Letter to my Unborn Child
20 Jul 2025Dear Little One,
I’ve come to realize that the United States of America in the 21st century might be the most unhappy society in the history of the human species. The degree of human, animal, and plant misery we have built our lives on has no precedent on this planet. We live with the constant knowledge, whether conscious or uncounscious, that almost everything we do in our day to day lives is somehow supported by large scale environmental destruction, human trafficking, slave labor, torture, violence, and poverty of all kinds.
We try very hard to convince ourselves that we are living in previously unimaginable freedom and prosperity. And it’s true that we live longer and with more material comforts than any of our ancestors. But our ability to enjoy these benefits is undermined by the foundation of suffering on which they are based.
And underneath this foundation is the core that supports the whole unhappy edifice of our society: a deep and persistent feeling of wrongness, to which we have become habituated. It is a nagging sense that things are not the way they are supposed to be, that this isn’t the life we were supposed to have.
When and why we invented this belief in our own wrongness I couldn’t say. But we have become so used to it that we have forgotten that feeling one’s own inherent rightness is the most fundamental need of a human being. Without it, happiness and well-being are impossible. Without it, the human organism cannot relax even when circumstances are relaxing.
So this is the world I am bringing you into. I can’t possibly provide you with the environment you deserve, full of people who are happy and live in peace, and for that I am sorry. But it is also a very special place and time to be born, because never before has a society of humans needed people who know their own rightness so badly. You, as I, are brought into this world to help it heal. That is one of the most beautiful assignments a human being can have.
The good news is that the feeling of wrongness is learned, and it can be unlearned. Underneath the concepts of wrongness always lies the innate feeling of rightness. This feeling exists below the conceptual level of the mind and therefore can never be proven nor disproven, justified nor unjustified, created nor destroyed.
It is your job to stay connected to your inner rightness no matter what happens in your life. This is the greatest gift you can give yourself and the world, and it is the only way to become happier and more ethical with each passing day.
Even when you stumble, notice how you stumble perfectly. If you can do this, everything will fall into place.
Love,
Dad
For some two million years, despite being the same species of animal as ourselves, man was a success. He had evolved from apehood to manhood as a hunter-gatherer with an efficient life style which had it continued, might have seen him through many a million-year anniversary. As it is, most ecologists agree, his chances of surviving even another century are diminished with each day’s activities.
But during the brief few thousand years since he strayed from the way of life to which evolution adapted him, he has not only wreaked havoc upon the natural order of the entire planet, he has also managed to bring into disrepute the highly evolved good sense that guided his behavior throughout all those eons. Much of it has been undermined only recently as the last coverts of our instinctive competence are rooted out and subjected to the uncomprehending gaze of science. Ever more frequently our innate sense of what is best for us is short-circuited by suspicion while the intellect, which has never known much about our real needs, decides what to do.
It is not, for example, the province of the reasoning faculty to decide how a baby ought to be treated. We have had exquisitely precise instincts, expert in every detail of child care, since long before we became anything resembling Homo Sapiens. But we have conspired to baffle this long-standing knowledge so utterly that we now employ researchers full time to puzzle out how we should behave toward children, one another, and ourselves. It is no secret that the experts have not “discovered” how to live satisfactorily, but the more they fail, the more they attempt to bring the problems under the sole influence of reason and disallow what reason cannot understand or control.
We are now fairly brought to heel by the intellect; our inherent sense of what is good for us has been undermined to the point where we are barely aware of its working and cannot tell an original impulse from a distorted one.
– Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept