May it inspires us not to leave our happiness or the search for a better 'now' to the next generations
Carl Gustav Jung to parents - (About “ZARATHUSTRA” from NIETZSCHE - Seminar given between 1934-1939) - Pp.1543-1544 VI.2 (Final considerations) (Free translation by myself)
...See, in a country as England, where people had a healthy egoism and where each generation tried to increase its well-being and confort, they left very decent conditions to posterity. But, what if people had run to all other nations in the World and made a home there. What would they've left to their children? Nothing.
When you neglect your own well-being to the benefit of your kids you leave them a bad heritage, a bad impression of the past. If you torture yourselves to produce something for your kids, you give them the image of a tortured life.
Therefore, stop it. It is all wrong, says the child, and than makes another mistake. If you are always preparing the happiness of the kids, you won't know how to search for your own happiness and your children will not learn how to search theirs. They will instead keeping preparing the happiness of your grandchildren, and the grandchildren that of the great grandchildren, and sohappiness will always be somewhere in the future. You think happiness is something to be achieved in the future, that you can't reach it but that your kids will have. And so, you fulfill your lives with ambitions to that kindom that will come and it never does.
Each generation is doing something on this behalf. Everyone tortures oneselves so that the kids might get it, but children grow up and are as silly as we are. They receive the same unfortuned teaching.
Try to do it here and now to yourselves. This is a good teaching. So children will try to do it here and now for themselves - and so this might come to the real World. do not be unnatural, searching for happiness in the future generations. If you are too envolved with your kids or grandkids you simply overload them with the debt you've acquired. If, on the contrary, you do not acquire debt, if you simply live and try to be yourselves, as happy as possible, you leave the best conditions to your children. In any case, you leave a good example of how to take care of oneselves. If parents can take care of themselves, so will the children.
They won't be searching the happiness of the grandchildren, but will do whatever it takes to have a reasonable amount of happiness themselves. This way, as a whole nation is torturing itself to the salvation of children, a heritage of misery is all that is left for the future, a type of unfulfilled promise.
So, instead of saying "i do it for my kids - in the future the thing might come", try to do it for yourselves here and now. And you will se if it is possible or not.
If you delay the tentative to the children, you leave something you didn't dare to do; or maybe you were to silly not to try; or if you tried you might have seem it was impossible, a stupidity anyway. however, if you leave it to the future you leave less than nothing to your kids - just a bad example.
