Five things I want to have possessed or experienced by the time I reach the end of my life are buying a house, getting married, having children, becoming old and having time to do the things that I enjoy. In addition to this a quality that I want to be remembered for is being a person with is understanding. All 6 of these things are important to me personally and to humanity as a whole.
Personally, buying a house and having a place of permanent settlement is important to me because over the course of my life I’ve moved a lot. I’ve lived in California, Indiana and Connecticut. In each state I’ve moved multiple times and I can say with absolute certainty that moving isn’t a fun thing to deal with. As result buying a house and having a place to live that I won’t have to leave is something that I want and is really important to me. More than that it is important to humanity because people settling in a place permanently is why we have society, countries, nationalities etc. If everyone were nomadic and never decided to settle in one place we wouldn’t have the majority of the things we have today and it’s essential for humanity to grow.
Getting married is important to me on a personal level because I feel that it is valuable to have a partner that may be with you for the rest of your life. I think that companionship, love and bond of trust are very important and sound very comforting to have. Marriage is important to humanity on a cultural level. The first recorded evidence of a marriage ceremony was in 2530 B.C. in Mesopotamia. It shows that in early civilizations the value of a committed relationship between 2 people was seen as important. In many wisdom texts, such as the Book of the Dead, there are ideas that you shouldn’t should sleep with anyone that wasn’t your wife. Even though it was purely a social arrangement, it was still very important for people to have a marriage partner and to be committed.
Having children is important to me because I feel that the experience of having children, raising them and being a parent an integral part of the human experience. I also think that it is an experience that will alter how I view the world in a way that I have no way of knowing yet, but I want to explore. In addition the bond between a parent and child is something I want to have sometime in my life. I want to know how my parents saw me as they raised me, although I’ll never know exactly. It’s important for humans to have children because on a biological level it’s needed to continue the species, but it’s more than that. In many early cultures there are many traditions around having a child and passing on the knowledge from parent to child. An example of this is a Bar/Bat Mitzvah in Judaism. During the ceremony the Torah is passed down from generations. Your grandparents pass it to your parents and then to you. It’s traditions like that, that show that early civilizations had this understanding of the value of the bond between parent and child.
I want to experience what it is like to be old because it means that I was lucky to live that long. I sometimes question how I’ll view the world when I get into my 80s and I’m curious to know. I also want to live long enough to see my grandchildren and I want to know what my value of family will be by that age. Getting old is important to humanity because it’s a valuable perspective. Having people around that have seen and experienced a lot of thing is important for educating younger generations. It brings in a unique perspective that many people don’t have. Early civilizations found this important and we see this through archetypes in stories. A protagonist of a story tends to have a mentor figure and this figure is often depicted as elderly. I think this becuase even back then people knew that the elderly often knew things average people didn’t and passing on this knowledge was important to the human species.
By the end of my life I want to have had the time to do the things I enjoy. This is because my hobbies are a way for me to destress after a long day and giving this up would decrease my happiness over all. My hobbies are important for my mental stability. I think that it’s important for humanity for people to be able to do the things they enjoy. In early human history once people didn’t have to worry about food people would create art and create stories. I think this is very important because it shows that people needed a way to express themselves in a creative manner and entertain themselves. It’s way people created sports and ways to view them. People pursue entertainment as a way to have joy in their lives and do things other than work.
A quality that I want people to know I had by the time I die is that I was understanding. Being understanding is important to me because I feel that in this day and age it’s something that society lacks. This is especially prevalent in the political polarization seen in U.S. today. People aren’t even willing to hear the other sides of certain issues before making a final judgement on something and that’s dangerous. I want to demonstrate to others what it means to be understanding before I hit the bucket. I think that it’s important for humans to be understanding and hear each other out because it can prevent a lot of terrible events from occurring. If two sides genuinely took the chance to hear watch other out and compromise I think a lot of human life could be saved with this quality.