Comment by mateo_wendler
Comment by mateo_wendler 3 days ago
It's the same as the love and work your parents gave to you. You don't have to retrieve them all, just pay forward, be the vehicle of the people who helped you to make the world a better place :)
This reminds me of a passage in Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign (Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan is speaking to Mark Vorkosigan):
Her smile tilted. "Mark, you don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one."
"I'm not sure that seems fair."
"The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted—but rather, vastly enriched."