The most important thing to understand about history is that it isn’t a story; it’s a filter. If you’re alive today, you are the beneficiary of an unbroken chain of success stretching back to the beginning of the species. For ten thousand generations, your ancestors did the hardest thing a living creature can do: they survived long enough to reproduce. They did this through ice ages, famines, plagues, and wars. They fought and struggled and sweated and bled, often in conditions of such grinding poverty and physical danger that we can barely imagine them today. They didn’t do this because it was easy or convenient. They did it because they were part of a biological momentum that was larger than themselves.
When you look at it this way, the idea of intentionally breaking that chain feels less like a personal lifestyle choice and more like a form of historical vandalism. We tend to think of our lives as our own property, but that’s a very modern, very provincial view. In reality, you are a temporary steward of a genetic legacy that took millions of years to refine. Your ancestors endured everything the world could throw at them specifically so that you could exist. To decide, for reasons of career timing or leisure preference, that their line ends with you is a remarkable kind of arrogance. It’s like being handed a torch that has been carried through a thousand miles of darkness and wind, only to look at it and decide that holding it is a bit too much work, so you might as well just put it out.
There’s a specific kind of intellectual trap people fall into where they mistake comfort for progress. We have birth control because we’ve become very good at hacking our own biology to maximize short-term utility. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s wise in the long run. If you optimize for your own convenience at the expense of your descent, you’re essentially saying that your specific, seventy-year window of existence is more important than the entire multi-millennial project that produced you. It’s a failure to understand the scale of the debt you owe. You are the edge of a very long, very sharp spear; if you blunt that edge, the entire effort of the shaft behind it becomes meaningless.
Ultimately, the reason this feels wrong isn’t just about tradition; it’s about the nature of life itself. Life is the thing that continues. Everything else—the economies we build, the apps we write, the cities we inhabit—is just scaffolding to support that continuation. When we use technology to bypass the fundamental drive to reproduce, we aren’t “transcending” our biology; we’re just opting out of the only game that actually matters in the long arc of time. You owe it to the thousands of people who suffered so you could breathe to pass that breath along. To do otherwise is to treat a miracle like a commodity.