Biology is pissing me off. It seems to have directive, but it’s really just arbitrary and loudly insisting, like some beet-faced dictator. Eat! Fight! Fuck!

You know those midgeflies you hear about that live for like an hour, mating like crazy, and die off once the eggs are laid, so their offsprings can do the same thing?

Those flies distill and make clear the pointlessness of life. For all of human society and civilization and whatever, that’s what our fleshy bodies are telling us to do—every breath we draw, every sense at our disposal, every evolutionary adaption we’ve snatched up, every secretion from some hormonal gland—they aim us toward a propagation chain.

We have outgrown this reason to keep ourselves and our species alive. No one’s living just to have kids. But this is still largely the main life goal for a lot of people. Get married, start a family, raise children. This instinct has the collective weight and momentum of billions of years of life on this planet behind it.

Just know, this is not a given. You don’t have to do it! Resist if you like!

Yes, I did have a nice family gathering recently, with every relative making inquiries to the state of my affairs, why do you ask?