I also made this decision on children for the very same reasons. I am very much also in the role of “helper” in my world, I don’t know any other way to be but I kind of lost touch with how to want anything for myself so there is a danger to it.

Anyway, thank you for the intelligent exchange, it’s rare as praseodymium lately.

This might be the first time I actually read a book recommended by someone on the internet. I feel like you’re dangerously close to how I think and feel, for better or worse, and while the revelation and understanding made me despair, I think pushing through and learning more might be the only way forward.

I am seeing our species’ future, where it’s just going to be cycles of back-and-forth, fighting our worst survival instincts or giving into them as we just make fascism and oppression over and over again because we’re not built to form a universal bond. Likely because for the million years or so before we even started agriculture or mastered fire, we were killing each other in wars without record, countless bloody fights between tribes of humans until we all just learned to hate and distrust anyone even slightly different than us. It made our brains grow so fast that our heads are now lethal weapons against our own mothers, but it also made the idea of a unified, borderless and compassionate world strictly unattainable. So what’s left? What’s the alternative?

Barring an actual threat from beyond like a 3-body-problem alien (a fantastic story btw) that would unite us all against a common enemy, then I don’t see us getting past this current state of shuffling pieces around on the bored to make little pockets of group-think and superficial relationships like skin color tribes, video-game culture tribes, religious tribes, and so on. We have brains forged from threats and enemies, and that is what we will see in each other before we see friends every time, and any little differences will always be amplified through that “System 1” as we invent rationalizations for not engaging our System 2.

Seeing the truth of the social picture is yes, the first part.

The last 10% is the hardest part, because that’s where you find yourself in the picture, and the hopelessness of the larger picture.

The blackest pill I’ve had to swallow as an adult is the empirical, material reality of what we are, what our qualia actually is, and film-strip that everyone is trapped in, thinking we’re making our own choices. Or more correctly, not thinking at all.

We don’t actually think about things, it’s an illusion your mind makes to “explain” things. Like the decisions you make to fulfill survival imperatives. We all live in this state on various levels, but none of us live outside of it. We’re having an experience, yes, but we don’t use free will.

I know we have some form free-will, but I genuinely don’t think we have access to it in most cases. Maybe some tiny, buried spark of something, a teeny seed that in another several million years may turn into a creature that really does make choices and understand the universe.

We’ve got a long, long way to get there though. The keys that pushed me over that last threshold was trying to understand where my own thoughts originate, where all of our feelings and experiences originate from, how we form language in our minds and trying to find what forms those “words” and that realization alone was terrifying but then realizing that not everyone even has THAT much, that most people are walking through life just reacting and experiencing and not even attempting to think with language and abstraction.

Most people don’t read. 21% of the American population is functionally illiterate. This is a failing on many levels, but the fact that it’s a failing at all means that we broadly don’t care enough to make the most important thing we have, the only TRUE thing we each possess, a priority. We do not care. We rather live a life of experiencing and reacting and believing our post-hoc rationalizations than try to break free of ice-age instincts and survival tools. And this shouldn’t be a surprise, we were living in that world less than 100 grandparents ago. We’re the SAME creature. We’re not conscious yet. We’re just really good at tricking ourselves as we manipulate our world in increasingly complex ways.

But so many people are making it into a statement. I have no idea why.

If you keep chasing this question, you eventually get to a very dark place and realize just how little free-will our species has. I am dead serious, unless you want to wreck your entire perception of yourself and our species and deal with a very severe depressive episode, cease your investigations.