Meaning of life

So the girlfriend and I were discussing children and why it isn't important that we have them. It lead me to think about carrying on the family blood line.

Why do we have kids? The chinese believe that it is to carry on the family trade/name/history, economists believe in populating the work force, atheists believe that it is the one thing that proves that they were once alive and existed in this world. I'll expand on the last one since the first two carries no meaning for me.

When you're old, dying and atheist, you begin to panic. What did I achieve? What have I done my whole life? What proves that I was here? If there is no religion and no heaven, I'll be gone the moment I die. Ah ha! But I have children! they prove that I was alive! True. But all you've done is bring forth to this world a being who will go through the same process as you, ie. study hard to get a degree, get a degree to get a job, get a job to support a wife, wife needs supporting because she's instrumental in family making and therefore cannot have a job, create a family, support a family, die not knowing what you've achieved your whole life.

Take children out of the equation. You create a family as equals, you both have a job, no one needs supporting, no one feels like they're losing out on something, you both have free time to do your own thing; create a new technology, invent something, discover old ruins, make history. In short, lived your life to the fullest and had a/many loving, fulfilling relationship(s). Die happy.

Sure, people invent stuff all the time, that person could have been your child if you chose to have one. You ruled out that one in a million chance that your child could be the next Nikolas Tesla.

Two things.

One, I believe talent is nutured; an inquisitive mind, creativity, the winning attitude, all got to do with upbringing/childhood.

Two, there are enough idiots in this world who have children without thinking of the consequences, enough idiots who would force themselves on the unwilling to carry their child(pssst! I'm talking about rape.), enough idiots who support a religion that dictates your chance at life to be destroyed because of an accidental conceivement, or just the occasional sad case of a tragic accident where by unwanted children are born and abandoned. Why would you bring a new being into this world while so many children are still uncared for, unloved, not nutured to be the talent they could be?

You don't even have to adopt a child to care for. You could just teach them your skills, nuture them, impart your values to them. You could just visit them.

I'll end the point here, but let's revisit point number one, carrying on the family tradition. In the past, every family did something, a rice field, a cobbler shop, smithing, whatever. Anything that could be traded for something else they need. They needed descendants to carry on the work because the village needs that particular line of work. A loss of blood line would mean a loss of a type of knowledge. Zoom in to the twenty-first century where in urban living, every person gets armed with the same set of knowledge, applies for the same kind of jobs, gets thrown into the same cycle of living. What then? Does anybody miss anything just because you don't have children?

So many ideas bouncing about my head and it's hard to bind them together to form sentences... Good night!