TRANSCRIPT
A question I often like to ask people, because it’s a question I like to ask myself, is: what do you think is gonna happen to our world in 20 years, or in 50 years, or a hundred years? What do you think our future really holds?
An answer I get not infrequently is that people say, “I think our species is going to go extinct. I think our world is going to collapse. I think everything is going to go to rot in hell. It’s all gonna crash.” And well, there’s part of me that considers that a possibility also. But why I came here now to make a video about this is several of the people who have answered in that way to me, that they think our species is going to go extinct, are people who actually have young children. And that brings up a whole other question for me. And sometimes I’ve even asked these people, it’s like, if you feel this way, why did you have children? Because the obvious thing to me is you are setting your children up for horrible destruction, for a life on a planet that’s gonna be awful. And mostly they don’t give very good answers. Some of them say things that are sort of facetious, like, “Well, maybe my child will change that. Maybe my child would be the one to make a big difference,” or something like that. But even then, when they said it, I don’t really feel they’re very sincere about it. And mostly I haven’t gotten any sort of really good answers from younger parents about that when they so obviously feel that the world is gonna crash and burn, that our species is going to go out in a burst of flames.
So I come here now to try to analyze that. Why did they have children? Why would they have children? Why would someone want to have children if they think our species is going extinct, if they think everything is just headed for doom and gloom? And I come up with a few different answers. I think the first answer comes out of my observations of people in general, of human psychology. And that is the human mind has a capacity to hold two opposing ideas at the exact same time, two radically opposing points of view at the exact same time. I’ve seen this again and again. I’ve seen it as a therapist. I see it out in the world. I see it so often with people and their ethics. They actually hold really strong ethics about one thing, and yet they’re able to do things that are totally against their ethics. And often they have a way in their mind to be able to balance this contradiction. Maybe they use rationalization to rationalize their bad behavior, or they’re so dissociated when they’re doing their behavior that goes against their ethics that at some level they don’t really even realize that they’re doing it. Or they’re profoundly in denial, or they just feel lots and lots of guilt about it, but they keep doing the behavior and yet hold on to their ethics. Or they just keep it a secret and nobody knows about it. Things like that. So that by keeping it a secret, they can put their ethics forward publicly, but privately they can say, “Well, I know I’m not following my ethics,” etc., etc. Or what they can do is they can use their ethics to balance out their guilt. “Oh, I have such strong ethics,” it balances out their guilt about doing things that go against their ethics.
So I think this is one thing with people who say, “Oh, the world is going to crash and burn and humans are going to go extinct,” yet they’re having children. They’re doing something that’s so basically contrary to what their philosophy would be. I think the thing with this idea that the world is going to crash and burn is at one level people can feel this. They can even say that they know this. They can really strongly have an intuition that it’s really going to crash and burn. And yet at the same time, they can’t actually believe it. It’s so contrary to what we see around us, this thriving species. And we’re worried about politics, and we’re talking about economics, and everybody’s trying to make a living, and we’re struggling day to day, and we’re all trying to find happiness, meaning, and things like this. Yet at the same time, a person can look forward to the future and see something that, like, the end point of the direction we’re heading may not be so good, or it may even be horrible. And yet they’re living in this present day reality. So their day-to-day life isn’t thinking about this future horrible thing so much. So when I ask that question about what the future is, it actually shifts them into a totally different way of thinking, a very different perspective. And their perspective when they look forward is this perspective that’s not so pleasant—doom and gloom, that kind of thing. But they’re not living in that perspective almost ever. And it brings up the question of why they are having children at all.
And to me, what I see, especially for people who have this, what they would call it, an insight, and to look forward and just seeing so much horror coming up, is really they’re having children as part of their own life of comfort. They’re having children focused on their present tense. They’re not actually thinking about their children’s future, really. They’re thinking about their own personal present tense. They’re thinking about their children’s present tense. And maybe they’re thinking about their own future, because I’ve heard that from some parents. Some people are pretty explicit about it. Some cultures are very explicit about it. People say, “Okay, the world is going in a terrible direction, that’s going in a dangerous direction, but I need someone when I’m old to take care of me. And if I don’t have children, who’s going to be there for me?” To me, well, I could pretty easily say that’s a very selfish motive. But I could say if they look forward into the future and said the world in general, we’re looking at a very promising future, a hopeful future, a future of a healthier ecology, healthier living for people, healthier living for animals, nature is getting better and better and better. If people said that, it might be a little bit more justifiable for them to say, “Yeah, I want children so I’ll be taken care of in my old age.” But isn’t that pretty selfish to say, “I’m having children to take care of me,” knowing in their mind that the world is going to collapse, that horrible things are coming? What about their children’s future? Because that’s a big thing. I think so many parents that I see aren’t really thinking about their children’s future much at all. They’re thinking about their own future. They’re thinking about their own needs. And I think underneath it all, what I see again and again is people are really thinking of their own unmet needs from their childhood, the things that they didn’t get when they were little, the ways in which their parents didn’t meet so many of their legitimate needs, that they really are still on a quest in their life through their partnerships in romance, through their friendships, through their work, through addictions, and then so many times through their children to get all these different external things in their life to meet their unmet childhood needs from way back when that are still stored inside of them, buried inside of them, dissociated. And even though they’re adults, and even though they can say things like, “Oh, I have unconditional love for my children. I adore my children. I would die for my children. My children are the most important things to me,” really deep down when they say all those things, it’s actually not really true. Because underneath it, what I’ve seen again and again is what they’re really saying is, “I have all this warmth, adoration, love for my children. I’d die for my children,” etc., etc. But really what it’s about is I would do all these things for my children so that my children will take care of me. Really fundamentally, with so many people I’ve seen, perhaps not all, but so many definitely, really their children are in their mind, in their deep unconscious mind, there for them. It’s not a relationship of real unconditional love. It’s not a relationship of unconditional nurturance. There actually are conditions on it. And that to me, it’s highlighted in the most extreme way when people say they don’t even see a…
Future for our whole species, and yet they’re still having children. It’s like that really helps me to explain this strong logical inconsistency. You could even call it a hypocrisy.
Now with people that I’ve trusted more, or perhaps people where I feel a little bit more safe to be really blunt, sometimes it’s a little easier with people that I know I’m never gonna see again. I could ask them, in the polite way, and I have asked some people, “Well, what about this inconsistency? Isn’t that sort of hypocritical?”
And I’ve had some people even say to me directly, people who they themselves think, “Well, I’m never gonna see him again, so I can be honest.” Some have even said, “Well, yeah, but I have to look after myself. This is what life is all about.” And some we’ve even said, “I’m doing to my children what my parents did unto me.” And these are people who really don’t like their parents. Somebody even told me, “I don’t like my parents. My parents are awful people.” But I feel that obligation, in part just for a personal obligation, or in part because of society’s pressure on me to do it, to take care of my parents, to make sure they’re looked after, to make sure they’re financially okay. And that’s what I’m looking for in my children when they grow up.
So I’m inculcating in them the same responsibility that was inculcated in me. And I said, “But isn’t that an unfair responsibility? Isn’t that something that shouldn’t have been put on you?” And they’re like, “Well, yeah, that’s just the way the world works. That’s the way my culture works. That’s the way I was raised. That’s the way my parents were raised. My parents had to do this for their parents, and I had to do it for them, and now my children are gonna grow up to be expected to do it for me.”
And I might say, and I have said, “Don’t you feel bad about that? Don’t you feel like it kind of goes against what you’re saying about unconditionally loving your children?” And they say, “Well, I do love my children.” I say, “Yeah, but what about unconditionally loving your children? What about the idea of your children growing up to become free entities in the world, to really have the freedom to be who they fully are, especially if you’re saying your children are going to be the ones who are going to go forth to change the screwed up pattern that the world is in?”
Well, I’ve never gotten any really good answers about that because fundamentally I don’t think there are any really good answers about that. But it is food for thought for me. And to be honest, there is a certain comfort I have knowing, well, that I didn’t have children. Also a little bit of fear sometimes because it can make sense to me to think, “What about when I get old? Who is gonna take care of me?” But really, when I think about that, when I get old, who’s gonna take care of me? I really think that question and that fear for a lot of people, and for myself, really does come down to something more basic and unconscious in me that’s actually becoming more conscious.
And that question is, “Why didn’t my real parents take care of me much better when I was a child and I was so full of needs?” And what I found is that question about worrying about my future, who’s going to take care of me when I get old, has quelled significantly. I’ve become so much more relaxed about worrying about my future by actually taking care of my past, by healing the wounds of my early childhood, by loving myself, by grieving the losses, by saying, “You know what happened to me was horrible,” and really facing it, looking at it in the cold light of day, and mourning what I’ve lost.
We’re really doing a lot of grieving, crying, getting away from the people who abandoned me and who raised me in so many different hypocritical and harmful ways. And what I found, to repeat myself a little bit, is that by loving myself, by healing those wounds, I’m much more centered. I’m much more here. I’m actually much, much better able to take care of myself now on an emotional level and also to not be so worried about my future.
I remember that statement, and I really like it: “If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you’re actually pissing on your present.” And I really like that. To me, there’s been a lot of truth in that. When I was younger, so much obsession about my future, my future, my future, and so much fear and anxiety and terror and rage about my past. The end result being I really wasn’t that centered in my present. And what I found now is that I am much more centered in my present.
And part of being centered in my present is that I have a lot more to give to others. I have much more of a surplus in myself. And that way, I have become much more altruistic because I’m not so much of the needy unconscious child that I was in a good chunk of my early adulthood. And what this is doing is allowing me to build strong relationships with others in the world.
And I think in many ways, by doing that, in a loving, really unconditional way, I am setting myself up for a better future. Now, what is my future? I don’t know. I don’t find myself so worried about it. I used to do much more, but I really don’t. And it’s a very nice place to be because I am so focused on what I need to do now.
And the question, “What do I see for the future of our species, for the future of our world?” I really don’t know. I have hope, but I think the real hope that I have is hope in people who are resolving their childhood traumas. Because the more that individuals do that, the less those individuals are so needy and so exploitative of others, exploitative of their children, exploitative of nature, exploitative of their own selves, misusing their selves in so many different ways. So that is my hope for the future. It’s the people who are doing the healing.
And yeah, we are a very screwed up species. No one can deny how screwed up our species is. But our very screwed up species that has so much unresolved trauma, and as the result of that, so much unresolved unconscious childhood needing played out through an adult lens writ large as a species, I don’t have much hope for that. I don’t have that much hope for people who are like that because I don’t think it’s very hopeful.
But the minority of people, presently a minority, who are resolving this childhood stuff, who are looking back, who are able to look at their parents accurately for how screwed up their parents were and are changing that cycle, those are the people who I have hope in. And I think that if our species has hope, and I do think our species has hope, the hope is in those people. And I don’t think those people are going to crash and burn so quickly. I don’t think those people are going to go extinct that quickly because I think their ideas are powerful.
I think the self of a human being who has actualized by resolving their traumas, or has done a lot of that work, I’ve done a lot of self-actualization by resolving a lot of their traumas, I would put myself in that category, having done a lot of it, not all of it. I’ve never seen anybody do all of it. But the people who have done more, I think there’s hope in that. There’s hope in them. And for that reason, I think there is still hope in our world.