What Matters/Progeny and Legacy

Progeny and Legacy

Children can bring great joy along with great responsibility.

Perhaps the purpose of life is to reproduce. This keeps the species alive and allows subsequent generations to adapt, improve, and evolve. At the end of the 20th century, based upon insight gleaned from the gene-centered view of evolution, biologists George C. Williams, Richard Dawkins, David Haig, among others, conclude that if there is a primary function to life, it is the replication of DNA and the survival of one's genes. Life exists to replicate and perpetuate life.

However, raising a child requires significant resources, including: time, social, financial, and environmental resources. Planning can help assure adequate resources are available to provide each child with a good opportunity to flourish.

Marital status and the happiness of your marriage has a significant effect on your overall happiness.

Legacy refers to anything handed down from the past. You may have inherited wealth, land, a family business, family traditions, skills training, or heirlooms from your parents. You may also have inherited debt, abuse, alcoholism, intolerance, bad habits, or any number of other liabilities. Work to pass on a positive legacy and resolve to end the cycle of any negative legacy prevalent in your family.

Assignment:

• Engage in careful family planning at appropriate stages of your life.
• If you decide to have children, devote adequate attention to their care, protection, and upbringing. Be responsible parents.
• Identify the legacy you have inherited. Evaluate each element of that legacy as beneficial, neutral, or a liability.
• Plan the legacy you wish to pass on. Strive to make it entirely beneficial.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Albom, Mitch (2002). Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson. Broadway. pp. 192. ISBN 978-0767905923. 
• Pausch, Randy (2008). The Last Lecture. NY: Hyperion. pp. 176. ISBN 978-0739495049. 
• Smith, Emily Esfahani (January 10, 2017). The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters. Crown. pp. 304. ISBN 978-0553419993.