What We Leave Behind

I. A question that comes too late

Some questions only unfold their meaning once the answer is already in place. What do we leave behind for those who come after? is one of them. Asked in one's mid-twenties, it can serve as a prompt for life-planning — an invitation to create, transmit, accumulate. Asked in one's mid-seventies, it is no longer asked in planning mode. It is asked as a balance sheet. And the balance that emerges is not the one foreseen fifty years earlier.

The previous essay, The Globalisation of Weariness, described the global finding: that in more than two thirds of the world's countries the average number of children per woman has fallen below the replacement rate; that this can no longer be explained by wealth, education, or family policy; that beneath all that lies another layer, in which the world withdraws from people long before people withdraw from it. This layer is not abstract. It is the situation in which an entire generation now lives. It is also the situation in which the preceding generation looks back along its own line and finds that the line is becoming short.

This essay takes up where the previous one could not go: with the question of what it means when this statistical truth arrives in a single family. With the question of what a generation now at the end of its effective power passes on to the next — and to whom it passes on, when the genealogical address has remained empty.

II. The double feeling

Those who grow old in a time when their own children no longer have children live with a double feeling that cannot be resolved. On one side stands the wish for grandchildren. It is old, biologically deeply rooted, and it appears even when one does not actively seek it. It has to do with love, with transmission, with the quiet consolation that something of what one was continues in another generation, even when one is no longer present. It is the friendliest form of self-preservation — not of one's own self, but of what one has come to love.

On the other side stands the relief that the grandchildren do not come. This is a kind of feeling one does not pronounce in any commemorative speech, because it sounds like betrayal. It is not betrayal. It is the sober acknowledgement of the world into which the grandchildren would be born. A world in which the climate is going out of control, in which democracies are decaying, in which the industrial base has migrated, in which pensions no longer carry, in which wars are again drawing closer, in which the possibility of a dignified life is no longer reliably present. Anyone who sees such a world before them cannot honestly say they wish for descendants without conceding in the same breath that they would be imposing on those they wish for something they do not wish to impose on themselves.

The double feeling is not a symptom of psychological confusion. It is the correct response to a torn situation. Whoever feels it has understood the situation. Whoever does not feel it has repressed something — either the wish for grandchildren, or the perception of the world.

III. The reasonableness of childlessness

There is a reading that pathologises the phenomenon. It speaks of egoism, of comfort-seeking, of a generation that withdraws from responsibility for the future. This is the reading of older conservatives, and it is not entirely empty — there is egoism, there is comfort-seeking, there is the withdrawal. But it misses the phenomenon because it does not take it seriously.

The more honest reading is that today's childless generation does not act irrationally. On the contrary, it acts with a clarity its parents and grandparents did not have to muster, because they lived in a world with reserves. Whoever today is between thirty and forty lives in a world in which the reserves are spent. The ecological buffers are exhausted, the institutional structures eroded, the economic prospects uncertain, the geopolitical situation open to escalation. Whoever in such a world refrains from bringing new people into it does not act selfishly. They act prudently — not in the sense of their own prudence, but in the sense of prudence for those whom they refrain from bringing into existence in the first place.

This is the anthropological point that would not have become visible without the preceding essay. The childlessness of this generation is not a refusal of the future. It is a form of responsibility toward beings who would otherwise be born without having been asked whether they wanted the world that awaits them. Since asking is impossible, this generation answers for the unborn — and it answers with restraint, because it believes it knows the world into which it would send them.

Whoever sees this as the father or mother of a childless daughter or son must decide. One can lay upon the child a reproach that one's own parents would never have had to think, because the world was simpler then. Or one can acknowledge that the child is responding to a situation one did not spare them, and that their answer to this situation is more honest than any genealogical expectation one might direct at them. It is not easy to do the second. But it is the only thing that makes love for the child compatible with the perception of the world.

IV. What is handed over when no one receives it

The older question of inheritance presupposed that there was an address. Parents bequeathed to their children, grandparents to their grandchildren, one generation to the next. What is left behind when the address has remained empty?

There are three answers, each with its own weight.

The first answer is that the inheritance does not become less just because no direct descendants receive it. Books remain books, patents remain patents, houses remain houses, memories remain memories — even if no one who bears one's own name carries them on. This is the legal and material answer. It is correct, but it falls short. It says nothing about what it means that the inheritance is no longer fed into a line, but goes to the general public or to more distant relatives or to institutions.

The second answer is that the address, when genealogically empty, is not absent altogether. There are other addresses. There are other people's children, who have a similar share in what we leave behind. There is the world itself, which we have helped to shape and to which we now give back what remains. There are the traces in the thoughts of others who have worked with us, in the inventions we have made, in the texts we have written, in the encounters we have had. These addresses are not as direct as one's own grandchildren, but they are no less real. They are only more diffuse, more widely distributed, less named.

The third answer is the heaviest. It says that what we leave behind is not only the things we can name, but also the situation in which other people's descendants must live. Whoever asks honestly what they leave behind must include this situation in the balance. And it is not favourable. We leave behind a warmer atmosphere. We leave behind poorer ecosystems. We leave behind indebted states. We leave behind exhausted democracies. We leave behind a world in which the possibilities for living well have become narrower than the possibilities we had. It does no good to gloss over this. It is what we hand over to other people's children, whether those children are our grandchildren or not.

V. Relief as an ethical act

If this is so, the meaning of the relief that one's own grandchildren are not there changes. It is no longer only a consolation against loss. It is also a form of decency. It says: If I do not want to impose this world on those I love, then I may not impose the burden of my own longing on those I do not know.

This is a point that traditional family ethics did not foresee. In the older world, the wish for descendants counted as a self-evident good. It was so self-evident that one did not need to think about what one was doing to the descendants by wishing for them. Today it is no longer self-evident. It is a question that every generation must answer for itself anew — and in the generation now living, the answer is perhaps more often no than it has ever been.

Whoever acknowledges this can also acknowledge their own relief without being ashamed of it. It is not a defect of the grandparental soul. It is the reason that looks through love and sees that what one loves can no longer be loved without breaks in the world as it is.

VI. What remains

What remains, once one has been this honest? There remains the task of filling the time one still has with something that endures even without a genealogical address. There remains what one does because it is right to do, not because an inheritance must be passed into a hand. There remains the possibility of acting in places that are not family — with younger people one works with, in texts others read, in inventions someone takes up, in sentences someone remembers without ever knowing from whom they came.

That is not a solution. Nor is it the reconciling conclusion with which an essay on such topics ordinarily has to end. It is only the observation that the question what do we leave behind? deserves an answer adequate to the situation — and the situation is that the address is often empty, the balance often slim, and relief often the most honest feeling one can allow oneself.

Whoever stands at the end of a line may lament it. They may also accept that the line ends because the world that would have continued it is no longer worth continuing into. That is not cynicism. It is a form of dignity that does not need to prove itself. It leaves the descendants in peace who have not come. It leaves the children in peace who have decided. It leaves itself in peace, with the love that does not become less just because it no longer has a destination.

It is enough to have been what one was. It is enough to have loved what one loved. It is enough to have worked at what one worked. Whoever can say this has left behind what they could leave behind. And if those to come do not come, then they do not come. That, too, is a form of answer.