TRANSCRIPT
Not infrequently, when I tell people that I’m not going to have children, one of the replies that I get is, “Well, who’s gonna take care of you when you get old?” So I want to respond to that comment.
Well, for starters, when I hear that comment, “Who’s going to take care of you when you get old?” it kind of brings to mind this idea that’s still common in certain parts of the world. And it was more common in America once upon a time that people needed to have lots and lots of children to work the farm. Children were there to grow up and work, and you needed lots of children because if you didn’t have lots of children, you weren’t gonna have ready-made, cheap, or free farmhands.
Basically, this brings to mind also something that I’ve seen when I travel around the world, especially in places that are more poor, that people treat their children sort of like halfway between human beings and livestock. This idea that children are there to work.
Now, often what I see in Western society is in our world, if children are sort of more like pets, they’re not like livestock. Children are there to be coddled. They’re also there to make the parents happy, to give the parents pleasure in all sorts of different ways. But they don’t expect the children to work until, that is, you become old and infirm, and then their job becomes to take care of the farm—that is, you.
Well, what’s my problem with that? Personally, I look at children as wild animals. What about their life? What about their independence? What about their freedom? I certainly have known, been friends with, and seen a lot of people who grow up into their adulthood and spend so much of their emotional energy, if not all of it sometimes, taking care of their parents. It’s like they don’t have their own independent life. They’re not free. And it’s like, what kind of life is that? Who in their right mind would want that for their child?
And what I think is the kind of people that want their children to grow up to take care of them are selfish parents. They’re like parasites in these cases. They feed off their children, and it hurts their children. Another one is parents being like vultures, feeding off the emotional carcass of their child for their own good and not for the good of their child.
And we live in a world, we live in societies where often that is considered not just okay, but it’s considered normal. It’s considered appropriate. People say it overtly, not even realizing this is sick. There’s something really wrong with this.
So then this brings up the question of what happens when somebody like me gets old and I don’t have children? Who is gonna take care of me? And really, my first thought is, I am gonna take care of me. The more that I really give from a surplus of who I am, give as a surplus for the self-love that I already have, the more I’ve seen that the world really does meet me halfway and take care of me as I get older. My life is better. I don’t need people who are emotionally stunted and harmed by me to take care of me.
The more I am altruistic, the more that karma comes into play. And I don’t mean religious karma in any sense. I mean karma in the sense of what I put out is what I get back. And for me, what I see is this is the direction I’m heading in. So when people say, “Oh, you need to have children to take care of you,” I say no. As I get older, I take better care of myself, and the world meets me halfway.