No. That’s not an uncommon thought. They probably shouldn’t have. My parents shouldn’t have, either. But they did, and we’re here now, and wringing our hands over it accomplishes nothing.

You exist now, in the present. That’s an immutable truth that you cannot change, so your only choice is to live now, and look forward to making a better future.

I don’t think someone needs to be the result of a loving relationship to matter or have value. None of us really needed to exist but we do so fuck it, let’s try to make the most of it (I need to take my own advice here)

As for caring about the future, I think we all should want a better reality for the children even if they aren’t “our” children. Immediate family isn’t necessarily the most important thing, we’re all related. Personally it brings me comfort to think of all life in the universe as part of a connected consciousness, and it’s worth fighting for.

Good things can come from bad decisions, and bad things can come from good decisions.

The existential questions come up regardless. Either way you ask yourself why, what’s the point, if you matter, if anything matters. And the answer is always no reason and something extremely important, there is no point and the point is because someone cares, you and everything matters but also not at all and certainly not to the universe.

And that’s ok.

my parents divorced, violently, when i was 5. my dad died a couple decades later. i often wonder what the fucking point of them having me was, but there wasn’t a point. my dad came in my mom and she wanted to keep it and shit spiraled and pressed their relationship into goo. but regardless of my feelings on it i still have to be here and live, and a lot of cool shit has happened to me even if i think my existence is a ‘mistake’ or whatever. even if my parents didn’t really give a shit, or couldn’t care for me and each other properly, i still have people in my life that depend on me and who i love dearly, and that sorta makes up for it.

fwiw therapy has helped a lot

It’s fine to think about such things, but leftists have a tendency to fall into patterns of thinking that are governed by self-righteousness and victimisation which can be paralysing and counter-productive. The Ancient Greeks used to say that the best thing for a man would be to have never been born at all. It’s an old problem. But we’re here now and we have to do what we can.

you have inherent value and human dignity

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.

its pretty normal honestly, i wouldnt worry about it too much. most people shouldnt have been born considering gestures at everything

my parents shouldn’t of had me and they did a bad job raising me compared to what im seeing as an adult but they did their best they didnt know any better.

I think this post feels very sad to me, and I would like to try to offer you some comfort in the form of trying to reframe things.

I understand why you look at your circumstances and think that your parents should never have gotten together and that you shouldn’t exist - their incompatibility really shines through the matter-of-fact way you talk about their dead relationship and opposite worldviews.

That sucks. Everything they’ve collaborated on has gone to shit, and that has to make you feel pretty fucking terrible about yourself.

You’re not their project, though. Why should it matter what hand they had in creating you? You’re loose on the world now, and you’re your own person. Maybe they shouldn’t have procreated! Sure, ideally, all children would be born to stable parents in stable situations with good resources, but that’s never been the standard for any species ever.

So. You started out in a very much not ideal situation, with parents who were wildly incompatible and probably didn’t show the greatest standard of care to you while they dealt with their own shit… And here you are today, on a commie forum, posting with the other sweetiepies and carebears and lovefools who just want a better world. You came through emotional hardship, and it didn’t harden your heart and make you selfish; if it had, you wouldn’t be part of this community.

I’m sorry you feel weird about you. I think your very existence as the person you are is a victory.

❤️❤️❤️

You’re here. You made it. That’s all it takes for your life to have as much value as anyone else’s. Plenty of people have children in less than ideal circumstances. That’s their own lives. This is yours.

I can relate to those thoughts and I’ve just been diagnosed with heavy depression. If you’re also tired all of the time you might want to go to the doctor’s.

Anyway regarding your parents: Who they are now might not have been who they were when they decided to have you (I know mine weren’t).
Either way, you’re not responsible for your parents happiness, but I’m pretty sure they’re very happy that you exist, they just don’t like each other.

It sounds like you’re taking on a responsibility that isn’t really supposed to be yours, so I just want to say: You didn’t keep them together, their unwillingness to accept that they should be apart did. They might have used you as an excuse for this unwillingness, but that’s on them, not you. You are not responsible for that, just like you’re not responsible for their relationship. They are adult sapient beings who should be able to look at their relationship and realise that they are bad for each other. The fact that they have a child together shouldn’t be a complication, in fact it should have made it easier for them to make the responsible decision, so they could provide you with two stable loving homes, instead of one unstable home.
You are not responsible for your parents. They are responsible for themselves and in fact they are responsible for you, because they are your parents. It should not be you lamenting your existence, but them lamenting the fact that they have pushed you to think such a thing. You are not responsible for your parents.

I feel you a bit on that when I think about the history of my own parent’s relationship (I’m my mother’s therapist basically). I can’t get them to make each other happy but, I can at least do my part to bring some happiness for them as part of my own familial relationships. So that relieves some of the guilt that I’m some sort of fetter on their lives.

I guess what moves me forward from all this is that I’m here regardless and I want to live, grow, and love before I’m no more. To belong, be fulfilled, and be at peace at the end of it all. Everybody should have the opportunity to live a full life while they’re on this earth, including you. That’s what motivates me at the heart of my left politics, the pursuit of that indescribable feeling of wholeness when everyone is being their best self in their best life and I did my part to make it so.

With regards to kids, you might not be having your own biological children but, as I tell myself, there are still plenty of children out there that need folks to help them like they’re their own biological parents. That doesn’t just extend to foster parenting but, also to the political and community side of things. Community wise, even helping the families of trusted friends with their children via babysitting. And policy wise, people fight to see better policies so that these kids can grow up to be fulfilled adults. I guess the point in all that is that, regardless of if they’re your biological children or not, helping to foster the growth of the next generation can be fulfilling in itself, by way of that feeling of wholeness I mentioned above.

First id like to say something about your parents marriage. People dont choose partners based only on the good things they have, we often (very often indeed) choose what problems we want to have. Of course, for most people they do it inconsciently. But as much as humans want to be loved in a certain way, we also want to be hated in certain ways too. Maybe your parents are just a very bad case of this, but its present in all relationships to some degree. And also, lots of relationships based on hating the other can be very durable. Im not saying its good or desirable, its just how things are.

But talking about bad decisions, cheese was created because someone made a bad decision about storing milk. I rest my point about this. And another thing about you being born and raised, you really cant do it without love. You really cant parent out of just obligation.

And yes, you should think about politics too, and worry about the future too. What you are today is not only what you got from your parents, you also contain your friends, your relationships, your heroes, your enemies, the art you saw, random kind and bad strangers that you met, etc. So you are going to be passed down to the future, with or without kids.

I’ve had a similar experience growing up with my parents. My life is an elaborate cosmic joke, except I’m the only one that gets to hear all of it. The best I can do is laugh at it sometimes.

It sounds like you’re seeking meaning for your existence. I spend my days trying to think of ways to improve conditions so that others in our position aren’t as miserable, and so that hopefully, those born in the future won’t have to experience what we went through. I’m not doing very well at it, but I should improve the more I try.

I don’t entirely know why. I will never have children either, for similar reasons, although I have a penchant for queer sex and now feminizing HRT instead of a vasectomy. I’ve also recently been grieving my eternal lack of children, and the only thing that’s helped has been finding existing people to nurture. Maybe redirecting my newfound parental instincts is enough. I’d like to think my drive to better the world is more than that, but I find it hard to believe my brain works on much deeper of a level, despite my best efforts. I don’t think that matters too much.

I don’t and can’t know what will work for you, and maybe you can’t, either. Maybe work towards implementing that better timeline you can see, even if it means you don’t exist anymore as you are now? I think it’s pretty cool you can see through spacetime like that, anyway. Maybe it’s part of being an anomaly.

Damn, that’s an awful lot of maybes. Nothing is too certain, after all. Try to let that liberate you instead of weigh you down.

…woops, i almost forgot im just a silly chimkin bukbukbukbokbAWK

I don’t really think about procreation as a thing that should happen, as if you attach morality to it. It’s so weird that there’s something instead of nothing and stranger still that someone’s here to see it. Once more it’s stranger that it’s you and me. Far be it from me to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. All I know is that it needs more communism