
The Case for Not Being Born - rbanffy
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born
======
nwah1
Anti-natalism is a belief that natural selection inevitably selects against,
and thus a compassionate person who recognizes the truth of the utilitarian
calculus of someone like Benatar would recognize a few things.

1) There is zero chance of convincing everyone to voluntarily cease
reproduction

2) Those who you convince on the grounds of compassion to cease reproduction,
are, by this very decision, proving themselves as among the best suited to be
parents... thus the only goal that is achieved is that the quality of parents
is diminished.

Given that, the true goals of anti-natalism could only be achieved through the
involuntary destruction of the human race... supervillain territory.

Yet, given the likelihood that natural selection would end up restarting the
process, even if destruction were achieved, it seems that perhaps a better
approach for someone with this goal system would be to play the game of
civilization, see how far our powers can take us, and how much of this
universe or multiverse we can reorganize according to our values...

And one of those values could be the prevention of new cascades of natural
selection leading to uncontrolled consciousness with the capacity for
suffering.

~~~
humanrebar
> Those who you convince on the grounds of compassion to cease reproduction...

Compassion is an emotion, not rational "grounds" for a decision.

> ...the best suited to be parents...

Or they just live in a particularly unsuitable environment.

Which brings up a good point. The case for "nobody should have children" is a
particularly hard one to make because it presumes that there is no good life
for any human ever. A more middle ground would be "there is no good life for
some, but there is at least arguably good life for others".

So what does "no good life" look like? Who has it "worst"? Should we say sub-
Saharan Africans should stop having kids? Lower caste Indians? Palestinians?
Jews in early 20th century Germany?

Isn't much of the middle ground between the status quo and "supervillain
territory" fairly close to outright racism and genocidal propaganda?

~~~
nwah1
Rationality is the logical and empirical pursuit of a value system. The values
are the axioms.

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never
pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" \- David Hume

~~~
humanrebar
Good reason spans generations, cultures, and languages. Passions don't age or
translate nearly as well.

Hume's formulation treats reason as a phenomenon existing entirely inside of a
mind and subject to individual passions.

------
hprotagonist
_Again I saw all the oppressions that are practised under the sun. Look, the
tears of the oppressed—with no one to comfort them! On the side of their
oppressors there was power—with no one to comfort them. And I thought the
dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still
alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen
the evil deeds that are done under the sun._

Ecclesiastes 4 (NRSV-A)

circa 400 BC

~~~
musage
> _There is a goal, but no way; but what we call a way is hesitation._

\-- Franz Kafka, "Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way"

When it comes to oppression by the insane -- and that's what it is, the desire
for power cannot come without insanity -- there is only cowardice.

I once saw a animal documentary, one scene was zebras that had to cross a
river because there was no food left on the side of it they were on. The
crocodiles were already waiting for their annual feast. The zebras pushed up
to the river edge, aware of the crocodiles, hesitated a bit, but once the
first few started to go into the river, the rest instantly followed. A few
crocodiles would catch a zebra each, but most zebras came to the other side
unscathed, the herd lived another year. I still remember how that one zebra
that got surrounded and bitten, got itself out of the water again (on the side
the zebras came from) while its guts were falling out, collapsed just out of
frame, and got dragged back by a crocodile to get eaten. It was probably the
lack of video resolution and sound that gave me the impression of that zebra
being very stoic, but at any rate it _seemed_ to calmly do what it needed to
do. It fought back as much as it could, but it didn't, say, roll its eyes back
like a (domesticated) horse might -- none of what I would have expected. It
reminded and reminds me of this:

> _I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen
> dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself._

\-- D. H. Lawrence

What are we doing? We hang around, and when someone makes a run for it, and
looks for us to follow, we watch them get eaten and call them dumb or
idealistic. We're ungrateful towards those we don't even deserve. We're
cowards. And we're not even dealing with crocodiles. One on one, we are
dealing with dwarves. Consider a man like Hitler. As a person, he was
incredibly weak. Other than children, there is nobody he himself could have
harmed. Left to his own devices, he would have just rotted and then imploded.
That goes for most powerful people who abuse their power, individually they
are a joke. Yet here we are, on mass graves, and already training ourselves to
accept worse.

Forget power and war: Each year, how many elderly people freeze to death in
the UK? How many children starve each minute in the world? There is just
cowardice, obedience to those who deserve no authority, and self-pity of those
who deserve no pity.

~~~
KineticLensman
I saw a zebra get caught by two lions. It ran like crazy until they caught it
up, one of them standing on its hind legs leaning on the zebra. It then stood
completely still for a few seconds before the lions pushed it over and
finished it off. I hadn’t considered shock as a possible reason but it
certainly seemed to have given up.

~~~
musage
I wasn't talking about zebras in isolation, I was talking about something like
this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8HJ2RJwcJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8HJ2RJwcJM)
except there were more crocodiles and the zebras were forming less of a line.

Yes, that individual zebra probably knew it was done for the second it was
surrounded. Struggling didn't make a difference for itself, it made a
difference for everybody else. And if the zebras had just stood there going
"you first", they would ALL have died. That's the point. That's how _we_ do,
and I don't see anyone debating that main point.

It's not even selfless, it's the difference between thinking in terms of
quarterly profits and one's own comfort in one's own lifespan, and destroying
the planet and society in the process. If you want to think of it in terms of
DNA, if other humans survive then still more genes similar to your own get
passed on than if NOBODY survives.

> _Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at
> stake._

\-- Hannah Arendt

Who also often pointed out how many intellectuals have this talent to not see
the woods for all the trees, and how talking about serious things with average
people is often more fruitful. Chomsky made the same point, though I can't
find the quote for him either.

------
rla3rd
Am I the only one? or do some people just have way to much time on their hands
for thinking shit like this up. I'd rather live my life than not exist.

~~~
baxtr
You probably don’t exist, you only think you do.

~~~
ythn
It's true - the universe is made of nothing. Galaxies are mostly empty space.
So then you find some matter in the galaxy. Atoms are matter. But atoms are
mostly empty space as well. But then you find the nucleus. But protons are
mostly empty space as well. But then you find quarks. But quarks are mostly
empty space as well. It's empty space all the way down. Nothing actually
exists.

~~~
gnode
On the other hand, we can detect atoms, nucleons, quarks, and even, in so
called empty space, vacuum fluctuations. Maybe it's more accurate to say
nothing doesn't actually exist.

~~~
baxtr
That’s what you think. There is a great book called “Constructing Quarks”.
Have a look

------
ryanwaggoner
In these incredibly nihilistic worldviews, what is the framework by which a
logical case can be made that something like “suffering” is even to be
avoided? Who cares? An individual organism (whatever that even means) may
minimize its own suffering, but why should it care about anyone else’s?

------
jostmey
"Better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all."

I'd say it is better to be alive and sometimes suffer than never to have life
at all. Life comes with joys and happiness as well as the downs

~~~
mr_spothawk
I was dead for 12-billion years before I was born... and it would be hard to
say it was "better" than this because there is nothing to compare this with.

anti-natalism is a divide by zero problem.

for the ones of us who are hopeful that we can solve the problems of aging in
the next century, there's an option to solve the problem raised in the
article: humans keep making the same mistake because by the time they've
learned to stop, they're nearly dead already.

I feel for Benatar, but I doubt his motives.

(edits for spelling)

~~~
humanrebar
> anti-natalism is a divide by zero problem.

True. But this math presumes atheism. If there's an eternal afterlife,
12-billion years is also a "divide-by-zero problem".

So the whole conversation sort of boils down to "is this it?"

~~~
mr_spothawk
> If there's an eternal afterlife

there isn't.

> "is this it?"

yeah.. until we can merge our brains to make new brains, we're just gonna be
stuck merging our genitals to make new brains.

biological systems are what they are.

------
MichaelGG
This is negative utilitarianism, right? For instance, if you could press a
button and wipe out humanity without (much) suffering, would you do it?
Personally I'd have a quick reminisce then all slam it.

But practically, this isn't an option (yet). Nor is voluntary extinction. The
people susceptible to this message or any such message (better for
environment; your group of people is bad and shouldn't continue; life is more
fun without kids) are more likely to be the kind of people that would
contribute to a positive next generation.

The bulk of growth that'll receive and cause suffering is from people that
won't ever listen or heed such a message. Hence anti natalism will only
increase suffering in the world.

~~~
ythn
> Personally I'd have a quick reminisce then all slam it.

What the heck? You'd destroy our entire species to "spare" those that don't
have it good?

~~~
UnpossibleJim
Wouldn't it be easier to eliminate yourself from the spectacle of watching the
less fortunate. Because this type of thought process only comes from the "club
seats" of world society. If you read actual studies on happiness, what the
first world world categorize as fairly destitute aren't as miserable as we
imagine. While we, with our fat bank accounts and our ever quest of
acquisition, just aren't as happy as we seem to think we deserve. To quote The
Big Lebowsky, "Fucking Nihilists".

------
cko
I had a vasectomy two years ago at the age of 29. I don’t know if I’m an anti-
natalist, as I try not to wax philosophical about my personal choices and
feelings. People are diverse. I am close friends with people with kids, and
sometimes I go to their softball games. I’m happy to see the kids’ triumphs
and sad to see them struggle, but these feelings must pale in comparison to
the roller coaster a parent must feel.

Not to mention I have this Catcher in the Rye mentality of wishing childlike
innocence was forever preserved. Which I know won’t happen. Then again I’m sad
when I see adults with childlike naivety suffer because reality does not
discriminate. I’ve also done my fair share of taking care of old people. They
are usually not the wise happy people that I imagine comes with aging - they
are lonely, impatient, anxious, stubborn - basically human but with declining
faculties. I’ll always be haunted by the image of my grandmother wandering
around in the dark, confused, holding a diaper in one hand, with wild hair and
unsteady gait.

Watching people eat is also sad. Hunger... oh the humanity. The humanity of
everything, really. Life is just suffering punctuated by the briefest moments
of relief. I’m not depressed... I don’t think.

~~~
hi41
cko, I am not trying to pry into your personal life but I found your comment
very noticeable. Was vasectomy a choice you made to remain childless or was
the surgery the result of pressures of life that removed any choice. You could
have chosen not to undergo the surgery and still remain childless. You can
choose to ignore this question if you don't want to answer it.

~~~
cko
I like the question, no one’s ever worded it like that before, but I would say
it’s a bit of both. That is, I never wanted children and I also didn’t want
any accidents down the road. And I know if I did have children I’d feel less
free. That said, I must say I feel extremely blessed in life in terms of
aptitude and finances, however.

------
dmm
Hating people and life has always been popular with philosophers. Socrates'
last words: "don’t forget to sacrifice a rooster to Asklepios". He's saying
life is a disease and death the cure, warranting a sacrifice to the god of
medicine.

I'm beginning to appreciate Nietzsche, his affirmation of life and embracing
its terrors, accepting the world for what it is. Just a pointer for the
interested.

------
indubitable
I'm trying my hardest to understand this, but I'm not seeing the logical
'meat' here. As the article states the vast majority of people are quite
happy. And even those in the worst of conditions on this Earth are not all
that dissatisfied with their lives. The philosopher's retort against this is
essentially, 'No, you're not happy!' Who is he to say? But then the argument
he follows his 'no you're not' with what seems to be a surprisingly shallow
bit of logic. He claims that various discomforts such as
hunger/cold/tiredness/etc are a major and never ending source of discomfort.
Let's consider comfort for a minute -- actually let's consider discomfort.
Imagine there was a universe that somehow, absolutely no discomfort existed.
Would this be a world where people living there felt or experienced their
lives to be ones of constant comfort? No, it would be experienced as a world
where the very notion of comfort and discomfort simply do not exist. It would
be like considering vision in a world where there was no such thing.

His argument also sidesteps the point of progression. Claiming we keep
repeating the same mistake is myopic at best. The vast majority of people are
freer and more able to pursue their lives as they see fit than most any time
in history. And this positive forward progression is a never ending theme. The
further back you go, the worse things become. Unless he wants to claim
existence was more pleasant thousands of years ago, it's tough to deny this
directionality of progression. And to deny the innumerable masses of people
that may be able to live in ever greater comfort in the future their
existence, because you're upset about some petty discomforts in the present --
that seems, at the minimum, supremely greedy and certainly far away from any
sort of vague appeal to utilitarianism that he seems to try to make at times.

------
cobber2005
Interesting quote:

"""His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who
studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital
anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious
computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in
the world."""

~~~
mistermann
Great conversation:

[https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-nature-of-
conscio...](https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-nature-of-
consciousness)

------
libeclipse
_“But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then,
the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be
bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.”_

I'm not convinced that this is asymmetric. You could easily extend the
argument to include that the absence of bad wouldn't be good "because there'd
be no one to be deprived of the bad things". There are many other examples of
this kind of logic in the piece.

Overall, it seems to be a pretty subjective and self-contradictory philosophy,
at least the way it is presented and defended (by the person being
interviewed) it is.

------
cerealbad
you ever listen to the breaths of someone speaking rather than the tone or
content of their speech? it helps to count the i's in someones writing, to see
if they're looking but can't really see.

people have children because sex is fun, babies are cute, toddlers are a
captive audience, aging is precarious, and legacy is precious. take the fun
out of sex with porn, replace babies with pets, develop a captive audience
through endless digital information, eliminate the physical risks of aging,
allow a permanent legacy on a voluntary basis for every human being.

life is the most precious gift you can give, 1 second of miserable agonizing
painful life defeats the infinity of non-existence. this is the wisdom in
giving children life. the developed world has gotten soft. but we need that
belly fat for the lean winter years to come. 25-30 years from now it will be
the people who chose to have 5+ kids in the 2010s that are relevant, not those
who bought the forever pill. nature is not a friend technology is an unwilling
slave, trust the first or liberate the second and die a fool. human nature is
to kill and survive, and technology is concerned with throughput.

what fascinates me about the world is how irrelevant most people are outside
of their immediate family. i could fit every person of net worth 100mil+ in a
sports stadium. if that's all that matters, we could go on with about 60k
people, why are we lugging around 7.5 billion? just convince them to stop
having kids and those next 100 years will fly by as the robots fill the gaps.
it's like the dried out husk of a chrysalis emerging beautiful from it's final
metamorphosis. 7.5 billion shells birthing 60k butterflies.

nah i'm pretty sure having 5+ kids and monitoring their internet access is the
right move for virtually every single fertile human being. if you have money?
go for 10.

------
ngvrnd
Counter argument to antinatalism. Benatar allows that once alive, death is
horrible and to be avoided.

Failing to reproduce results in the death of all in the limit.

Therefore I propose that anti-natalism's ship has sailed once there is someone
to think of it.

------
croon
I don't disagree with the reasoning: The Earth would be much healthier, there
would be no suffering, the "Universe" wouldn't care.

But for good or bad, we humans have an inherent drive to procreate and
survive. I think while his question/answer might be correct in a vacuum, it
misses the point.

Now that we're already here and can't consciously stop existing, how do we
best move forward and maximize collective utility and minimize suffering and
our damage to our habitat?

Disclaimer: the environmental effect is my addition, to his psychological
effects.

~~~
pqh
If life isn't worth creating, why is it worth preserving? Why not take this to
the logical conclusion of voluntary total extinction? Furthermore, how could
one even discuss good or bad without a frame of reference?

~~~
perfmode
Benetar argues death is often worse than life. It is non-existence that is
better than both.

~~~
toasterlovin
Non existence comes after death. Death can be painless. How, then, is death
worse than non-existence?

~~~
perfmode
These are terms used in a philosophical argument, so you have to be precise
about definitions. In this case, non-existence is not possible once life
begins. Non-existence is the alternative to creating new life. So , as far as
we are concerned, in this context, non-existence is not considered to be what
occurs after death.

------
orblivion
I think the capacity for suffering increases dramatically with the advent of
AI. This was referenced in passing in this article, but underplayed. We've
talked about "virtual hell" stuff on HN before. I say let's not even create
it. I wouldn't know how to stop it if it were created. Then again I don't know
how to "stop the progress of science" either (other than, say, ending humanity
altogether). I'm uncomfortable even working at a company that uses machine
learning.

~~~
okreallywtf
Can you go into more detail on your concerns? I feel like fears over AI are
greatly exaggerated. In the real world I feel like we've managed to create
some pretty impressive suffering and I'm not sure AI would have that big of an
impact (it could even reduce it). Everyone who is concerned about AI seems to
be trying to predict the post-singularity world, my guess is that in the near
term it will just allow those with power and money to have even more power and
money (which is already happening).

What is your idea of virtual hell exactly? By the way, googling virtual hell
brought me to this delightful fossil:
[http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=spooky;id=56;url=http%3A%2F...](http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=spooky;id=56;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejust4kidsmagazine%2Ecom%2Fhell%2Fmain%2Ehtml)

~~~
scbrg
Not OP, but I don't think the fear is that AI will take over the world and
enslave as all. Rather the other way around. Imagine you can create an
artificial consciousness. You could then proceed to cause this AI a tremendous
amount of suffering, by submitting it only to whatever input it is that it
considers unpleasant. This experiment could then be scaled up on a level
unprecedented in history, and it would be possible to submit billions and
billions of AI:s to effectively eternal torment.

Why? Any reason. Perhaps as revenge on an AI that has acted against your
interests, perhaps as a bargaining chip ("if you don't do as I say, I'll
create a thousand exact copies of you and torture you"), perhaps just because
- because hey, it's not like the world lacks psychos.

[edit]: Ah, I see OP answered while I was typing. Oh well :)

------
francisofascii
Let's assume that humans thus far have caused a net-negative on the earth,
through wars, environmental damage, animal extinction, etc.

Let's also assume that humans have the potential to be net-positive. Humans
can create environmental restoration projects could potentially prevent an
asteroid catastrophe.

So I would argue that humans are still in their infancy. Once we get our act
together, (which could take a few more millennia) we will eventually be a
blessing to the world.

------
petraeus
Nothing he writes supports his "theory" that the universe would be better off
without sentient life as this is the sole purpose of the universe to exist
altogether, so in essence he wants the universe to cease to exist???

Anyways I completely disagree with his premise that life should not happen
because of "bad things" in fact life happens not only in spite of but in fact
did happen because of "bad things" like the first cell replication!!

------
api
"The secret to success is being smart enough to play the game well but not so
smart you figure the game out."

I've heard many variations on that saying. The most popular contexts I've
heard it with are Wall St. and the financial industry and politics. People
like the Wolf of Wall St., Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, etc. would be people
who were just smart enough but not too smart. People who are too smart make
their money and leave or don't play at all.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if it applies at the evolutionary scale. Add
it to your queue of potential Fermi paradox answers. Maybe there aren't any
super-intelligent aliens visiting other stars because super-intelligent aliens
realize evolution is a meat grinder and opt out.

Personally I don't buy it.

For a long time I've incubated what I call the "uncanny valley hypothesis"
about this kind of nihilism. The idea is that between the standard issue human
intellect guided by myth (religion, political myth, etc.) and something
_beyond_ there is an uncanny valley of nihilism. This would also be called a
fitness valley in evolutionary and learning theory terms. Local maxima in
fitness landscapes are very often separated by valleys that must be crossed.
Things have to get worse before they can reach the other peak.

Secularism repeatedly fails at the civilizational scale because it gets stuck
in this valley. Societies try abandoning religion but find themselves denuded
of "why" and "ought," eventually retreating back to mythology as a virtual
motivator.

What's beyond the uncanny valley? Perhaps something rational, logical,
realistic, and with the positive motivation of an ecstatic religious guru. It
would be a motivation rooted in some kind of understanding that eludes us, not
in raw myth, though I suspect our myths contain little seeds of that
understanding here and there.

There have been notions like "extropianism" in the fringe sci-fi space that
have attempted to construct such a thing, but they always devolve into woo woo
fluff or culty stuff. Makes me think this fitness valley is tougher and deeper
than merely recasting myth in terms of science. There is either a missing
fundamental understanding or a missing cognitive ability. There's something we
don't have that religious and other myths sort of act as brain hacks to lend
us or simulate.

I also think Nietzsche saw this but I think he was wrong about how to overcome
it. It's not a matter of mere will. Will without "why" and "ought" devolves
into robotic non-sentience or psychopathy.

Edit: going back to the Fermi paradox I suppose this fitness valley could be
one of the "great filters."

------
Kazamai
Anyone else think that suffering is the means to the end. Eventually through
enough suffering, such as climbing a mountain (or building a country) then
suffering diminishes. Won't the end game be like Elysium in thousands of years
of suffering?

------
SonicSoul
interesting idea but i feel like this is an extreme end of a spectrum to a
solution of suffering. There are plenty more solutions like giving those who
suffer an easy and painless and dogma free way to exit. I think that even
knowing that you have an option to leave would be an instant boost to ones
psyche. Sort of like running a marathon with an option to quit, vs running a
marathon with no options but death. Probably infinite solutions exists in this
space if we got rid of dogma.

~~~
Cthulhu_
But one of the cases he makes is that everyone suffers - mild things, like
being hungry, thirsty, having to use the bathroom, small pains which are
pretty much constant once you've hit your 30s. Would you offer those an easy /
painless way out? He's also not arguing about ending life once it exists -
death is bad too. There's more of that in the article itself.

~~~
SonicSoul
i'd take that with a grain of salt. he can't possibly know what hunger feels
like for other people. some people love to use the bathroom, some people love
the hunger. some people fast on purpose, be it religious, health, meditation,
bio hacking, they do it because it makes them better off. some people suffer
on purpose. philosophers probably suffer more than other people and not on
purpose :)

------
usrusr
As surprising and extreme as this argument appears when applied to humans,
it's pretty much the default when people feel bad about about our meat
animals.

------
myth_drannon
If you prefer to listen, he was also on Sam Harris's podcast:
[https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/107-is-life-actually-
wor...](https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/107-is-life-actually-worth)

~~~
mistermann
I got about 10 minutes into it yesterday and gave up, poorly thought out
nonsense imho.

~~~
plehoux
Benatar never answered any of Harris counter-arguments. Made absolutely no
sense to me.

Being anti-natalist, but stating suicide his morally wrong? If life is so
painful that we should not give it to someone, why one should not kill
himself?

I think Harris nailed it in the first few minutes when he asked about how
Benatar own experience of life could taint his view on this.

~~~
lbl03
I haven't heard the podcast, but I can see the argument for being anti-
natalist and against suicide. Anti-natalism is ultimately about avoiding human
suffering (or any kind of suffering). Even if a suicide is painless, it will
still cause suffering for the ones close to that person. Even if someone
reaches the conclusion that life is meaningless and not worth living, it is
still very difficult to decide to commit suicide for countless reasons,
starting with one's instinct of self preservation.

------
reasonattlm
It starts with the death of companion animals. Not when you are young and
comparatively resilient, but later in adult life when you are personally
responsible for all of the decisions and costs, the management of a slow and
painful decline. The futile delaying actions, the ugly realizations, the
fading away, the lost capacity, the indignities and the pain, and all in an
individual fully capable of feeling, but who lacks the ability to comprehend
what is happening, or to help resist it. One slowly realizes that this is just
a practice run for what will happen to everyone you know, later, and then to
you. Ultimately it comes to euthanasia, and one sits there looking down at an
animal who is a shadow of his or her previous self, second guessing oneself on
degree of suffering, degree of spark and verve remaining. It is rarely a
clear-cut choice, as in most companion animals the body fails before the mind.
When it is clear, and your companion is dying in front of you, you will rush,
and later chew it over for a long time afterwards; did you wait too long,
could you have done better?

At some point you will ask yourself: why am I trying to maximize this life
span? Why am I playing at balancing capacity against suffering? Why have I not
just drawn an end to it? Why does it matter if a dog, a cat, another animal
exists until tomorrow? Next year the animal will be gone without trace. In ten
thousand years, it is most likely that you will be gone without trace. In a
billion years, nothing recognizable will remain of the present state of
humanity, regardless of whether there is continuation of intelligence or not.
The great span of time before and after cares nothing for a dying companion
animal. There is no meaning beyond whatever meaning you give to any of this,
and there is a very thin line between that and the belief that there is no
meaning at all, the belief that there is no point. If the animal you lived
with will be gone, what was the point of it all? If you will be gone, why are
you so fixated on being alive now, or tomorrow, or some arbitrary length of
time from now?

It starts with companion animals, and it gnaws at you. The first of the cats
and dogs you live with as the responsible party, the thinking party, the one
motivated to find some meaning in it all, arrive and age to death between your
twenties and your forties. That is traumatic at the end, but you find it was
only practice, because by the end of that span of time, the first of the
people closest to you start to die, in accidents and in the earlier
manifestations of age-related disease. The death by aging of companion animals
teaches you grief and the search for rationales - meaningless or otherwise -
and you will go on to apply those lessons. To your parents, to mentors, to all
of those a generation older who suddenly crumple with age, withering into a
hospital or last years in a nursing facility. You are drawn into the sorry
details of the pain and the futile attempts to hold on for the ones closest to
you, a responsible party again. You are left thinking: why all this suffering?
Why do we do this? What does it matter that we are alive? The span of a
billion years ahead looms large, made stark and empty by the absence of those
dying now, no matter how bustling it might in fact prove to be.

Grief and exposure to the slow collapse of aging in others: these are toxins.
These are forms of damage. They eat at you. They diminish you, diminish your
willingness to engage, to be alive, to go on. I think that this burden, as
much as the physical degeneration of age, is why near all people are accepting
of an end. The tiredness is in the mind, the weight of unwanted experiences of
death by aging and what those experiences have come to mean to the individual.
Human nature just doesn't work well under this load. It becomes easy to flip
the switch in your view of the world: on the one side there is earnest work to
end future suffering by building incrementally better medical technology,
while on the other side lies some form of agreement with those who say that
sadness and suffering can be cured by ending all life upon this world. Oh, you
might recoil from it put so bluntly, but if you accept that existence doesn't
matter, then the gentle, kind, persuasive ending of all entities who suffer or
might suffer lies at the logical end of that road. It is just a matter of how
far along you are today in your considerations of euthanasia and pain. This is
the fall into nihilism, driven by the urge to flee from suffering, and the
conviction that your own assemblies of meaning are weak and empty in the face
of the grief that is past, and the grief that you know lies ahead.

Not all of the costs of the present human condition are visible as lines upon
the face.

------
ngvrnd
“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers
of men...” Borges

------
eternalban
A splendid idea. Let's start with the 1% and their children.

------
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
>An “anti-natalist,” he [David Benatar] believes that life is so bad, so
painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of
compassion.

Poor me, I had no idea it was that bad committing to veganism.[1]

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/TheSpeciesBarrier35Antinatal](https://archive.org/details/TheSpeciesBarrier35Antinatal)

