Editor:
I often think about the fact that I’m the extremely unlikely product of an unbroken, four-billion-year-long chain of survival and reproduction. What are the odds? Sometimes I’m wracked with guilt by the fact that, partly by luck but mostly by choice, I’ve broken that chain. Mr. Evans (“The Lure of Immortality,” Nov. 20) points out that once we’re done reproducing, we’re just dead weight, consuming precious resources. That means I’ve been dead weight my entire life. Bummer. Thanks, Barry.
If life in the general sense has meaning, it is solely to continue the germline, every organism doing its part to ensure the continuance of its lineage and species as they exist now and will become. This places added responsibility on us non-breeders to make something of our lives that somehow offsets our presence here as dead weight. It’s a heavy load to bear and maybe not entirely fair, but there it is. We humans like to think of ourselves as different from all other forms of life, and in some ways we are, but we are still fundamentally just amalgamations of germ and somatic cells like every other organism, albeit (and uniquely?) ones with the mental capacity to choose not to reproduce.
Most of us “justify” our childlessness in part as contributing to the welfare of the planet by minimizing humanity’s enormous impact. Too many of our lineages haven’t been broken in the past couple of centuries. I don’t regret my choices (well, not those, anyway); the species is secure for now and my sister has done her part for the Burton lineage. Still, the “dead weight” viewpoint does add some import in my mind to make the most of the time I have left to justify my existence and my life choices. I hope Mr. Evans’ article stimulated others to think about their own lives in new ways. For me, it isn’t the first. Keep ’em coming, Barry!
Ken Burton, McKinleyville
This article appears in Flash Fiction 2025.