Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
Look up the research on parenting and happiness? It's even worse than it seems when you go into deeper analyses. The costs, and I don't purely refer to monetary, are enormous.
It's simply an absolutely nightmare. It produces some of the strongest biological effects, emotional and cognitive biases, that skew the perceptions of parents to an immense extent in order to have them optimally care for the progeny at the expense of themselves. One of the goals that should be among the highest importance to the man of learning is questioning and understand what underlies their motivations and behaviors, all aspects of their humanities. Why do I do as such, why do I behave this way, react, feel, desire? A true understanding of the gene centric view of evolution is that we will be driven to behaviors that are not beneficial for ourselves, nor even for others, behaviors that when analyzed under a system of ethics will reveal themselves to instead be, arguably, the most abhorrent there are in human existence.
"There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy... So long as we persist in this inborn error... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence"
We do not exist to be happy. We can strive to be happy, attain it, but this is not what our beings evolved to do, to provide us with a satisfactory experience that leads us to some optimal notion of happiness and fulfillment. Not only will our individual lives be affected by the overlooking, lack of, and misunderstanding of this concept, but of course as our species exists as the most collaborative and advanced on earth, by far, it will be ever present and ubiquituou among cultures, societies, and all aspects of such. Look around you, reflect on the past, on what was imposed on you, the institutions you were made to attend, coerced to, and think of the countless imperfections you became aware of, the countless grievances.
Does any of this appear to be a world that was specifically designed, designed by man himself, every one of us to some extent, to come anywhere near to optimizing our happiness, minimizing suffering, and providing us with a sense of fulfillment?
We must be the most foolish species of all at the end.
