"my great grandmother who survived 3 wars and raised 10 children by herself while working in a factory watching me go to therapy because my parents yelled at me" ok but your great grandmother was also miserable. maybe your great grandmother would be happy you try your best to not be miserable
like have you considered your ancestors wouldve wished to see you be less miserable than them
We are still here, as human beings, because millions and millions of us - since far, far longer ago in our history than recorded time - have looked at the world, and said "I want my children, and my children's children, to have a better life than I did."
Maybe your parents and your grandparents and great-grandparents were among those people - or maybe they weren't, personally. Some people admittedly aren't.
But every human alive is part of an uninterrupted line of hundreds of thousands of years of descent (and that's only since we became Homo sapiens).
We, as humans, have created and built and invented and learned and treated and cured so, so much. Because we kept looking around us, and looking at the people around us, and saying, "I want a better world for the people I love. I want a better world for the people who will come next."
Or perhaps think about it this way:
Would you want your great-grandchildren (or the great-grandchildren of your loved ones / family / chosen family, if you'd rather) to be miserable?
Or would you want those children to take care of themselves, and be kind to themselves, and do their best to find peace and joy in their lives?
Recently my dad handed me my granddad's pit token to pass on to my brother when I next see him.
The pit token (and locker key) was something my grandad had when he worked in a coal mine. Every day he would have it over and receive his safety lamp, and go down the pit to mine coal. At the end of the day if there were any tokens left on the board then they'd know that there was still someone in the pit.
My grandad was an intelligent man. He was politically motivated, wrote letters to the local MP, read countless books about many subjects, listened to a wide variety of music, etc. But he worked down that pit for years to pay for a house and home for three kids. He broke his back down that pit. When his best friend died he locked himself in his shed with a bottle of rum cause obviously Men Don't Cry and he couldn't be seen. He fought in world war 2 and killed men in battle, and he never spoke about it unless asked.
My brother has a masters. He attends therapy. Has his own son now, and he worries about the world. He works in an office, and while he would like to do something he is passionate about rather than admin, I don't think my granddad would ever begrudge the kind of man my brother has grown up to be even if he didn't fully understand it. He wouldn't wish that pit on anyone.
