I spent a lot of time not existing before I was conceived and I never had any problem with it.
I wish I could be someone who were smart enough to know these things inherently. I had to have them explained and justified to me by someone else. I can tell what is right when it is explained by other people but until that happens I’m at a loss. Guess I’ll never be a revolutionary. I’m glad you saw my post and that it helped you feel less alone in your beliefs.
Does it matter? I know I don’t want to nonexist just like I know I don’t want to take a .45 to the head or an ax blade to the neck even though I don’t actually know what it would be like.
On the other hand, I’ve suffered greatly in an ER fairly recently and it just made the good things that much sweeter. Weird, huh?
It’s a pretty common misconception to conflate pain with death/nonexistence. Pain, we all can agree, is bad. Lots of ways of death look pretty painful, we also can all agree. But just becaue the road is bumpy doesn’t mean the destination is similarly unpleasant.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with the idea of being dead. If I did have a problem with it, then my life would suck; I forsee with absolute certainty that 99.99999999% of my future will be spent dead (making certain presumptions about the length of the timeline), and forseeing that that much of my future will be spent in a place I have a problem with would be incredibly worrying.
In fact, death is so non-frightening to me that there’s only three reasons I’m not dead right now:
Note that all three conditions could change: 3 is already basically avoidable. 1 could change if I got some horrible agonizing disease with no cure or relief. And 2 will half-correct itself in time, since nobody really expects me to outlive my neices and nephews (though suicide might still bother them, assuming I don’t outlive everyone or lose contact).
So yeah - page me in sixty years, when my diabetes has gone critical and I’m blind and can barely move and all my family is dead. Death already doesn’t look particularly bad, but at that point it might look downright enticing.
What does this have to do with deciding to have children? Well first, it’s no crime to them not to have them. To put it jokingly, they won’t know what they’re missing! However, if one does have selfish desires towards having kids (perhaps you want a pet but are allergic to cats), then there’s similarly no ethical obligation not to have them, unless you think there’s a serious risk that their lives would suck. If you do think that their lives would suck, then condition 1 applies pre-emptively and it’s immoral to have the kids.
It’s just another bit of difference and diversity that adds flavor to the day, I guess. I also only get eight hours of sleep per night if you count the time lazing around and blissfully not getting up. And insomnia and rude awakenings are rare for me. I also nap very lightly and frequently, sometimes dozing in and out of consciousness for an hour or two, and I certainly can’t write that off as time spent entirely unconscious; I spend a good deal of it barely conscious enough to enjoy it.
I do technical work in theatre. Generally, I do more hands-on stuff (hanging and focusing lights, mostly) than design work (both set and lights), but I’d like to move a little more into design work in the next few years. Right now specifically, I’m the head electrician for a small touring show.
It sounds like you’re just passing the time. Why do that? Why not pick something special, something that you can do truly for its own sake, because you love it, and do that in your spare time? Paint, or garden, or travel, or run, or teach children, or something like that? Something that you love, that you can do for no reason other than that you love it, and let it give your life a little meaning that way. I know that I’m unhappiest when I’m not busy because I get that sense of purposelessness, so I try to stay busy most of the time.
I am one of the luckiest people in the world. My life is better than most people’s. But I have experienced:
And that’s just the beginning. Every day brings new suffering in some form.
Today, for example, I experienced:
This is just what comes off at the top of my head. This is one day in one of the best lives in the world. I’m not trying to appear ungrateful; believe me, I do recognize how lucky I am. But a good life compared to other lives is still not a good life. Everyone will experience suffering, even if it’s minor.
Now, granted, it wasn’t all bad. I watched an entertaining movie, I had a nice meal, I finally found the thing I was looking for, I listened to some of my favorite music, I played some computer games and had fun doing so, I did a project that despite frustrations with the other team members I was overall happy with the result of, and I reconnected with an old friend. But had I never been created, I would not miss these things, because people who are never created simply do not exist; they do not have the ability to miss anything.
Some people may say that I brought these things on myself, but I know I certainly didn’t try to. It is human nature to avoid suffering. Even if someone brings suffering on themselves as a result of their own naivete or because they simply didn’t know any better, it all could have been avoided if their parents had decided not to reproduce.
There is good in the world and in life, but this does not erase the bad.
Nah. If you’re a Buddhist, or have other training, you realize that suffering is completely unnecessary.
But leaving that aside, freedom of choice is more important than lack of suffering. By not having kids, you take away their freedom of choice, the most important things they have.
You’re contradicting yourself. The kind of parents who think their kids can always opt out would be the same ones that would be happy for someone who ended their own life to end suffering.
Whereas the kind of parent who would be devastated by the loss of their child is the same one who believes that being alive has much more value than the prevention of suffering.
It’s funny, I must be the exact opposite of you.
It seems to me that the joys of life are relatively trivial things like the cake & kittens that you mention, while some of the pains of life are truly horrific things like serious accidents & diseases. I look at the two sides of the equation and they don’t even come close to balancing.
But, I suppose trivial is a matter of opinion, and cake & kittens obviously aren’t trivial to you if you’re willing to endure torture to have them. I wish I could relate to that perspective, but it’s completely foreign to me.
Sometimes I think about the possibility that I could get into a car accident any day and end up disfigured, disabled, or paralyzed for life. I can’t imagine any joy that could ever be wonderful enough to make up for that possibility. I feel foolish for remaining alive, a sitting duck for all sorts of horrible misfortunes that I am powerless to prevent.
I also feel that the good parts of life don’t really count, in a way, since I wouldn’t miss them if I didn’t exist. To me, even the happiest life imaginable wouldn’t be any better than nonexistence. Schopenhauer wrote that happiness is just the absence of pain, and I think I agree with that. I guess that’s why I’m against creating new people.
I disagree, if there was the will to colonise the galaxy we could do it, it wouldn’t be easy or cheap but it is technically possible. As with all human endeavours we probably won’t attempt it until it is almost too late. It’s not that I care about some hypothetical aliens, particularly, I was just using this as an example. It is difficult for me to express my general opinion of humanity outside the pit, but let me try to give you the polite version.
Most people are ignorant, stupid and often rude. Society is beset by crime, low level antisocial behaviour and religious intolerance, not to mention the fact that we are beset by environmental problems and resource issues that are likely to result in more war and suffering in the not too distant future. The impact of all of these things could be reduced if not eliminated if there were less people. As the growth in population is increasing exponentially it is unlikely that this will happen any time soon. This will result in an increase in suffering over time as we fight over dwindling resources while choking on carbon dioxide and religious fanaticism.
Thus the growth in population and hence having children can be seen to be directly linked to an increase in global suffering and is hence immoral.
I don’t follow the premise that causing pain is “unethical,” especially in the context of indirectly causing pain.
I have a hard time understanding a system of ethics in which a surgeon would be regarded as unethical. Clearly she is causing pain, even if it a situation in which the pain is only going to be experienced post-surgically and treated with medications.
I have a hard time regarding a parent as unethical if they are causing their child emotional distress by refusing to buy them each of the toys they want as they walk through the store.
Can you elaborate on this system of ethics to help me understand why I should even buy into the first bit, let alone follow you to the conclusion?
Reminds me of a Buddhist parable:
Dunno exactly what it is supposed to mean, but I’d guess it has something to do with living in the moment.
It’s not going to happen. Even admitting it’s hard, you’re underestimating the difficult by a factor of ten thousand.
With due respect, I believe you’ve deluded yourself. Most people are objectively none of those things. Society is NOT beset by crime in any sense that that statement would be meaningful; indeed, if you live in any industrialized nation, you are likely experiencing an era of unusually low crime. We do not have any more environmental or resource problems than we have been before, and are equipped with more knowledge and tools than ever to deal with them. Frankly, things in general have never been better. You are remarkably lucky to have been born when and where you were and it is nothing but ignorance to believe otherwise.
No of course not. In fact having kids is the more ethical choice. Humanity must perpetuate itself suffering or no suffering. In fact for most board members as they have comfortable lives suffering will be minimal compared to the contribution new people will put to the economy and society.
Who cares? Its trivial and whining about it as suffering belies actual suffering by people with AIDS or getting carbombed in Afghanistan.
Why ?
Ah, my old grandma’s “Finish your plate even if your belly hurts, there’s starving kids in Ethiopia”. Didn’t make much sense then, still doesn’t now.
How does knowing there’s more fucked up existences out there make the one I actually live any less subjectively unpleasant, exactly ? Would their lives be better if I ate my veggies or pretended like I’m having lots of fun ? Does one only get to complain if one has AIDS ?
Though I guess they should also stop whining, since they don’t know the Real pain of those who have AIDS *and *cancer *and *a toothache…
But these are only possibilities. They may not happen. In fact, they probably won’t happen. I can understand if one wonders about things things once in a while, but to agonize about this constantly strikes me as very strange.
As you say, though not referring to me specifically, we are very different. I am aware that bad things might happen but I know that for the most part, they don’t. And when they do, they are temporary setbacks. I feel that my life is, in general, very good. It’s clearly a very different mindset from yours.
That isn’t really analogous to what Curtis LeMay said, and so I think maybe the point was missed, which in the context of the thread is sort of a metapoint; we’ve got people now really digging pretty deep, and getting amazingly creative, in trying to justify why their life is so very, very horrible that it’s unethical to have children. “Oh my God, I was briefly hungry and around 2 PM I was bored” is, you must admit, one hell of a lame reason.
If in fact it was objectively the case that any children I were to have would be very likely to live a really horrible, nasty and miserable life, then deciding to have kids might be an interesting ethical issue. But the antinatalist olks here have established nothing of the sort, and are reduced to complaining about what any reasonable person would agree are trivialities.
I’m just objecting, very strongly at that, the notion that because people on the telly face some pretty graphic hardships, then the pain of someone who doesn’t is inconsequential or not real. A healthy person’s fear of death is just as real as a terminal cancer patient’s one, a raging toothache feels just as painful as a stab wound (in fact, having felt both, I’d rather take the knife), a “mere” heartbreak does feel like the world has ended and anhedonia/lassitude/ennui is just as shitty an emotion to feel on a daily basis as hunger.
There’s no gradation in pain and discomfort - you either feel bad (for whatever reason) or you don’t. And when you do then your life is not pleasant or enjoyable, pretty much by definition.
But the real reason Curtis’s idiotic argument really gets my goat is because it’s one depressives will hear oh so very often. “Why are you unhappy, you have X, Y and Z going for you, you live in the best part of the world, Somalian kids would kill to have your life etc…”, like it’s all the depressive’s fault he feels rotten all the time and he should feel guilty about it on top. Fuck that noise. That’s not helping, that’s being part of the problem.
Toothaches are bad - but temporary. We have evolved to forget the true extent of pain - or else no woman would have more than one kid.
We measure our happiness or unhappiness against impossible to obtain ideals, and reminders of how much better we have it than lots of people might help to reset expectations to something reasonable. If you don’t want to have kids because you are convinced life is miserable, be my guest. No one should tell me that I shouldn’t have kids who can (and did) inherit our positive outlook on life, and who don’t bitch and moan about things.
The point about children starving wherever is not that you eating your dinner is going to help them - Alan Sherman said that kids kept on starving in Europe and he got fat. It is that those kids would kill to have the problem of too much food on their plates.
I suppose you are against sports programs also. Any high school or college football program will sucker kids in who might injure themselves and put themselves into pain - or even, rarely, die. Should we not fund programs which will inevitably hurt a few kids?
Who’re you objecting to, though?
Heartbreak sucks. Frustration over having to do laundry, though? Come on.
We aren’t dealing with people here who are suffering from clinical depression, a disease that cannot be talked out of. We’re talking about people advancing a ridiculous argument on an internet message board.