As an only child being the "last of my bloodline" has given me a great deal of anxiety. Evidently out of ignorance. Where can I learn about lineage being more of a web than a line?
Just track your genealogy. Go up like 3-4 nodes from your parents and then expand the tree from there.
The expansion gets even more extreme if you start your expansion further up the tree, as the average number of children per household goes up dramatically as you go further back in time.
https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/a...
Genetically, you're just about as close to your great-great-grandfather as his second daughter's son's third daughter's nephew is.
Unless you've been in some sort of clan war for generations or your family has been the target of small-scale genocide, you're unlikely to be the 'last of a bloodline'.
At a complete guess, that may be inaccurate because I don't know you? What you possibly have is a biological imperative to reproduce, perhaps some social expectation or personal desire to have a family, which combine to create the anxiety. Then the anxiety manifest as magical thinking about "being the last" in a way to drive attention to the underlying issues. Is it 'being the last' or 'being alone' that's the real driver?
Id argue that it’s not ignorant, it’s socially constructed.
Count your blessings; I’m extremely pleased to be the last of my bloodline.
You already know about it, just in different terms. You have one father and mother, but two grandfathers, four great grandfathers, four great grandmothers, etc. Which of these is your "bloodline"? Either all of them or none. Each of them is likely (in the general case anyway) also a grandparent to many other children with other intermedaries. Which of these is their descendant bloodline? If you get rid of weird socially contingent criteria like "first son", the answer is obviously none of them. It's just a big web, going back thousands of years at minimum. Billions of years back to the first sexually reproducing eukaryote, if you want to think of it that way.