My parents have had a terrible marriage for basically as long as I can remember. I have been anticipating their divorce on some level since I was about 11 (I’m now in my late 20s), and I don’t know why they don’t just pull the plug. In fact, I don’t even know why they got married in the first place; they don’t enjoy each other’s company, they don’t have congruent ideas or tastes on basically anything, they’re basically incompatible in every way.
I think they both would have been better off if they had split up early, never gotten married and never had children together. They should have married different people, or just not gotten married at all.
The obvious implication of this, of course, is that I shouldn’t have been born. This does cause me some existential discomfort. Thoughts occur to me like, “Why do I care so much about the future? Why do I pay so much attention to politics? What’s the point of advocating for socialism or trying to work towards a better future? I don’t have kids, I can’t have kids*, I don’t think I should have kids, and I don’t even think my parents should have had me. In a better timeline, I wouldn’t even be here anyway.”
*(I had a vasectomy a few years ago)
I would like to feel a bit more assured about all of this. What do you think?
I guess I don’t really understand what your discomfort stems from. Most marriages in human history have been about convenience and economic necessity as opposed to love. It was nice if you got along with your spouse but that was never the main reason. At worst, your parents’ marriage is on the lower end of the average human experience with marriage.
If you want an existential reason for your existence then you probably won’t find one. Human beings aren’t really sentient in the way they think they are. Most humans are driven by instinct in the same way that an insect is. What we consider the ego is merely the social organ that the brain uses to navigate interpersonal relations.
Do you mind elaborating on that?
Sure, the ego is more or less a social appendage used by the brain in order to fulfill instinct and other drives. In the same way that our arms are merely instructed to move by electrical impulses, the ego is merely instructed to want/do things by the unconscious mind. You don’t decide to eat, your brain increases the hormone Ghrelin and the ego carries it out. While it gets more complicated, this is also the reason people love, strive for greatness, and participate in altruistic behavior. If the ego isn’t aware of where its desires come from, then it is powerless to distinguish between itself and those desires. Thus, it becomes no more sentient than an insect or a plant.
This isn’t to say that the ego is destined to be a mere slave. The ego can override the desires of the unconscious but only if it is aware of the boundaries between them. Similarly, being unaware is not a moral judgment. You can be a morally righteous person and still not understand how the mind is structured.
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