Well what is a mental illness? Historically you had an illness if something caused you to not function properly at the things society expected you to function in. You can’t remember things clearly anymore and it affects your career or social life? You now are considered to have the mental illness of dementia. Are you just slightly forgetful but can still function fine? You are not ill, instead that forgetfulness is just a character trait of yours. And it goes on like this. Back in the day the expectations to marry the opposite sex and have children was huge so being gay was considered a mental illness. Today it’s more accepted and being gay is just part of who you are (in some places at least). And it goes on like this.

I think not much has changed in this regard. If a certain mental affliction doesn’t affect your social or work life in a meaningful way it’s not really considered an illness. So if you take this as a definition of being mentally healthy there are certainly lots of people out there who have no affliction which seriously hurt their current social or work life. However this of course doesn’t mean that these people are completely free from any mental affliction, it just means these mental afflictions are not considered serious in today’s society.

And these things change all the time as society’s expectations change. Back in the day when only a small minority could read and write there was not a diagnosis for dyslexia. Now that reading ability is expected of everyone in today’s society we have defined dyslexia. As new societal expectations come and go the list of diagnosable illnesses will certainly have things getting removed and added. Let’s say theoretically some people can’t handle zero gravity, today this is not relevant for the vast majority of people so there is not any diagnosis for such an illness. But if more and more people are expected to live in zero G then such a diagnosis would be sure to be defined if such an affliction exists.

Is this definition reasonable? Well that’s a completely different question. But as I see it this is how it is generally defined right now.

I don’t have data to quote here but considering heart problems were rare back in the day when butter, lard and tallow was used in generous amounts in combination with obesity being rare and daily labor was common, I would assume it would be mostly fine. Heart problems in non-overweight people are rare even today, especially at younger ages.

There are also 2 new high quality studies out there showing milk fats being significantly safer for heart health compared to other saturated animal fats. I can link that study for you on request. However you wouldn’t need to use butter for your potatoes necessarily. You can oven bake potatoes in rapeseed oil or olive oil just fine and get the same calories in, if you happen to be afraid of milk fat that is. Finding a milk alternative would be harder however since the seed and nut oils out there are generally much less nutrient dense than whole milk. The exception would be soy milk but then you have to be careful not to get a version full of sugar.

When trying to gain weight (or simply not go minus as in your case) the method will be the opposite of what is needed to lose weight. I have helped someone with this in the past and what I saw as his greatest trouble was that he would get too full to eat more very quickly. I asked about his diet and it was just full of foods which are very filling without actually containing many calories. Lots of fruits and vegetables with almost no carb and no fat.

So really what you need are easily digestible and not too filling calorie rich ingredients. Think lots of grains and fat. Buttered potatoes instead of air fried potatoes. Carrots instead of lettuce. White pasta over whole grain pasta. Cream or mayo based sauce instead of a stock/water based sauce etc. However still try to eat healthy. If going for bread take the white bread without added sugar for example. And still include vegetables but don’t make them over ⅓ of your plate. I have read many success stories with adding heavy amounts of dairy to the diet which makes sense since milk is there to grow a calf as fast as possible. Drinking a package of milk a day is almost a miracle cure to being underweight if you can stomach it. In fact the medical food packs they give to malnourished children are dairy based. Consider it if your diet allows it.

However what specific meals which are convenient to bring I don’t have many ideas. But I hope this mode of thinking will help at least a bit. It has to be a big portion that you can actually stomach. Think about which foods you seem to be able to eat a huge amount of and then narrow those down to the most calorie rich. They also have to not clog your stomach for the whole rest of the day so being easy to digest is also key.

Calling it selfishness implies one only does it for himself/herself and no other reason. I don’t think that’s always true. At the same time it’s not a totally selfless act either. For me it has to be a positive to both me and the child or else it wouldn’t be worth it. Currently I can’t know if the child will enjoy life or not. But if I somehow knew the child would only suffer in life I would absolutely refuse to have that child. But I can’t know and that makes this complicated.

I think I can connect this back to the comment I made about adoption. I could adopt a baby and be just as happy with that as if I had a biological one because to me that is a comparable experience. However I wouldn’t adopt a violent and problematic teenager. Doing so would probably decrease my life quality and endanger my and my partners life. For the calculation to work I want both me and the child to have good lives. I admit it’s not a totally selfless act. But it’s not a totally selfish act either.

For the ideological stuff I don’t have that as a main reason personally but brought up because I think it’s important in a broader perspective. It’s absolutely true that one parent’s ideology has a huge influence on a child’s future. The Amish for example has only ¼ of those born in the community eventually leaving. And how many join the Amish? About zero. It’s a religious movement solely run by those born into it. However the high rate for the Amish is extraordinarily high when looking at other religions and this is because ones ideology is not only influenced by one’s parents but by one’s community as well.

There are a lot of people who were born in conservative or religious households and only left that ideology when they started interacting with people outside the family, for many that’s highschool or College. Internet as well in today’s era. The Amish keep so many because they have their own closed community. However think about it like this. If only one category of people had kids of ideology x. Then all kids would start out with that. In addition they won’t talk to people with a different ideology at school or college or maybe not even youth oriented internet because all other children were also born into ideology x. Suddenly they end up in a bubble and converting them would be much harder. For any other movement but ideology x it would be an uphill battle. Again having children for this sole reason would be stupid in my opinion. But it was a worrying thought of mine when I see through the statistics of who is actually having children nowadays.

Are there really that many kids who need adopting? What I have heard there are far fewer domestic kids who need adoptive parents than there are people willing to adopt if you are looking at young children under 3. This causes a lot of people to adopt internationally which is insanely expensive, often very dubious ethically and a bureaucratic nightmare. A lot of source countries for adoption have banned international adoption in the last years making the supply lower than ever. Adopting internationally does not mean you’re giving a child a home who wouldn’t otherwise have one. No you’re just competing against other prospective parents. The child would just get adopted by another family.

What is available domestically and where one can actually do real good are older children, mostly male, around the ages 12-17 who come from abusive households. The people who adopt from this category are real heroes and do enormous good to the world. However this is a totally different endeavour that not all are able to tackle. Many of these kids are violent, criminal and may despite their young age already have drug addiction problems. It really is a lot and is often a real physical threat to the adoptive parent. I have considered it but right now I’m not ready for it. It also closes the possibility for your own biological children in the future because having a violent older step sibling can ruin your childhood and I wouldn’t want to do that to my kid. Maybe when I’m much older I’ll consider it. Those kids deserve loving parents too and arguably need them more than anyone else.

I really regret to hear that you feel that way about your own existence. I really don’t want to cause someone to exist who then regrets their own existence in such a way. I would be very interested to know what went wrong in your life and what your parents could have done differently. Or is it perhaps not the fault of your parents but the world at large that is to blame?

Of course that’s true. However what is the conclusions of this? Should our long unbroken line of ancestors who reproduced end or should it continue? That’s the big question of it all.