We know what's going to happen with us and our legacies.

One difference between the current and previous generations is just how much information is recorded by and about us. There will be a lot more evidence of the existence and experiences of people alive today than people of a century ago. Whether people will care to look is a different matter.

True and that makes it even more visible how little the future cares for you.

My mum is the only one who likes to look through our holiday pictures.

They will be there and no one will care.

Only some ml tool to potentially tell my future Familie members that I might have been depressed based on pictures and the ml notes it down for potential medical relevant information.

No one will know what I liked and disliked. No one will see that my life had ups and downs.

I really thought Facebook would be a great thing. Sharing and seeing what my Familie is up to but no one is using it for sharing family pictures. And I myself I'm sometimes annoyed by too many WhatsApp pictures.

I do get why it is like this but realizing and accepting it took a bit

One large-scale EMP incident, and that is no longer the case.

We have alot more data now, but I am not sure how durable it all is.

I have quite a few DVDs and hard drives that no longer work.

CDs/DVDs typically oxidize after 15 years.

Print the book version on vellum, and you'll preserve it for a few thousand years (or ANSI paper with the infinity sign, which supposedly lasts for at least 750 years).

We do have a lot more data however we don’t have enough time to absorb it. Until something like Neuralink improves that, I don’t think it would be much different. So many of us take pictures all the time but how many of us really go back and look at the old pictures? And do we really have the time to view all pictures from our own time let alone previous generations?

That's such an unkind thing to say about another person's life. He seems like a contented and inoffensive person, and he's quietly living the only life he'll ever have. There's real dignity in that. I do wonder why you wrote this.

As for children: being a parent myself, I think it's best not to instrumentalise them by viewing them as a legacy that you'll leave behind after you. They're their own people. They don't owe you that obligation.

People are different, with different desires, personalities, mentalities, ..... Isn't it only natural then that 'happiness' would be different from one person to another?

Why speak low about him? You're content with your life, and he is content with his... it really is that simple.

You can't go up to an artist and say, "Hey, your painting is crap, you should change x, y, z," because it is the artist's painting, not yours.

These threads are always so entertaining. Someone will make up this pastoral romance while implying that the city life is somehow lacking. Then someone will do the opposite and the wars will begin. Very entertaining.

For my part, I enjoy modal editors so I think vim is better than emacs and I like the GPL over BSD.

> For my part, I enjoy modal editors so I think vim is better than emacs and I like the GPL over BSD.

We need more fuel on this fire. What's your take on spaces vs tabs?

That farmer is happy keeping tabs on his space. He enjoys his work, his place, and doesn't much mind (it seems) what others think of him.

The Butlerian jihad is coming for you all.

Tabs of course. Spaces are for people who keep missing the tab key. Maybe the target is too small to hit.

Ask ‘make’ about that :)

> For my part, I enjoy modal editors so I think vim is better than emacs and I like the GPL over BSD.

Calm down, Satan

I think you misunderstood the issue people have here. It is not the pastoral Vs city life that is the issue. It is the OP assertion that this guy has been lobotomized because he is content with his life.

Haha no, that's par for the course. Each one of these people will always make some remark like this. "You leave no impact on the Earth. 40 yrs in your apartment and then burnt in a crematorium. Who knows you existed? Villageboi leaves legacy. Cityboi never existed. No trace."

"Yeah, but villageboi is a lobotomized mole. I am sophisticate. You have no frontal lobe"

The peak of discourse. Hahaha. And then depending on which lifestyle you have chosen, people will pick some arbitrary thing to argue about.

"You said villageboi. Actually, I am village girl. And it's not village. It's farm"

"You said lobotomy. Actually, it's a corpus callosotomy"

That's what makes it so entertaining. The idea that people think they're being all this sharp when really they're just offended that their preferences were made fun of.

But you're clearly an Emacs user. See you on your way back from the RSI doctor, nerd!

Yeah that was an offensive way to put his point for no reason.

It's also a failure of empathy on OP's part - we look at the world through our own lens but we should at least try to look at it through other peoples before accusing them of choosing "lobotomy".

I prefer <TRIBE_DESIGNATION>. The other tribe is wrong sick and cease to be. :D

Such a close-minded view. Children are great but they're just more people with their own experiences, like this man. And it seems rare these days that they might be as naturally at-one with the world around them as he is.

I hear you. In not sure if want to be raising kids today.

I had a moment in my 20s where I just stopped and thought, "Every single ancestor I had from my parents back to algae had offspring. What if I don't?"

If you consider the whole Ocean as history, and the present moment as a single solitary wave heading towards the shore, and your life as the surfer on that wave, it doesn't matter what came before you. What matters is the wave. You get to ride it and wipe out. And that's it. I don't care if that wave is a composite of a million unknown ripples in the cast Ocean. It doesn't matter really.

> "Every single ancestor I had from my parents back to algae had offspring. What if I don't?

A large proportion of your ancestors offspring didn't themselves have offspring.

Why would you have children if you live in a cramped apartment in an equally cramped and dangerous city? The amount of effort you're putting in for that tiny life is barely enough for subsistence, much less for having children.

The answer to that isn't having material wealth, especially when you get no time left over to appreciate it. So the problem is having enough time when you waste most of it toiling for the dreams of another man, and for next to nothing in return. Because that's the real economy. (If you do, though, then congratulations I guess, but then you're not in the position of most people anyway.)

I think, however, that you'd change your mind about things if you had the freedom, the space, and the ability to grow your own food. Then you'd see how foolish most city dwellers actually are. As for the philosophical musings about whether you should have children... Well, it's your life, man. If you don't want a shot at prolonging your true legacy, then that's up to you. But you're certainly doing a service for everyone else who do want their kind to succeed.

For me it was just a realisation that reproduction is just one way we pass ourselves on, but one that has a lot of evolutionary push to make us want to do. For me, I was just born without that push for whatever reason. I'm not sure if it's a symptom of undiagnosed asperger's that I suspect or some other thing like that. Regardless of the reasons why I don't possess that drive, I don't think children are the only way we pass on. In fact I think every action we do is a form of reproduction, including building stone walls. Maybe people think that there is something inherently different between biologically producing a living being and other forms of interacting with the world but I don't believe so personally.

In terms of your moment in your 20s, the way I see it is that it goes beyond my conventional existence as a human: I'm not just the product of all my direct ancestors, but also of all the causes and effects which have effected those ancestors. It's obvious that I am the continuation of my great great great grandfather, however I am also the continuation of my great great great grandfathers lunch that fed him, or doctor that saved him, or the Sun that supported him. Reproduction is an essential component for continued existence of sentient beings, but so is food, so is warmth, so is water. I feel that the Sun is just as much my parent as my biological parents.

Something like 10% of all humans that have ever lived are alive today.

They must be so fucking old. I bet they have some good stories. /s

I have three kids.

It is wonderful.

Tiring, taxing, exhilarating, inspiring.

It works for me. I make no claims for others.

JFC, who speaks like this about someone else? Have some respect for a kind man who's content living a simple life.

Imagine if someone looked at your comment and denigrated it "oh wow you had unprotected sex with your partner and managed to not kill your kids before they turned 18. Congrats on the achievement!"

There are many paths to happiness, no need to denigrate this man's life.

I don't think he was doing that. It's just a perspective.

It is when I read these stories that I truly consider how short our lives are. I can't stop thinking about how fragile our beliefs are once we hold them up against someone elses values, earthshaking.

The grandparent post compared the farmer's experience to being lobotomized - if that's not denigration of someone's life, what is?

He very definitely was being derogatory.

> those of us who have children leave behind much more than stone walls we built in our 20s

Ah, yes. A planet completely ruined by overpopulation. That is your legacy.

Also, your existence is just as meaningless as this farmer's. You probably remember your grandparents, at least you know a little about their lives. What about your grandparents parents, or your grandparents grandparents. They were people with their own full lives, hopes and dreams. Do you even know their names ? Let alone what they were like, what they cared about, what their life was like ?

They are forgotten, just like you will be, regardless of how many children they had.

It saddens me to read such nihilistic comments here. Specially based on such clichés.

Under which metric is the planet complete ruined? and why do you think it's overpopulated? what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you, and based on what?

Under lots of metrics, today's planet is a much healthier and prosperous place to live for humankind than it was 100 or even 50 years ago. As an example, for most human history life expectancy was no more than 30 years. Nowadays we are around 70 and quite some countries already over 80. Poverty was common some centuries ago, with around 90% being considered poor. Nowadays it's only around 10% of population. Literacy has also advanced tremendously, with now around 90% of people under 25 being able to read and write.

And all of that has been happening thanks to those that were here before us. Yes, the ones we have forgotten their names, but for whom we live now in the capable and free societies that are most of the western countries.

Having children is an extremely important part of that legacy. They are the immediate inheritors of the ideals and visions of the ones that were here before us.

> Under lots of metrics, today's planet is a much healthier and prosperous place to live for humankind than it was 100 or even 50 years ago.

We have created healthier and more prosperous societies. It is difficult to argue that we have created a healthier planet, yet our long term survival depends upon the health of the planet.

> Under which metric is the planet complete ruined?

Nature is being destroyed, we polluted our planet enough that it affected the climate. The air we breathe is filled with ultrafine particles. The water is full of microplastics.

Sure, we are able to afford more things, and we have made advances in the medical field. Our expected lifespan has gone up, but are those last few decades worth it ? Spending your last years in adult diapers and being regularly tortured by doctors in an effort to extend your life as much as possible doesn't seem like a big win to me.

Our good years are spent working longer days than ever, doing unhealthy, stressful work to the point that we have to spend our little free time exercising to keep our health. All the while the majority of humans spend their lives in cities that resemble ant hills more than a space designed for humans. More people than ever suffer from anxiety and stress-related mental health problems.

Is life really a better experience now than it was 100 years ago ?

> what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you

I would say about 10 million people globally.

So pessimistic!

Why wouldn't older folks' quality of life continue to increase as we develop new medicine and technology? Cancer and Alzheimers will never be cured? We'll never be able to induce cellular regeneration like many other species can, or artificial body parts will never advance beyond their current crudeness?

How many people spend their working years doing mind-numbing or back-breaking manual labor compared to even a century or two ago? How many people back then would have been radically oppressed from birth but even today can pursue their own dreams? Life is still relatively "nasty, brutish, and short" but it is getting better and I see no reason to expect that progress to end, let alone regress.

While you despair over a grim dark future, I look forward to a garden Earth, resplendent in biodiversity, home to fifty billion humans free from disease and material needs, yet with less footprint than we use today. Technology can do this for us, as long as we don't get stuck.

“Nature” is us, too. It’s constantly changing, but there’s as much of it as there ever was, because our nature is to build. Indeed, so are the ants whose ant hills that you criticise cities for resembling.

The improvements to duration of lifespan have also come with improvements to quality of life.

My father’s final year of life started with a cancer diagnosis, and while it was an extremely long way from “fun”, tech gave him mobility, and he’d only lived that long because of half a lifetime of treatment for disease-induced epilepsy.

My mother had a few years of Alzheimer’s — still essentially untreatable, and yet tech made it easy to keep her entertained, and GPS tracking made it easier for us to look after her without her getting lost due to a moment of intention on our parts.

Our good years involve less and easier work, in better conditions, than 1972, much better than 1921, and insanely better than 1871. When did we start mandatory schooling? When did we end actual slavery? Conscription? When was polio vaccination introduced, when was smallpox eliminated, when was anaesthetic easily available for childbirth? So yes, life is much better than it used to be.

Of course, I actually like living in Berlin, metro area population 61% of what you think the entire plant should have.

This is such an myopic human-centric world view. If every other species had a voice, or an opinion on what the success of man has meant for their own lives, their own families, their own future, what would they say ?

Consider how much man has cost every other living thing on this planet today.

I so much appreciate your point of view! I don't understand those nihilist statements as well. Looks like Satre's smoke has permeated most minds.

We are having this convo because someone had a child.

If someone really thought and believed life isn't a great thing (equating a stone wall to a human being) he'd be either a dishonest person or a weakling to be alive educating us.

For if he truly believes children and humans are all nothing, then, why toil in vain. Why procrastinate, why suffer at all for nothing.

Why is it that the majority of the humans that live and has ever lived chose to toil and provide for their family? Why is it that many folks that has ever lived are happy to have kids and nurture them. Is it ignorance that has given our ancestors the joy they experienced in child bearing and nurturing?

An "intellectual" that is enjoying the wealth of our ancestors turns to proclaim it all nothing because we cannot remember their names.

> For if he truly believes children and humans are all nothing, then, why toil in vain. Why procrastinate, why suffer at all for nothing.

Because suicide is vastly different from never having been born at all. Like every animal people have an extremely strong survival instinct. So strong that people have to be under extreme physical or mental pain before they consider taking their own lives.

This is not an argument for procreation but against it. It adds to the absolute horror that is life.

Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser - freilich Das beste wäre, nie geboren sein.

Sleep is good. Death is better, but the best is to have never been born.

Heinrich Heine 1797-1856 Morphine 1835-1836

http://www.vhemt.org/philrel.htm#antinatalism

Also, after a couple generations the ancestors become so many that the "legacy" contribution from a given ancestor to a given descendant becomes statistically negligible.

If that would be true, we would all be living in stone age.

If you truly internalized your belief that this is all meaningless, rationally you wouldn’t care if the planet was ruined.

That man has set the ideal conditions for raising a lot of children. While most city dwellers scramble from 9 to 5 to own but a cramped apartment—which also leads most of them to forgo having children in the first place—this farmer has plenty of time, and plenty of space. And he grows his own food! It's the ideal condition to raise children. And it's far safer too. I would know, because I grew up on one. But today both women and men are of course taught that a career is much better, toiling for the dreams of another man. Well, I'm not so sure.

>today both women and men are of course taught that a career is much better, toiling for the dreams of another man.

What kind of awful garbage take is this? It's objectively false, people who willingly don't have children are saw as society as second class citizens who are thought of as pathological. The VAST majority of humans have children at some point in their lives. It's true that there's a larger amount of people who willingly forgo having children than in the past, but it's still an incredibly fringe way of life.

>I would know, because I grew up on one.

Not saying that nobody should ever raise children in a rural area but the majority of people I know who grew up in rural areas got heavily involved in drugs and/or alcohol during their youth out of boredom. So there's downsides as well.

The world doesn't have an infinite amount of farmland, you can't raise "a lot of children" on a farm and have their children raise "a lot of children" on a farm indefinitely without running out of farmland. That, by definition, makes it not "ideal."

Yes, what an amazing world we are leaving our children. I'm sure they'll be so thankful of the task our habits and livelihoods have left them. You've left them so much, indeed.

You speak as if everyone of us is guilty and actively participates in making the world worse. Perhaps you should evaluate your nihilism.

To put your accuser in the nihilism box does not absolve you. It would be extremely unlikely for you to not be a active participant in the process of making the world worse.

A human being's inability to accept he is a finite random experiment with no specific purpose is the cause of most of suffering.

Children are not the penultimate achievement of humanity. In fact, they're one of the core things that take zero learned skill and can be created and raised entirely via instinctual means.

I would argue that those who leave the most behind are those who are kind and thoughtful to those in their lives. They leave behind one of the most important and precious things that anyone ever could - pleasant memories in the minds and experiences of others. They brought direct happiness to others through their kindness. This is the type of person I strive to be, and I feel enriched and deeply fulfilled when successful in doing so. In some ways, the type of peace that can bring can be one of the few things that you can "take with you" in death, in that you will feel that happiness until your very last moment, which you will most likely not generally do with material possessions.

Just like one could live their life wholly not applying the same level of effort you describe here to their lives, living on “zero learned skill” and purely “instinctual means” alone.

I’d argue having children is the same. You can do it with zero effort, or you can do it with intention, to leave behind a better off generation, and devoting yourself selflessly as a parent to that cause.

I believe the lifelong quest of high-quality intention is what ultimately is the greatest achievement of life one can chase. Whether that is intentionally treating others with kindness and leaving pleasant memories, or intentionally raising healthy and inspired children who will continue to take up noble intention.

Penultimate means “second to last”. But what is your message, that children are the most precious heritage or not?

I don't believe children are inherently our most precious heritage, but I believe they can be up there if raised with care

My peasant grandmother very rarely set foot outside her village’s mountain valley. When my grandfather got to held an important political party position she had to make do with living ~20 km down the valley in the area’s only town (that’s where my dad was born), but as soon as the chance arose to get back to her village she immediately took it (and I presume she also convinced my grandfather to take it, he became the village’s mayor).

She was very, very happy with her way of living (she lived to about 85 or 86), almost no medical problems in her entire life (apart from the last couple of years), why would she have wanted to give that all away? For some fancy trips to the seaside? That was not what she considered a good way of living.

They are not rich, but they do have way less stress then the city dwellers. And if stress is to be considered the one thing you do not like, they spend way less time in situations they do dislike.

Unless they go into debt. Then the bank owns them and the farm, and the debt turns into stress and you have the city experience, out in the great outdoors.

I'm afraid that those children of yours might not be left behind with good manners.

It is a simplified illusion.

I always wanted to do ancestry for my family (family tree?) And I realized and still realize how far away people really become.

My last grandpa will die soon. I know his stories everyone knows but I don't know what he would have voted, what his favorite food is, what music he liked.

He has dementia now and forgets that he is at home and asks go go home.

What do I know from his life really?

He will end in some online tool as a name, two dates an image and lines connecting him to other family members.

I thought about making a legacy somehow and if I would make children I would create a family book and create rules which would share my thoughts with every future generation and everyone gets reached to follow it and enhance it like having Familie values and keeping them.

But at the end of the day I do realize for myself that this will not work as imagined and it doesn't matter at the end anyway.

People who have children do indeed leave a lot more behind. Yet almost nobody can name their great great grandparents, know what they looked like, or in fact, know anything about them. Sure, "you're their legacy", but they never got to know you and vice versa.

I think this is a more recent phenomenon of the modern’s. One can look to other ancient societies that still exist in small pockets, and their storytelling is orders of magnitude better than ours. Especially when it involves passing down family history.

You also have to realise that only partial family history can ever be truly handed down, particularly when there are no official records. Look back 6 generations in your family and there are 64 direct ancestors (if you're lucky and there was no inbreeding). There's no way all of those names and personalities get preserved. I went looking for family history in parish records and thought that I found a goldmine. Turns out there are about 5 people with the same name in the relatively sparsely populated town that my great great great grandfather was born in. Maybe some were cousins. Maybe one of them was a first-born son who died in childhood, so the traditional first-born name was recycled. It sounds cold hearted, but that shit happened.

Oh there's a great history of story telling on my father's side of the family. He's 94. There's a solitary photo of him sitting on his great grandfather's knee when he was about 5. He has an astonishing memory (that I'm afraid to actively doubt for a number of reasons, mainly though, he's the oldest person I know and nobody alive could corroborate or deny anything he says). He's recently been on TV, being interviewed about his time as a steam train fireman. An example of the amazing stuff he knows... My mother grew up in a large country house that her family somehow inherited. (Honestly, I have no idea and neither does she - they were broke, like most people, but they were rattling around in this large house, and totally mismanaging the land). It was built by a decendent from a French Knight who landed in Ireland in the 1100s during a conquest. There's next to no information about the family, beyond what you might find in Wikipedia about the Knight, and a few generations of the family before they blended into the population. Still, they retained status (justice of the peace, and owning a large estate) and were definitely wealthier than the locals. But the last of that line was Richard DeVerdon, who only had a daughter, Elizabeth. She died at the age of 18, in the year 1845. I was doing some research on the matter an found a large headstone in an ancient graveyard a few miles from our house. My mother knows next to nothing about her family history, and there are few records from the time. Talking to my father opened up a surprising story from his side of the family. My great great great grandfather was a young boy living high on the hills above the graveyard. His own father was ill in 1845 and could not go out to the end of the field to look down to the graveyard, so he asked his young son to go out and look down at the funeral procession and come back to describe what he saw. It's probably why the boy remembered it so vividly. It was a huge funeral, because the young girl was heiress to the estate. He related it directly to my own father when he was a boy, as they stood in the same field looking down at the graveyard. And my father told it to me simply because I asked if he knew anything about the De Verdon family, and the girl's death. It astounded me that I could barely read her name from a very worn headstone, but he could give me a description of the funeral procession that he got from someone who saw it with his own eyes in 1845.

Still hope the old man wasn't just trolling me.

If you meditate then ironically you're trying to achieve the state of mind this man has achieved and lives every day.

What an arrogant opinion. You're unduly proud of being a parent. There is no inherent value to it at all. You force beings into this world and believe this is a feat? Ridiculous.

Your child is just as likely to be a terrible person as they are a good one.

In fact, having children significantly increases the risk that what you leave behind is actually detremental to the world overall.

It takes a special lack of irony to write a comment like this. One of the most closed minded comments I've ever read.

Children learn from their parents and if this is your attitude then I expect your children will inherit it. Will the world be better for them and their perspective of it is the same as yours? I very much doubt it.

Hopefully your children will learn how not to judge others for different life choices, perhaps they will be more humble and not assume superiority over others just because they had children.

In case you had not looked around the world recently, having children is no great achievement. Any idiot can have them.

This person's children are so fucked, its obvious they don't see their children as human beings with thoughts, feelings, dreams, and emotions of their own - just as a way to extend their own personal ego. It's an emotionally damaging way to be raised.

Happiness is a negative. It’s the absence of pain and boredom. It’s achieved by negating those two forces. Or so sayeth Schopenhauer.

Perhaps he gets more satisfaction out of a stone wall than a child. Happiness and achievement are completely subjective. It isn't a credit to anyone who doesn't grasp that, much less denigrate another out of that lack of understanding.

Why is it a lobotomy to enjoy something? And sure you might have added code to Facebook to more accurately track users, or you made a 1% difference to your employer's bottom line, but this guy is a farmer, and you can have all the money in the world but at some point you still need a farmer somewhere to supply you with goods. No one NEEDS what you create. So perhaps don't be so derogatory about others life choices, I am pretty certain that this farmer would not criticize you for your choices.

Think of all the people who made an impact on history and the world. How many of them did it by having children?

This guy at least got an article written about him, what have you done?

I won the Putnam?

lol, once more on cue.

What can I say, tomcam summoned me...

Precisely twice as many people have had an impact on the world by having children as the number that have had an impact on the world through action. Unless you believe that Mary was really a virgin. Then the number is slightly less than twice as many.

Well, Einstein's mom, for one.

Hoping cperciva answers this

is it that hard to accept others perspective ?

> If happiness is a lobotomy then credit to us who don’t choose it.

Why not? By definition it would leave you happy, what does it matter?

Existence is pain to a Meeseeks, Jerry!

You seem to make of happiness some sort of end goal of life. It is not, and should not be.

Why not, and why not?

>I appreciate the romance, but those of us who have children leave behind much more than stone walls we built in our 20s.

How many children are optimum?

Are we to infer that you aren't happy?

Children are continuations of your own or someone else's membrane, but this man built one himself /s

Children aren't much of a legacy either. They have 50% of your DNA and nurture. Grandkids 25%. Grand-grandkids 12.5%. Within a few generations your contribution is watered down to almost nil. Children are amazing in their own right, but they're not exactly a legacy. If you want legacy, write a good book, start a successful company, etc; ideas are things that can become legacy.

In enough generations, not one atom of your descendent's DNA will be specifically yours. The impact of your parenting will be diluted. The time spent on parenting shuts off an infinity of other options. I adore my children but the ways we enrich our culture and those around us matters just as much as our kids. And besides, why should a well-lived life look the same for him as for others?

> ...not one atom of your descendent's DNA will be specifically yours.

Ignoring the fact that you are probably not correct scientifically speaking, I think that the constitution of your descendants is figuratively, symbolically, if not scientifically, yours (please pardon my English). It's yours because you played an entirely crucial role in creating this lineage. Whatever path it took after your role in it, that path was shaped by your involvement. You don't have to believe in the spiritual importance of lineage to acknowledge that your actions, and simply being, have some important, significant impact upon it. I find this outlook a bit too modern and nihilistic for me.

I take the view that it's more optimistic, and our impact is felt in many ways, parenting being one of them, but I take your point.

But it could have been absolutely anyone else, with a penis.

This sounds quite sanctimonious, just because you have children doesn’t mean your life is somehow more valid than those that don’t. This mans life is arguably more valuable to society than us sat in an office. He’s producing food and helping to feed a nation

*I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

This valley dwellers will be there long after the ruins you created swallowed all you touch.

Oh man, this is great. Thanks for sharing. Here's Bryan Cranston's reading of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPlSH6n37ts

Yeah, and if everyone in the world did exactly the same thing we would be already a) out of space on the planet b) starving because you can’t just eat sheep c) dying because there’s no high-functioning medical industry requiring a working manufacturing facilities to have nice things like MRI

1) we weren't running out of space on the planet until there was high functioning technology to prevent people from dying,

2) you can eat just sheep,

3) people lived just fine before we paid for massive bureaucratic buildings full of men to tell them they don't know what's wrong with them and full of facilities to keep people on life support.