While it’s true that not being alive means missing out on the good as well as the bad, the case can be made that some bad things in life are VERY VERY bad, whereas many “good things” in life are usually only moderately good. The agony of suffering severe burns over your entire body would outweigh the pleasure of ten thousand mornings of waking up and seeing the sunrise and smelling the daisies. IOW there is more bad potential than good potential in life, from a certain perspective.
Pain, suffering are experienced far, far more intensely than joy, pleasure. Ask yourself if you would be willing to endure 1 hour of the most brutal, agonizing torture imaginable in exchange for a full 24 hours of the highest euphoric bliss possible.
It is also monumentally easier to suffer in this world than it is to be “happy.” If you asked me “what should I do to suffer” I could recommend you dozens of straightforward, actionable, easy, and extremely effective ways to do just that of the top of my head- hit yourself with a hammer, stick your hand in a flame, lick a cop, hell, just sit still and do nothing.
Joy is far, far harder to achieve and more elusive, and it is fleeting and rare, compared with the ever nagging sufferings, discomforts, deprivations, frustrations, and so on- of life.
I want nothing to do with your god. This ‘god’ deserves nothing but condemnation for creating the most abhorrent, messed up world you could possibly design.
True, like the saying that “It takes many years to build a good reputation but only a minute’s indiscretion to destroy it.” But that’s how it is, a certain Murphy’s Law of life if you will.
Would that be “Desiderata” by Les Crane?
From 1971, but it's possible to have heard it in the 1980s on some stations. National Lampoon parodied it some years later, as "Deteriorata.":
More likely to be played in the 1980s, but rather bleak; not about great things in life.
Anyway, would one of these be what you are looking for, Machine Elf?
I agree that you shouldn’t have children. Not because of all the things you list, but because your outlook on life would be more depressing for the kids than any torture imaginable.
I note you haven’t given a reason for why you are living. If life is so horrible why do you persist with it? Your continuing existence is incompatible with your supposed outlook. It reads to me like you just don’t want children and have come up with a cute philosophy to justify it. The best reason for not having kids is because you just don’t want them.
I will also point out that you can avoid the vast majority of true suffering (not crap like “boredom”) by having children in a western country and providing them with a good upbringing.
My children are real, and they don’t have to worry about those things. Strife, pain, difficulty, etc is part of being alive. Worrying about it is, to a large extent, a choice. You don’t have to worry about anything.
Maybe everyone is walking away a winner in this scenario. Good work!
Thanks, but no, those weren’t it. It wasn’t really poetic like that, it was more like a list, albeit spoken with a bit of passion. The only lines I can really remember are these (and I may be misremembering):
“If you’re a boy, you’ll miss out on the feeling you get the first time you stick your hand down a girl’s pants. If you’re a girl, you’ll miss out on the feeling you get the first time you stick your hand down a boy’s pants.” (heteronormative, sure, but such were the times.)
Trust me, I could design a significantly more abhorrent, messed up world than the one I’m currently living in. The tricky part would be keeping it populated, but given divine power I’m sure I could come up with some mechanism to replace all the people that are tortured to death (which is to say, all of them). Perhaps I could keep resurrecting them, so that the pleasant memories of their prior suffering wouldn’t be lost.
Seriously, that list in your OP is absurd, if you’re trying to claim there’s any significant chance that any kid you spawned would experience it all. Yes, if you actually know that your kid will experience the worst extremes on the list then you should consider sparing them the experience. (Like maybe you’re living in a lawless hellhole where the local warlord swings by every three years and takes all the toddlers as sex slaves.) But you know what? I don’t believe you live in a hellhole. I don’t believe that there’s any significant chance any kid of yours would be tortured to death at all.
Which means that to do a fair assessment, you’d need to, well, do a fair assessment. Which means doing a complex weighted comparison of all possible experiences accounting for severity and probability.
Or you could take the easy route and look at the calculation that’s already been done: yours. Are you alive? Are you currently trying to kill yourself? If not then you consider life worth living. QED. Go have tons of babies.
If you are not alive, or are currently in the process of murdering yourself, then I agree you shouldn’t have kids.
As you wish.
True, but the odds of being burned like that are pretty low. Any time you walk out your door there is a chance of being in a horrendous car wreck, or having your balls shot off by a maniac, or being held hostage, or all sorts of horrible things. Yet you know this isn’t very likely. Same for having kids.
On the other hand the chances of joy from a nice sunset or a child are pretty high.
If the only joy you could get comes from winning the lottery or a Nobel prize, then things would be pretty bleak indeed.
True. The example I was thinking of is plane travel. Besides assuming you lose anything by sudden loss of your life, suffering the fear of dying for seconds or minutes before a crash, and the impact might not be painless either, is surely worse than the mild good of completing a flight. But it’s millions of mild goods for every one of those horrors.
Today’s entertainment industry is kind of hooked on cheap manipulation of audience emotion about horrific torture and painful slow accidental death. I think it’s a case where we can be subconsciously influenced by entertainment, and not as conditioned to give the same response as people more readily do in opposition to Nervous Nellies (or Neds) about air travel, though the odds of being tortured to death for the average first world person* are probably a lot lower than being in a plane crash.
The reality of first world life is a large % opportunity to live a prosperous quiet life and be satisfied by it, if you can be; a smaller but still significant % chance of becoming confused and unable to enjoy what first world life offers you, smaller still non-negligible chances of a really unhappy life (chronic health issues, really bad luck economically etc), and basically negligible (though not zero) chances of stuff like 80% third degree burns or being the victim of deliberate horrific torture. A rational discussion has to weigh probabilities.
*and this whole discussion is the epitome of ‘first world problem’.
Consider a thought experiment- there’s an uninhabited planet, and you have a button that when pushed, starts the same process of life on that planet as the one on this planet. You get the chocolate ice cream, you get the sex, you get the cool 80s music, you get the beautiful sunsets, but you also have to claim responsibility for the trillions of sentient organisms suffering, every cancer, every suicide, every genocide- from a purely objective pov, can you justify pressing the button?
Yes.
I don’t really understand the point of the OP or if I do, don’t agree with it. But I do agree with Mangetout, worry is a choice. The things you list are potentially real but that doesn’t mean that everyone does worry about them. Nor for most rational thinking people do they cancel out life’s positives.
Serious question, how so?
Of course. You’re giving me the chance to populate a planet with LIFE!
That’s insane. And dare I say, sadistic and depraved.
Is this it?
There are people who are severely depressed, that every waking moment is painful. Likewise, people who have anxiety disorder (hello!) that life can be hell. It’s easy to imagine that everything would be much better if nothing existed.
I grew up in a household which was pretty much off the scales in terms of abuse. Several siblings wound up with severe mental illnesses because of the abuse (although probably it’s complex PTSD which can look like many different types of mental illnesses), including a brother who is homeless.
One thing which was pure hell were family vacations as we were together with our father 7/24. One sister handled her dislike of them by simply not taking vacations with her children.
My wife grew up in a “normal” family, where vacations were fun, enjoyable and looked back on with lasting pleasure. I try really hard to enjoy the vacations we have with our kids, but it does take work.
This “debate” sounds like someone who dislikes life and doesn’t see how pleasurable life can be.
I don’t see how arguing is going to change their mind. If one doesn’t like life, then one doesn’t like life.