Do you want to get married, do you want to have children? Nowadays, young people do not like to get married, and the divorce rate is also very high, it is said that February 14 was supposed to be Valentine's Day, but as a result, there are very few people who register for marriage at the Civil Affairs Bureau, but there are long queues of people waiting for divorce.
Do you want to get married, do you want to have children? Talking about this topic is actually very sensitive, and most of the bloggers and ** basically stand on the position of young people: society and parents should not urge marriage, should not morally kidnap young people, respect the free choice of young people, and understand the living situation of young people.
If we talk about this topic today without standing from the perspective and position of young people, it seems a bit "politically incorrect", just as talking about education is to condemn parents from the perspective of children, and talking about the workplace is to blame the boss from the perspective of employees, which is likely to get a lot of recognition and praise. Of course, the arguments for advocating freedom, independence, the pursuit of happiness, opposition to discipline, and opposition to moral kidnapping are of course legitimate. I'm not going to challenge these consensus today, as a married father, a philosophy blogger, I just hope we can look at this from a more perspective, between encouragement and opposition, between encouraging others to oppose and opposing others, there are actually many possibilities.
Some people say that if you don't marry and have children, you can keep your peace, but this is against encouragement. Some people say that the essence of marriage is a contract, and it is just a way for the parties to the marriage to obtain social resources and complement each other's values, which is opposed and encouraged. Some people also say that the marriage system is a product of feudal society, an old social tradition, and even a means of social discipline and rule, and an anachronistic thing that should be resolutely discarded, which is to encourage others to oppose it.
Two days ago, I read an article written by Mr. Liu Run, and talked about why young people don't get married from the perspective of fertility value, pension value and companionship value.
Is the essence of marriage a contract? Is the essence of marriage an exchange of values? Is having children an investment behavior of "raising children and preventing old age"? Perhaps from the perspective of pure rationality and business, there is some truth, but it should not be the whole of marriage and upbringing, using the market and business to evaluate a thing, maybe you can get the pros and cons of value, but the problem lies in the legitimacy of this evaluation method itself, to evaluate a thing in an inappropriate way, is to devalue and corrode the value of the thing itself. As the philosopher Sandel said, the deeper the market extends its hand into the non-economic spheres of life, the more closely the market and moral issues become entangled. The problem is not the pros and cons of the value evaluation results, but the use of market values to evaluate the problems in areas of life such as love, marriage, and raising children, which has the legitimacy of the evaluation method and the limitations of the perspective.
So how to look at marriage and parenting, let's first analyze from two aspects: what will marriage give us? Is it the investment value of raising children and preventing old age? Is it the emotional value of the companionship of old age? Or is it the contractual value of cooperative living? Or is it the moral value of succession? If it's purely from a value analysis point of view, they all have alternative solutions.
Because, today's people are becoming more and more independent, there is not much problem in surviving independently, and a person can live well; Emotional value can be obtained from other places, the pension medical system is becoming more and more perfect, and in today's modern society, the concept of non-marriage and infertility also has a high acceptance, and will not be subject to moral condemnation and pressure. Therefore, under the comprehensive evaluation of many factors, marriage and having children do not seem to be a necessary choice. In particular, they are not the best way for us to pursue a happy life, and have even become the biggest obstacle, as some people joked: no marriage and no children to keep peace.
What do we lose from marriage and parenting? It makes us lose, leisure weekends, stable emotions, independent space, free time, money and energy, etc., marriage and parenting make us lose a lot of things, and it is not conducive to our pursuit of happiness, so what is the point of them? If we think of marriage and parenting as a means and an end to achieve happiness in life, then its means value can be replaced, even inefficient, but marriage and parenting can also be an end in itself, and only by treating them as an end in itself, can we truly experience it, rather than calculate and evaluate it.
What is the meaning of marriage and parenting from an experiential perspective? It allows us to learn tolerance, understanding, acceptance, facing together, gratitude, courage, responsibility and love, which is not only love, praise and appreciation, not even sweetness, but also true responsibility and respect, selflessness and tolerance. These things may be experienced elsewhere, but marriage and parenting will make it more profound.
I remember when I first had a child, I asked my parents to help us take care of the child, and my father told me a sentence that impressed me, he said: You should take care of the child yourself, so that you can know how a child grows up. I didn't have a deep understanding at the time and thought that raising children was a burden, but if you haven't really taken care of children, it may be difficult for you to understand why we should be grateful to our parents. If you don't face the madness of tutoring, it may be difficult for you to understand why we should accept imperfections; If you don't witness the joy of your child completing the bricks, it may be difficult for you to feel what it means to witness growth.
These processes may make you feel painful, crazy or even helpless, but if you don't have a real experience, it is difficult for you to regard these hardships as a precious wealth in life, companionship, witnessing, faceting, embracing, encouragement, growth These things are difficult to measure with value, and even it has nothing to do with the happiness we usually understand, but I want to say that the pursuit of happiness is not the only thing worth pursuing in life, and even happiness should not be narrowly defined as making yourself feel comfortable and happy. Brave commitment, true feelings, learning to understand and tolerate, learning to accept imperfections, learning to be grateful, learning to selfless love, learning to respect, appreciate, and encourage these things that cannot be measured by value, are also things that you can experience and gain in the process of marriage and raising children. They are not just emotional emotional values, but the shaping of a person's spiritual and personality qualities.
If you don't regard the pursuit of happiness as the only pursuit of life, and also regard life as an experiential journey, then the richness and profundity of the experience are also the worth pursuing in life. The philosopher Dilthey said: Life is the sum of experiences, not the collection of experiences. Looking at life from an experiential perspective, not just from the exchange of values, marriage and raising children are not so unworthy, although there may be quarrels, separations, pain, entanglements, and even despair and helplessness, but it is also a meaningful adventure.
It is the instinct of human beings to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, to enjoy and dislike, to enjoy and avoid suffering, and to pursue happiness is a reasonable and normal goal. But people also have an instinct for curiosity and an instinct for adventure, and in a way, we are actually the descendants of adventurers, if it weren't for our ancestors who gave up the pursuit of stability and comfort, they might never have bravely walked out of the cave and embarked on an unknown adventure, and human footprints would not be all over the earth, they would still be a calm gorilla in a cave.
Of course, marriage and parenting should not be rendered as a heroic adventure, I want to say that there is more than happiness in life, and there can be many things in life that are different from happiness, or even beyond happiness, which are worth pursuing and experiencing. Well, that's all for today's content, about marriage and parenting, you can also talk about your views in the comment area.
For more discussions, you can join us for the Cognitive Evolution Camp, which we will see in the next installment.