I have been teaching my kids what I have come to call the “Daddy Lessons”.
Daddy Lesson 1: The purpose of life is to have children.
Every biology textbook says the primary drive of all living creatures is to reproduce. Every major religion strongly encourages having children, including the Bible which commands “Be fruitful and multiply”. Every single one of your ancestors for thousands of generations, perhaps trillions of generations, has successfully had children. Who is foolish enough to argue with all of that?
Beyond that, anything you do with your children is better than anything you do without your children. Life’s greatest joys are not the things you accomplish or do alone, they are the things you do with your children or you watch them accomplish. The more you invest into your children, the more joy you get in return.
The only true form of immortality is having children. Even the ideas of the most famous person in all of history, Julius Caesar, have mostly died out. All that remains of him are portions of a couple of books he wrote. Did you read those? They are fantastic, I highly recommend them, but if even the most famous man in history mostly has disappeared in time, what chance do the rest of us have? Children are little genetic copies of you, and if you train them right your best ideas will live on in them as well.
Billions of generations of your ancestors fought and bled and cried and died so that you could live today. Are you going to let that mighty legacy and line end with you?