Writer's Block: Go it alone

[holly_evolving]

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I don't particularly feel this sort of pressure, but I can easily see how someone would. The cult of celebrity has become, in part, the cult of pregnancy, as tabloid interest in pregnant celebrities grows. I remember feeling a great deal of pressure to get married and make babies when I worked at Babies R Us and was surrounded by pregnant women and their pheromones.

I see it, too, in diamond ads, since they're mostly for engagement rings. The diamond trade makes me a whole different kind of angry, but that's not what we're talking about here. Especially around Xmas and Valentine's Day, "He went to Jared!" and "You'll love David's Bridal!" bounce around on the radio.

I see it, too, in the otherwise reasonable families of my friends. It surprises and bothers me that, in this day and age, parents still pressure their grown children about settling down. I know they have their children's best interests at heart, but often parents don't know what's best for their children anymore, once their children are grown.

There's nothing wrong with chosing to stay single and not have kids. It's not right for everyone, but neither are marriage and procreation.

More than anything, our biology tells us to mate and propagate the species. But our species is damn well good and propagated. Overbreeding of a species in the wild leads to overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, and the slow death of many by starvation. That's why we cull white-tailed deer in New Jersey. It's not an option at all for people, though genocide happens all the time. It's too late to choose not to make more people than the world can sustain. We are slowly starving to death, fighting for control of resources and taking out more of each other as we go. And the longer our population spends climbing, the longer these things are going to continue to happen.

Oof, that was ranty.

Society pressures us because our biology pressures us. We've managed to take ourselves out of nature, but we can't take nature out of ourselves. What we can do is recognize that and work with it. If you feel the urge to family but just aren't sure if it's you or your basic animal nature, adopt a pet.

Society doesn't really care what's good for the people who are going to be here in a hundred years. Our animal basic brains aren't built to think that far ahead. But our higher, human brains are. It's a matter of what you're thinking with.

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