How does giving everything to children so that they don’t have to struggle as much as the parents did lead to the destruction of the children and eventually the parents in old age? How do parents try to buy love? How self-aspiration leads to a rat race which is then rationalized as “for providing children?” How do parents try to buy love?
Table of Contents
A. Core Feeling that one desires
Every animal, humans included has only a key desire “to feel being needed,” to feel we are adding some value to people around us. If we give what others need then they will give what we need, that is LOVE.
B. Law: The brain doesn’t work in two ways, what you chase in life, you get in the end
“I have struggled a lot in my life, my children must get a good and comfortable life.”
The biggest self-destructive lies fathers in particular have been telling themselves for ages.
Why? It is hard to accept we chase money, but when you can convince yourself with the lie you are earning for children, then rat race appears noble.
C. The Destruction of “my child won’t have to earn what he needs in life”
Results of transforming a child into a privileged child:
i) Expensive schooling:– It is not necessary to first create a desire for knowledge; schols would act as a shortcut for “good education”
ii) Transport: Never mind that only 15% of Indian families have cars. Unless the child walks to school, he/she will be already cut out from the 85% of society and won’t develop the need for transport.
iii) Devices: Technology makes life easier, but there has to be a life in the first place. Life by definition is a fight against death for survival. Easy food, no life, and then a device is like a knife in a monkey’s hand.
iv) Dresses: “Kapda Lajja Dhakti Hai.” A cloth helps us to cover our shame. Like food, it is a key fundamental to life. When one focuses on the cloth they forget the shame. Let’s get designer clothes for children.
v) Cars & Bikes: The child turns 18, and gifts a Car, and/or Bike to the child. He/she doesn’t have to earn. Legs are just to keep the jeans in place.
vi) Travel and Tours: The child has worked a lot for one year, mugging up silly books in school, lets us give comfort by taking the child to exquisite tours.
Keep adding.
D. “I deserve” syndrome
Because of food, cloth, roof, transport, knowledge, and tools, the child had to earn none. After all the parents did not take their permission while bringing them into the world! We deserve it, and parents must give.
E. Love is a Sequential Feeling “Fear of Death, Followed by Relief of Being Alive”
a newborn doesn’t see the mother, and feels dead; then the mother holds the child in the chest and the child feels alive. We love only and only those(people, pursuits) that make us feel alive, when we feel dead.
F. Inability to Love
Sense of hunger, shame, roofless sun, legwork, knowledge, life, and tools, the child develops a love for nothing. The child never experienced death feeling repeatedly, and so fear of death remained.
G. The Old Age Ending
You want love, but the child, now an adult only knows “hate of not having something(cars, money etc).”
“I sacrificed so much for the children,” the old man thinks. No, you sacrificed the child for your survival. The child has your genes. So he/she will sacrifice?
The pharaohs have always built pyramids for their mummies!
H. Are we Struck in a Trap? Can we Raise Children in a Cocoon when the world is moving like a Jaggurnut
Is the trap is unbreakable?
1) The world appears faster than ever, but it is not, time moves at the same speed, and human core emotions haven’t changed a bit.
2) When Phillip III married his 4th wife, the third wife Olympus told the son Alexander that “You are not a son of Phillip but of lord Zeus.” And today also that is exactly the sentence an aggressive woman utters before divorce “The child is not yours.” Nothing much has changed in the world.
3)Humanity isn’t even 1% of the ecology. Life still hangs on the balance of that and hangs on an understanding of fishes, snakes, crabs, Scorpios, monkeys, and trees.
4) urban life is a facade. Rome, Babylon, Ur, and Akkad, have had great civilizations with great technological advancements which were far ahead of that time, and some even modern times.
5) Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor in 230 AD tried to teach the Stoicic way of life to Romans, and lived a long prosperous life in modesty, out of lavishness. His son Claudius became the epitome of the spoiled prince.
No matter how uncomfortable it appears at first, hunger is the key to survival. Life will teach this to everyone. It is when, and at what cost, not “whether.”
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
I. Conclusion
Life is never unfair, it gives you exactly what you want out of life, and always before your life ends. And genes will live through children and everyone gets a chance to see themselves in their children before they die.
When the child cried, it cried due to fear of death but was given a mobile or toys or nannies to get rid of that fear. When the child cried in hunger, powdered milk was fed. When the child learned to talk, silly teachers and not fathers kept children away from their mothers.
And the child never learns to get the emotion for food, mother, or father. In the end everyone in their old age talks to self “I wish I had not given everything to my children,” but by the time that realization comes, it is too late.
The problem is that old age is the longest and toughest phase of life.
It appears like a prison of life and life doesn’t seem to ever end, entangling in the never-ending pain of being alone.
Hunger, Shame, walking for miles for knowledge, making own tools to ease life, earning to survive, becoming social just so as to learn from seniors, helping juniors, sun, and rain, fear of death, and parents being there are the only things that a child needs to learn.
Life is about pain. Because love is about pain.
