Why your parents owe you their wealth

“I wanna be a parent, let’s have a baby!”

Your parents brought you into this world out of their selfish need for self-actualization. Maybe they did it because they needed a new purpose in life once their careers stabilized, or perhaps they wanted to experience the joy of parenting. Or maybe they thought they were duty-bound to preserve their bloodline, who knows. Whatever the reason may be, they did it for themselves. They weren’t thinking about you — they didn’t even know you!

How, then, is it fair for them to demand that you survive on your own?

It’s like forcefully bringing a little boy into a forest in the middle of the night, teaching him some basic survival skills, and asking him to make it out by himself. Who are you to do this? Kid was doing fine in the city, he had no say in the matter, and now he has to deal with deadly predators? You may feel proud when he navigates the forest well, but you’re the reason he even has to in the first place.

Is existence so good?

Weren’t you doing great when you didn’t exist? Free of all stress, problems, disappointment, fear, crisis, and disease, floating in raw oblivion. Free from the fear of losing what you have, or not getting what you want. Wasn’t that peaceful, if not delightful? Now that you’re born you feel the pleasures of existence every now and then, but at what cost? The highs in life are often nothing more than just periods where there are no lows, and you carry the burden of thought at all times.

Granted, existence offers pleasant things as well — the experience of physical beauty, for example. But you wouldn’t miss out on those if you didn’t exist, because there would be no “you”! It’s a simple void, you feel no disappointment.

I would say then that at the end of the day, every single problem you have exists because you exist, and your parents are to blame for that. Irrespective of whether or not you like being alive, you never asked for it — they did it to you. They got you into the forest, which makes it their responsibility to make sure you survive, even if you’re having fun there. Anything else is equivalent to leaving you to die.

In that sense, I believe they owe you as much of their wealth as you need to live your life.

Of course, you could argue that it’s important to educate oneself anyway, and I agree. It’s important to strive to develop life skills and become a capable individual, but that doesn’t give your parents — or the world, for that matter — to demand it of you. You must do it to ensure your survival, just in case your parents don’t.

This is a one-directional argument, not an in-depth analysis of the subject. The goal is to provoke thought, not prove a point. I’d love to know your opinions, tweet them out to @dushybag, or reply to this email :)

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This was originally posted on my blog.