
The Case for Not Being Born - anarbadalov
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born
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ChanningAllen
> _We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must
> go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort”—we are too hot
> or too cold—or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches,
> allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes…_

There's an irony here: practices like meditation make us more aware of this
constant unsatisfactoriness, but they also make us aware of the crucial
distinction between the mental faculties that _notice_ sensations (e.g.
itchiness, hunger, jealously) and the faculties that _react_ to those
sensations. It's like the author learned a great deal about human mental life
but didn't go all the way.

Pain and suffering, for example, are not the same thing. Suffering is a
reaction to pain. And one can train oneself not to suffer, or at least to
suffer less. Likewise, one can train oneself to have a greater appreciation
for love, pleasure, and good fortune — to really "lean in" to positive
experiences emotionally, so as to get more out of them.

So for someone to make a great sweeping gesture with their hand and say that
life is a wholesale terrible experience is merely to betray that person's
ignorance of how experience works in the first place.

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anarbadalov
Back before i had my kid i remember reading (and really enjoying) Benatar's
book, "Better Never to Have Been." I also remember it being a downer,
unsurprisingly, and picking up Christine Overall's "Why Have Children" to get
another perspective. She offered a somewhat more clinical — but readable —
argument and got into the ethics of procreation. Both recommended.

