OP: meh.
Yeah: Your ancestors are all watching, cheering you on, saying:
“We NEVER wanted children. FINALLY one of us broke the cycle!!”
You found my partners family. Literally people who hated children placed a generational curse for thier kids hate their children.
Them: "we were just horny fucks with no condoms"
Me, gay: "watch me solve that problem with this one weird trick!"
It is pretty crazy to think that for literally thousands of years, every single ancestral pairing, going all the way back to the first lil mud skippers that flopped up on land, have decided to produce offspring, which is ultimately the only reason you're even alive today.
And when it's your turn to uphold the unbroken tradition dating back millennia, you're just like 'naaaaaaah, fuck that yo'????
Honestly that's fuckin awesome! The point of life is your own personal experience, and you should absolutely do everything you can to push it in the direction of your choosing, tradition be damned. ✌️
The way I see it is that tradition is working pretty damn well on the whole. People are producing kids just fine, taking care of them as they grow and become adults is the hard part. That lineage you point to is the only reason I'm alive today, yes, but there are a lot of other "only reasons" I'm alive today that happened after I was born, and many of them were very much not from my biological parents.
Personally there was a lot of generational trauma in my upbringing and I don't wanna pass that on. These days I've taken that parental drive and repurposed it toward the adults in my community whose parents have decided to abandon them, usually due to being queer. It's different than having a parental relationship to a kid, but I'm finding a community guardian role is filling the same emotional need. The people I care for won't carry my name, but I didn't even carry my own name lol.
I used to struggle with the fact that nothing I do will likely outlive me, but now I feel it's just as worthwhile to make the present day better for the people who need it. I'd still love to work with kids, maybe teach or something, but being trans makes many parents less willing to allow their kids to be around me. I might foster someday, it'll be a challenge but I think it's something I'd get a lot more out of.
You know what, at least 7 branches of hominids existed from the same line (12 if you count one evolving to the next) and only one of them lead to us.
Hey. It's like sometimes you don't need to score the goal -- pass the ball and let someone else score with your help. It's a society, man, and as a group we're not in (much) danger of external extinction.
To be fair a lot of people don’t have the choice
That is literally the funniest ASCII drawing I've seen.
It's weird why people call it a line, we're just a leaf on a big ass tree
Asexual, sex-repulsed, intersex. Bloodline stops with me for like all the reasons.
But where a bloodline ends, freezer burrito consumption begins.
Burritos are worth it :p
If your ancestry was a tree, what people think of when saying this is the tree getting uprooted, when it really is more akin to cutting off a two, perhaps three growing seasons old branch.
Which is to say that not even in this teeny tiny way do you matter.Family trees can be drawn both with ones self as the root that everything branches off of as well as starting back as far as one can go and tracing all of the branches including ones own
The point of progeny is to increase the likelihood of your species survival. Today, the opposite is true. I'd call it luck.
Not species, genes. Species is a socially constructed concept. Selection operates at the level of individual genes which are the fundamental transmissible units.
Bacteria even carry out horizontal gene transfer via the exchange of plasmids between cells!
Baby, thanks to CRISPR, humans can too.
I wonder if decreased reproduction in developed countries is the result of evolutionary forces from long ago. It seems like most animals are the opposite, and have more offspring during times of plenty.
Eh… My brother has two sons. No need for me to add more.
I like how this flips the narrative from: "I need to make my impact on the future by leaving a child!" to "I can also make an impact on the future by deciding not to leave a child here!"
I went on a little thought journey about this, partly because I'll never have my own biological kids (snip snip). Ironically, I have a family tree that is traced back to the 1500s. My branch will just stop. I'm OK with that - this is my choice. There will be a lot of branches that just stop because of unfortunate deaths. The difference is whether it's by choice or not, maybe?(?) Is this a bad thing anyway?
also japanese. also didn't inherit the hardwired instinctual urge to pass on my genes ¯\__(ツ)__/¯
Jokes' on my ancestors, we've been getting through a bottleneck for the last 3 generations. All only children... at least on my mum's side, my dad's side's not faring much better with my generation and our kids
I'm the third or fourth generation only child on my mom's side. I broke that cycle with two kids which I think is pretty cool
good job. I hope you get some grandkids that are healthy and happy in the appropriate future
They lived at a time when there was no planet-level reason not to have kids. You don't. Swap places and the behaviors swap. This isn't because of you.
At least not statistically.
I feel attacked
At least your kids won’t
I looked it up and it seems that there are other Homo sapiens sapiens, so it was never up to me after all.
I do the same thing, but I regard it as carrying on the proud tradition of kings, like Charles IV and Richard III, who have done this before me.
They probably still have a few branches of the family tree growing.
I always find that funny, people only think about their branch but I'm looking at my family tree and even though my branch stops, my cousins have kids, the family lives on, so who cares about the bloodline bullshit?
Thank you for your service
Sally Amaki is always big mood but is always right.
no way a nananiji idolposting on lemmy 😳😳
:3
Each generation back from yours has a higher chance of not having their genetic lineage ended by you not procreating. Most people will have siblings so won't even be the end of their parents lineage, even less will be the end of their grandparents, I'd be surprised if there was anyone that could end the lineage of their great grand parents. Depending on your circumstances I'd say the only ancestors you have to worry about disappointing in a genetic propagation sense are your parents, and that's only if you have no siblings.
The idea wasn't to bring you to life. You are just a byproduct of the process of having sex.
Just like how there are people who intentionally avoid having children, there are people who intentionally have children.
And there are who intentionally avoid but still ending up having and there are who intentionally planning to have but cannot.
_
Jesus christ what you said is disgusting. Be better.
I'm male (women have it stronger) and experienced it myself, family gets more important over 30. Be less drama. Whatever.
Or maybe you could stop being a dick and respect people's decisions.
Yo, what the heck
Let people be themselves, she's far from the only one who doesn't want to waste their time
You're hitting all the sad tropes for a laugh, right?
It's all good. Societies have fewer kids and worship fewer invisible sky gods as they get more educated and less food-insecure. It's just a stat.
I just worry when actual people really say things like your comment and believe them.
NGL the girl in that profile picture could realistically be anywhere between 12 and 47. The way skincare routines are these days, and then Photoshop on top.
