The phrase “don’t worry, be happy” comes to mind.
Seriously, why even spend time contemplating this if it bothers you? Think about baseball, or sex.
Because it affects how I see the rest of the world. A world where everything is pretty much for the future of man and that life is worthwhile, that’s essentially truth in the world we live in. How do I respond to everyone else when they ask me and i say " i don’t know".
Anti-natalism doesn’t require life to be so miserable you want to kill yourself, nor would it recommend it. IIRC Benatar had a chapter about this in his book. There’s a difference between hurting yourself versus not creating life in the first place. The standard arguments against suicide would apply, like not causing grief in your friends and family. We all die eventually, so there’s no need to hurry the process along, assuming normal life circumstances. I don’t know anything about you, but poor people in the global South suffer unimaginable indignities and manage to find happiness, so you probably can too.
Lots of philosophical debates have smart people engaging each other with sophisticated arguments that would take years of schooling to really understand. Ideologies come and go, like fashion. Basing your whole worldview on what amounts to mental onanism probably isn’t a good idea. Personally, I don’t have concrete beliefs on a lot of topics, but I try to understand the arguments and follow how the rhetoric changes.
If you’re suffering from nihilism you can still find personal contentment, even if it’s objectively meaningless. Would the existence of objective meaning or purpose really change anything? What would that even look like? Do you want to live up to God’s commands or some other cosmic ordering principle? I think it was Hitchens who referred to that as a celestial dictatorship.
If nothing else, there’s lots of weird and interesting people out there to meet, new experiences to appreciate, media to enjoy, or world events to follow. Like Carlin said, we have front row tickets to the freak show.
Sure, the whole idea of ‘knocking’ somebody for having kids (per se as opposed to being a bad parent) or not is absurd to me. Just saying that people who want to judge it can cut it either way. As in begbert2’s statement subsequently
“Also I’m an atheist, so yeah. Having a child is something people do for their own benefit - they want a child of their own loins, and so they have one (or try to). Selfish. However I don’t consider selfishness to be inherently harmful, so as long as you treat the kids decent once you have them, birth away.”
You can make an argument having kids is selfish or not having kids is selfish, as well as play around with the definition of ‘selfish’ and what forms of it are ‘bad’. Also that statement has an interesting (though pretty common nowadays) twist where what the speaker believes is all that counts: if other people have kids for some truly felt religious reason, it’s still selfish because somebody else doesn’t accept their way of thinking. Anyway, I just realize the pointlessness is a society with decreasing ground of common values (at least with any given stranger one encounters as on the internet) of debating stuff like this. I think your and other positions amount to the same thing though, no real disagreement. To each his own.
Also as to whether it has anything to do with one’s belief or lack of, I doubt that also. Personally I am at somewhat religious, but it doesn’t make me think all social patterns really arise from belief, though OTOH I definitely don’t think everyone who doesn’t believe really sits down and figures out how to run their life ‘rationally’ on their own from scratch. We follow traditions (or deliberately rebel against them, which is in a way equivalent). We follow the crowd. We follow instincts, all to some degree, IMO though independent thought and interpretation of religion (for those to whom it applies) play some role too. Except maybe some smaller subset of deep thinkers who figure it all out. I admit I might not understand them, not being one of them. But that’s not most people I know, in my observation.
I don’t take philosophical arguments for preventing suffering by not having kids seriously. Again it could be lack of deep thought. But a lot of people really making that decision that way, for that reason, really, people who have their heads where the sun shines in general, I really doubt it. 
The idea that the miserable are content with their lives reminds me of Margaret Mitchell’s description of the dark laborers singing happily at their work in the cotton fields.
Are poor people fundamentally happy? Do they have reasons to enjoy their lives? I don’t think so.
Poverty disturbs children’s brain development (Scientific American).
Poverty creates long-term disadvantages for children (livestrong.com).
Poverty damages children and their life chances (Child Poverty Action Group).
Global poverty affects countless lives internationally (Children International).
Children’s well-being and development are greatly influenced by poverty (princeton.edu).
I wonder why one could imagine poor people are happy. Is it because poor people are endowed with a sense of humor like any of us? Is it because they can sing and dance too? Or is it because they can love and cling to hope?
I don’t run into a lot of people asking me about the meaning of life or whether life is worth living. Do you?
And if I did, I’m sure they’d be fine with “I don’t know.”
This actually crossed my mind after I’d posted - I’d incorrectly implied that a person who valiantly thought that they were desperately pulling unborn babies from the pool of hellfire that their god was stewing them in were selfish, just because by my standards their reasoning is mired in false premises. This is not the case. A person who is hallucinating that people are devils is being altruistic when he goes on a killing spree - by his logic. Which is the sort of logic we’re talking about when we say when somebody is selfish or not. So, if you’re having babies because you believe doing so saves them from a god, then you are indeed being unselfish.
I’m actually not sure which religions, if any, think that their god boils unborn babies in hellfire. No religion I know about does - they often say that souls have preexistence, but I’ve usually gathered that the possibility of them never getting born is either already accounted for or it isn’t possible due to foresight and proper planning on god’s part, or whatever. But who knows.
A more common reason for religious people to pump out babies as fast as they can boils down to “I was told to” - the same basic reason they think murder is bad or stoning infidels is good, or whatever. They would say that obeying the rules of their god is an unselfish act. I disagree. I think that people obey their god for personal reasons, and those reasons have a strong tendency to be selfish. (They want their god’s approval, blessing, or salvation for themselves.) The only way a god being part of the equation results in unselfish behavior is if the god is creating a situation where you are doing things with no anticipation of benefit for yourself. So, like, if you went around murdering just-baptized babies to ensure their salvation at the cost of your own, that would be unselfish.
I don’t recommend you do that, by the way. Because I’m an atheist and all, and disagree with the premises that approach is based on.
It doesn’t help that the majority of natalist arguments are religious.
Well, my preferred natalist argument is “why not?”, which is relatively agnostic I believe.
In regards to the whole “life is worth it” what if someone has traveled the world, made love, played piano, and all that and still would find death preferable?
Yes, what if they do?
A mature adult should be allowed to make that choice for themself, after appropriate counselling to confirm that this is not a temporary episode of depression.
I still maintain that impossible to quantify suffering and pleasure in any reliable way. I maintain that so hard that I don’t know whether or not I’m happy! I do seem to be relatively content though, generally speaking, based on behavioral evidence.
However, if a person assesses their life and determines that they are doomed to experience an unacceptable amount of suffering that they can be relatively certain will not eventually end and be replaced by a redeeming amount of pleasure…then first I would recommend that they seek a second opinion and check whether lifestyle changes can alter their anticipated suffering/pleasure outlook. But if they really do conclude that they’re doomed and there’s nothing they can do (like, if they’re in extreme amounts of physical agony all the time and have nothing anywhere ever that can distract from it), then a mature consenting adult could in theory determine that terminating their life is their best possible choice.
Though if they’re polite, they’ll take into account the feelings of their loved ones, neighbors, and the people who will have to clean the carpet afterwards when choosing their actions and methods. Leaving a mess behind is just rude.
In other words such a person who lived a “full life” and still would have preferred death is just an opinion. What if they were not in chronic pain? What if after traveling the world, studying philosophy, sex, piano, etc they still would prefer death? What then?
Then they have a decision to make.
Some people thing that the excitement of sledding down a snowy hill is worth the effort of hiking back up to do it again. Some people don’t.
But, I thought this thread was about having children?
I just saw that comment made on a forum by someone else and it makes me call into question once again whether or not one should continue in life. If someone did all that and prefers death, what then?
It’s mostly in regards to antinatalism and whether life is worth living or not. This is relevant.
Why are you so keen on debating whether life is worth living or not? Everyone will have their own opinion. I don’t think you will change their minds nor they change yours. What are you looking for?
Then I’d ask why they prefer death. Killing onesself is messy and annoying for the people around them, so if they’re just bored are having an imbalance of their yellow and black bile or have read too much bad philosophy or whatever, I’d rather correct their problems than just jump to the irreversible decision. And if everything seems to be fine and they still want to die, well, I’d ask them to do it somewhere away from me because I’m a sensitive soul and also I don’t like having to mop.
I disagree. I think that ‘potential lives’ are way, way less valuable than actual lives, and so the arguments for why I should talk you out of suicide aren’t relevent to the arguments I’d use to talk you into having a kid. For starters, I wouldn’t bother trying to talk you into having a kid at all, and if you do decide to have one I’d ask you do to it somewhere away from me because I’m a sensitive soul and also I don’t like having to mop.
Of course having children is a selfish act–we allow them to be born in hopes of having someone to take care of us in our old age, to help with the work of living, and to feel of use in the universe–it is the ultimate of selfish acts.