Some notes on meaning triggered by Mark Salzman's "Lying Awake" and PD James "The Children of Men"

If, as James' dystopian novel suggests, humans could no longer have children, how would our relationship to a "meaningful life" change? To what extent are children what keeps people looking to the future, even if they are not their children? In the novel, there is a sense that the people are giving up, as if living their own lives until their death is simply not enough. If the children do supply some notion of a future and of meaning to humans, then as cultures and society's have fewer, do they need to seek meaning (or at least the meaning filled by children) elsewhere?

Is trying to live "a good life" meaning enough? It doesn't seem to be--perhaps because we have no idea what a "good life" is without guidance (or at least we think we don't).  Religion, parents, duty, law, making the future better, are all ways that we guide ourselves towards a "good life".

In the New York Times Sunday there was an article that said that in Denmark too many people are deciding not to work and just to live on welfare. Historically, the article said, people chose to work so it wasn't a concern but now, they are not choosing to work.  Is work another (or an additional) way that we make meaning in our lives. As we discard these traditional ways of meaning making--work, children, god--what are we replacing them with?  Is happiness the new meaning?


Update: just read an interesting review on NPR about a new paper that claims having children is an "epistemically transformative experience" (I know, what the heck?!). But the review goes on to explain what that means, which basically is having a child puts you in the position of having an experience that gives you access to knowledge that you didn't have before (which seems a bit odd because isn't much of learning then epistemically transformative?). I wonder if it is a bit larger than that--the notion that we can't conceptualize or think about the experience in any "real" way until we've had it because there is simply nothing like it.

In a blog post at Crooked Timber written with sociologist Kieran Healy, Paul sums up her argument as follows:

We are not arguing that it is right or wrong to have a child. Nor are we saying people shouldn't be happy with their choice. You can be happy with a child or blissfully child-free. But if you are happy, you shouldn't congratulate yourself on your wise decision—you should be thankful for your good luck. Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice ...

The standard story of parenthood says it's a deeply fulfilling event that is like nothing else you've ever experienced, and that you should carefully weigh what it will be like before choosing to do it. But in reality you can't have it both ways.

Here's a link to the paper http://lapaul.org/papers/choosing-child-draft.pdf