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Sept. 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:55
3834 An Important Birthday Message From Stefan Molyneux
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So the other day I'm driving along the road and ding, ding, ding, get stopped at a railway crossing.
And you know, I sit there in my car.
I'm just watching these endless railway carriages go by, these railway cars go by.
It's kind of a blur. And people are asking me what it's like to be 51 today.
Well, it's kind of like sitting there staring at these railway cars going by, the years go by.
It's a bit of a blur, but it's deeply satisfying.
I feel like I'm doing exactly what I should be doing to make the world a better place with the skill sets that I have.
So I want to thank you all for having the opportunity to do that, for having the opportunity to talk to millions of you and make the world a better place thereby.
I really, really appreciate that.
If you would like to So, when you have a birthday, of course, you remember being born.
And if you're a parent, you remember your children's birthdays.
And it's kind of an interesting conflict going back and forth at the moment regarding what's called child-free people, people who choose not to have children.
And people who have children.
And there's a bit of a bitter battle going back and forth.
I wanted to put my two cents in because I think it's really, really important.
It's one of these horrible things that happens that if you decide not to have children, but you change your mind later on, you can't.
You know, you start getting into your late 30s.
Actually, fertility begins to decline in your early 30s, mid 30s.
It really gets tough.
And if you decide you want a big family later on, it's too late for that as well.
So it is one of these decisions in life you really, really don't want to get wrong.
The amount of regret, and you have a long time to feel that regret.
I mean, you have decade after decade after decade where you're getting older, less physically attractive, of course, less limber, less able to enjoy other things in life, you know, sports and so on.
So it's a long time to be ugly and old.
We're all going to get ugly and old.
It's just the way of the world.
It's what Galileo said, I think, about it.
He said, you can regret dying, but the only reason you're alive is because nature needs its replenishment.
And... The only reason you're alive is because people died in the past.
You are part of that circle that must always complete itself.
So if you make the wrong decision about having kids, you have a long time to simmer in that regret.
And from what I've talked about with older people who've made that decision to not have kids and then deeply regretted it, it doesn't go away.
It doesn't go away.
It will just sit there in your craw.
And you get progressively more excluded from things.
When you get old...
Something a friend of mine said when I was a teenager about his grandmother.
He said, you know, she's lived for a long time.
You'd think she'd have some wisdom to offer me.
When you get old, the only people you're going to matter to are your kids.
You know, if you have a spouse, then that's, you know, going to be the case.
But if you don't have kids, your friends probably will.
And when they have kids, your life just takes a hugely different direction.
And they spend a lot of time on their kids, and then they have their grandkids, and they have an extended family, and they're busy all the time, and you have like a playlist of 80s bands to comfort you.
When you get old, you no longer have any real sexual market value, and you may be retired, so you're not contributing much to society from that standpoint.
You have health issues, so you need more resources.
If you don't have a family, if you don't have kids, I mean, your parents will be dead by the time You're old.
Your siblings may be far away.
They may have their own families to be involved in.
So when you get old, who's going to care about you?
Well, if you have kids and you can provide value to them, you provided value to them when they were growing up, you can provide value to them as a grandparent and so on.
Well, you have value. And it's a pretty lonely, bitter existence from what I've seen.
The people who didn't have kids, who cares for them when they get old?
They're just some anonymous person shuffling around in the...
Horrible, garish lighting of a pharmacy store looking for some supplement that's going to lift their spirits, for which supplement there probably is not one around.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that.
It's not a scare story, it's just a basic reality of what I have seen.
The discussion, it was Jordan Peterson who was talking about this with someone on Twitter, and...
I want to give you a couple of perspectives because you've had a lot of no-kids propaganda.
We have too much population growth and if the only thing that you think you can contribute to the good of the world is not taking on the responsibility of raising children and the joy of raising children and the challenges of raising children, I don't think you have much to offer.
You know, the only thing I have to offer to make the world a better place is the end of my bloodline, which has been struggling and striving to raise itself from single-celled organism primordial soup muck for the past couple of billion years.
It all stops here.
That's kind of a sad.
Life is a baton that's passed to you by prior generations.
If you enjoy being alive, why not pass the gift forward?
Why not pass the gift along?
Why not create life?
Create life. It's an amazing thing to create life.
Thoughts will exist. Dreams will exist.
Passions will exist. Talents will exist.
Which otherwise would never have come into fruition, would never have come into existence.
We have this funny thing about life.
We consider it heroic to save a life, but somehow we don't consider it heroic to make a life.
You know, some kid's cramping out in a lake and is drowning, and someone, maybe not that great a swimmer, you know, someone swims out, struggles to save that kid, which can be risky, right?
I mean, they're flailing around, they could crack you in the head, you could lose consciousness, you could drown yourself.
If someone takes that risk, endures the discomfort of the lake and the possibility of danger, and goes out and saves that kid, brings that kid back to shore, we say, that guy's a hero, because he saved a life.
But tell me, why is it any less heroic to make a life?
If you save a life, it's great.
It's a wonderful thing that you did. If you save a life, well, the human population is now not minus one.
But if you make lives, then the human population is plus one, plus two, plus three, plus four, plus five.
If you have a financial advisor, would you rather she simply didn't lose you money?
Or would you rather she made you money?
Would you rather she made you money?
And so we consider it heroic for a man to dive into a lake or a stormy sea to rescue a child.
Which is a short thing to do, right?
A couple of minutes. But why do we not consider it heroic to create life and to nurture it to fruition, to bring the next generation into being, to allow for a continuation of your culture, of your history, of your family, of your genetics?
Why is that not considered heroic?
It's a lot more sacrifice to raise a child than it is to dive into a lake and pull a child to safety.
One is a hero, the other is what?
How is that not heroic?
It is a funny thing, because I've been a stay-at-home dad now.
My daughter's going to be nine soon.
Oh, time whiplash.
Just by the by, people always said to me, Oh, the time flies so fast.
Time flies by so fast.
Next thing you know, they're teenagers.
Next thing you know, they're going off to college.
That's not true. Look, if you only see every tenth frame of a movie, then the movie's going to fast-forward itself pretty quickly.
But if you spend... Most of your children's waking hours with them, it passes by just right.
It's not too fast, it's not too slow, it's just right.
So people who say the time flies, there are people who, you know, they went off to work, they put their kids in daycare, they didn't see their kids more than an hour or two a day, and most of that time was spent either feeding or bathing or instructing or correcting or helping them with homework and so on, rather than just having those relaxed kind of peaceful interactions that to me are the very essence of joyful parenting.
So I just wanted to point that out.
People say, oh, time goes by so fast.
It's like, well, if you sleepwalk through life, I guess it's like being Ripley in a cryogenic freeze box for everything except the sequels.
So we should, I think, look upon it as heroic.
Because it's a funny thing, and I didn't really get this until I became a dad.
I mean, I worked in a daycare when I was younger.
I'm great with kids. I love kids.
And until I became a father, though...
You know, if somebody said, oh, you know, Steph, you've got a brain the size of a planet, but you're really going to enjoy going to play centers.
You're really going to enjoy, you know, squeezing your middle-aged man mass through the lower intestine tubes of McDonald's play centers or whatever, right?
I would be completely shocked to find out that that would be the case.
Because I'd sit there and think, well, how much fun could that be?
And, of course, there's nothing you would do if you weren't a parent, right?
So, like, last night, my wife and I, we played tag.
With my daughter at a play center, no, an outdoor play center, a park.
It was fantastic fun.
I mean, we were laughing so hard, it became hard to run, which was great.
But these are things, of course, you'd never do if you weren't a parent, and you would find incredibly boring if you weren't a parent.
Go to a park and run around.
But when you're a parent, they just become so enormously enjoyable that it's hard to understand in a way why that is.
It's great watching your kids get better at stuff, and it's great watching them come up with clever retorts, and it's great watching them become sarcastic, which is, you know, a great sign of intelligence.
And it's fantastic with all of that pushback.
You know, you want to create a life that's independent of yourself, and you want to lay that foundation pretty early.
And it's a beautiful and wonderful thing to watch that occur.
But there are sacrifices, financial sacrifices, time sacrifices.
Like I just recently released a new book, The Art of the Argument.
You can get that at theartoftheargument.com.
It's the first book I've written since before my daughter was born, because there has been that kind of time.
And of course, you want to invest that time, especially the first five years.
You know, your kid's personality is largely set in stone after five years.
So you really want to spend that time at the beginning to make sure that the foundation is laid.
Well, correctly, deeply.
And then it's, you know, you harvest what, you know, you reap what you sow.
You sow love and you reap togetherness and, you know, very few conflicts and a huge amount of fun.
So, and it's a funny thing.
There has, of course, been so much anti-natalism, right?
Anti-birth stuff going on.
It's really tragic. It's really tragic.
You know, you should really consider tasting deep the pleasures of parenthood.
It is absolutely sublime.
It is, you know, my marriage, this show, and being a father is like the greatest things in my life.
And it's... I mean, I said to everyone this morning, you know, just thank you everyone so much for giving me such fantastic memories, such...
Deep and abiding joy in my life.
And I want to thank you guys too.
You're the listeners, you're the watchers, you share.
Sometimes you take the hits for the controversial fact speech that comes out of the big chatty forehead.
And I really appreciate that.
I don't take it lightly. I don't take it for granted at all.
I mean, I am dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
And I try to repay it as best as I humanly can.
So it's just something to think about.
And I had a call with a woman the other day on the show.
And I won't get into all of the details about it.
Listen to the podcast. It basically came down to the fact that everyone was telling her to go to college and have a career, but she actually just, maybe just wanted to have kids.
Have kids when you're young. You can enjoy your grandchildren more when you're young.
You can bounce back from sleepless nights.
You have more energy. You're more robust.
Your knees are a little bit springier than the creaky corker boards that I have down there.
So it's, there's really, and you know, if you want to have a career, that's fine.
You spend, you know, 20 to 30, raising your kids, and then you've still got 35 years if you retire.
35 years without interruption if you want to raise your kids.
Sorry, to go out and have a career.
So it is something to think about.
Of course, politicians don't want you having kids now.
They want women to get out into the workforce and start paying taxes.
They want them to get into debt so they don't rock the boat socially.
And they also want them to pay for their own propagandizing in left politics.
Entrenched arts courses.
So for politicians, you know, if you have a bunch of kids, well, they've got to pay, you know, they've got to give health care, schooling, you're out of the workforce, you're not paying taxes.
It's very expensive for politicians for you to have kids.
And of course, if you have kids, and you're a woman, then you're going to be dependent upon your husband.
And therefore, your husband's income becomes very important.
And if you're staying home raising them, And because of that, you're going to vote for lower taxes and smaller government.
And of course, if you don't have kids, you're dependent upon the state for the provision often of health care and pensions and so on when you get older.
And so it's a reliable way of cutting down costs for government, of increasing tax revenue, and of making more and more people dependent on the state.
It has nothing to do with your happiness.
Come on, I mean... This fantasy that the politicians care about your happiness.
Oh, but the children and the dreamers, they don't care.
They don't care. You are livestock to them.
I made this case in my biggest video, the story of your enslavement, years ago.
You're livestock. I mean, the farmer cares about the cow because he wants the cow to continue producing meat and milk.
He doesn't care about the cow's happiness.
He cares about the cow's productivity.
For himself. And the culture as a whole is pushing anti-child stuff all the time.
Like, when was the last time you saw a miserable childless couple contrasted with a happy couple with children?
No. It's always like, oh, the child-free couples are doing all this cool stuff, and they're traveling, and they have all this sex.
Whereas the couple with children, they're exhausted, they're tired, their children are Always screaming and making mess.
It's just relentless propaganda.
And they don't have your interests at heart.
They don't care about your happiness.
Your happiness is something you have to win back from the liars in authority.
It's not something they're going to give to you.
They don't care about your happiness.
They want your dependents, and they want your votes, and they want your taxes.
They don't care about whether, you know, at the age of 50, you're going to wake up one day and feel this terrifying, vacuous emptiness of your life and feel like it's not even worth going out of bed to raise another dollar that you can't spend on anyone you love.
It's terrible.
And you have to be skeptical of all the propaganda that's pushed you away from those in authority from, and not just political authority, but artistic authority as well.
They're serving agendas that have nothing to do with your happiness.
So for my birthday, I hope that you will remember your own birthday, the joys of your childhood, the joys of parenting.
And I hope that you will consider adding a significant number of birthdays to the world going forward.
Thanks everyone so much.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day.
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