this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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I see the whole thing as what happens when people fail to move beyond teenage angst. Having children or not is a a very big, very personal choice. And I fully respect someone who chooses not to, whether their reasons are personal, economic, religious or whatever. You do you. Turning that outward to the argument that humans are horrible, life is suffering and no one should ever have children is taking that sort of thing to the point of hypocritical religious zealotry. No, you didn't get to consent to being born. Until you were born, you didn't have the capacity. But, once you are an adult you have your full faculties and can make choices for yourself. If you really feel that existence is that horrible, there's a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge. Except, these folks never actually follow through. They want the attention that suicide brings, without that whole dying bit.
So ya, I fully understand that someone may choose not to have children. There are many valid reasons for making that choice. The whole argument that life is so terrible that we should work to off ourselves as a species, isn't valid. It's a cry for attention and the folks feeling that way should seek professional help.
just ignore all those hundreds of millions of suicide victims, none of them actually do it, they just want attention, you piece of. you have a bit of teenage angst of your own left unresolved.
Oh, found the nerve. You're sitting around dressed in black on black listening to some "edgy" band I've never heard of, right?
And yes I'm ignoring the folks who commit suicide. They aren't the people arguing for others to not have children or for the end of all humanity. They are completely beside the argument about anti-natalism. We're talking about your philosophy here, do keep up. If you're arguing that humanity should be ended, then you really have two logic options:
Hanging about for some misguided sense of "I need to convert the masses" is just the same sort of messianic bullshit every cult leader engages in. Convince the dupes to follow your bullshit, while never actually following it yourself. And much like the crap from cult leaders, the philosophy is bullshit. There may be some nuggets of truth and useful ideas buried inside it, but it's wrapped up in enough shit to render the whole worthless. Its a philosophy which has latched on to the same thinking as the guy on the corner with "The End is Nigh!" written in large, dark letters on a sign, ranting about whatever form of doom is en vogue. Those guys have been hanging about for millennia, none of them have been right. But hey, maybe the next one will be the ticket.
Yup, the world's got problems. If your solution is "give up" then you're part of the problem. The world gets better when people choose to fix it. But that's hard, usually slow (including moving backwards on occasion) and requires effort. Giving up is easy. The hardest part is maintaining the flexibility in your shoulders to keep patting yourself on the back. And that's all this philosophy is, it's giving up with excuses to justify it to yourself. it's a short-sighted view of the world, hyper-focused on the things which are bad.
If you really feel that things are that bad, instead of giving up or killing yourself (seriously, don't do that. It improves nothing), find a small corner of the world which you can make better and go do it. Plant a tree, at least the world has one more tree now. Help troubled children, the fact that you are able to waste time arguing on the internet with idiots like me proves that you live an absolutely charmed life compared to many, many people, go make one of their lives a bit better. Go create something, the world needs more art. The time you just wasted on my trolling could have been far better spent on learning to paint or just rubbing one out. I mean, I get it, arguing with idiots on the internet is like masturbation, it's fun at first but really you're just screwing yourself. At least with real masturbation you get a refractory period to go do something useful with a clear mind. Give up on giving up, and make the hard choice to make the world better. Sure, you'll fail a lot. That's part of what makes it hard. But the successes are worth the effort.
Seriously? You can do better than that. At least try to put more effort into the insult than "no, you". Something like "brain-washed" or "child-pilled". Or is that "natal-pilled", what is the appropriate "-pilled" insult here? Even "neo-lib sheep" would have shown some imagination. Also, I've pretty much set you up for a whole host of insults over my masturbatory habits and things being "hard", let's see you really pound something out here.
@sylver_dragon@lemmy.world @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de
Before I was born, there's this... nothingness. No fleeting happiness, but also no suffering. There was no pain, no angst, nothing but the nothingness. Then I was pulled, without the ability to choose positively or negatively... now the blame is on me: "you really feel that existence is that horrible, there’s a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge".
Why should a person have to go through the painful to opt-out, risking failure? Yes, because suicide attempts aren't guaranteed to lead to suicide, in fact, such attempts often leads to failure and, in many cases, to irreparable damage without death. One risks having to endure more pain.
Why? Because, for example, self-chosen euthanasia is still a matter of taboo, a forbidden subject to be talked about (or highly bureaucratic for someone to achieve without somehow "proving" they got no "depression" while DSM considers "deathwish" as a textbook depressive symptom) , because all the BS that people keep parroting such as "life is sacred".
It's worth mentioning how coping mechanisms to escape this nightmare are getting increasingly forbidden by christofascism (e.g. natural drugs never getting to be decriminalized, and being recriminalized in many countries), because being born to a dystopian world isn't enough, people need to "grow up" on it and embrace being a cog in the machine while fully aware and focused on being such a cog.
I lost count on how many times I tried to end my own existence, and how many times I failed to do so because of this thing called "survival instincts" that restrain me from proceeding to being kissed by Lady Scythebearer.
So far, all my attempts failed on myself because my vessel conflicts with my own will because, just like it's impossible to choose whether to be born or not, it's also impossible to choose whether to possess instincts or not.
So, no, it's not as easy as "jumping a bridge", and you know it. Challenging others to commit suicide is a fallacy (the strawman fallacy, to be exact, because it plays with the very mechanism behind one's pain) just like gaslighting optimism ("Things gonna be alright", "It's just a phase", "You'll get through it") is also fallacious.
Were/Are David Benatar, Philipp Mainländer, among other thinkers who extensively wrote about this subject, eternal "teenagers"? Are the scientists who've been tirelessly reporting on how human activity is endangering all lifeforms, and/or those who reported about microplastics everywhere, and/or those who tried to report about the consequences of Industrial Revolution, driven by "teenager angst"?
Because there is no other way to determine what that choice would be. If you don't exist, you cannot opt-in. So, the only way to give people any choice is to force them into life and let them opt out. Sure, it's not a perfect solution, but it's the only one which provides a choice.
Yup, I'm willing to stand behind that statement. It's entirely possible to be well educated and still be stuck in teenage angst.
Ah going for the absurd now? Pointing out problems is very different from the edgy "everyone needs to die" philosophy. Quite the opposite, really. Fixing problems requires identifying them. If the goal is complete human eradication, identifying problems and putting forward solutions is counter productive. Scientific advancement is the reason we have so many people on the planet. Prior to the late 19th Century, diseases like small pox and bacterial infections were doing a bang up job of suppressing the human population. And then we came up with the germ theory of diseases and vaccines. So no, I won't put scientists down as full of "teenager angst". Maybe some of them are, I certainly don't know them all. But, working hard to improve the human condition seems a pretty far cry from "why don't we all just die?"
@sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
Well, to me, it seems pretty paradoxical, almost in the same Rousseauesque line of "I'm forced to be free".
Sorry but you distorted my words. In no moment I said "everyone needs to die", and I challenge anyone accusing me of that to point out where I said this. What I've been saying throughout this Lemmy thread is how humans are inherently evil (as per Hobbesian philosophy, not out of hatred misanthropy), how our actions are endangering ourselves and other lifeforms, and how we "should" (emphasis on "should", not "must") refrain from letting the unborn suffer the consequences of Industrial Revolution.
In no moment I advocated for forced antinatalism, let alone for genocide/omnicide. My point is philosophical, rather than regulatory.
First: no, it's not. It's about eradicating suffering from future generations.
Then, humans are eradicating themselves even without antinatalism. No other lifeforms developed nuclear warheads, no other lifeforms shrug off when children starve. I saw a cat desperately meowing to me when she couldn't breastfeed kitten that wasn't even hers, because she got no more milk to feed them, I could feel her desperation. I saw myself, and heard as well, how animals stopped to take care of another who is/was hurt or starving. Meanwhile, humans, oftentimes, shrug at the homeless "well, you'll find something", or even rudely saying "you gotta work to eat like everybody does"... To be fair, it's not everyone who does this, but many people do, especially in the said "first-world countries".
Also, even if humans continue reproducing recklessly ignoring the nightmarish future that expects the future generations, no lifeforms are eternal. Even Earth herself isn't eternal, for the Sun will engulf the Earth as part of its transformation to Giant Red. One could argue "humans will become interplanetary", but it'll be just moving cosmic goalposts, because the Cosmos will also end someday.
Yes. Then, Science was hijacked by capitalism, becoming something sponsored by capital goals, one which sees people as cogs in the machine because "profit must go up".
Yes. And, on one hand, this improved quality of life (= less physical suffering). On the other hand, it empowered capitalism so people became increasingly reliant on a system that seeks to perpetuate their slavery (= ontological, invisible suffering).
Improving human condition also means avoiding suffering from future generations: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7422788/
That's fair, but it's either we force all people to exist or no one ever has the opportunity to make a choice. An unfortunate fact of life is that a lot of things will happen to you, without you having a choice. Some of that will suck, some of it will be fantastic, much of it will be somewhere in between. You will never get to choose everything which happens to you, all you can choose is how you react to it. Pain and suffering is valid, but so is joy. If you choose to focus on pain and suffering, that's up to you. But ya, that's kinda the response of the angsty teenager.
Fair enough, that was me getting absurd.
This one would be fun to expand one. Though, fair warning, I tend to dive into moral relativism and will put Hobbe's philosophy up as an appeal to authority and his idea of some "state of nature" as just a "noble savage myth" wrapped in fancy language. Speaking of "noble savage" style myths...
Ok ya, we have fancier ways to kill each other, but the idea that animals don't is complete bullshit. Wild animals which have too many young will kill or abandon the extra young to conserve resources. If you're an old enough fart, you might recall people quoting Planet of the Apes (the one without CGI), "ape don't kill ape". Except, that ya, they do. Primates are known to kill and eat other groups of primates, even within the same species. Competition for resources and all the brutality that entails predates modern humans and it predates cities and agriculture by a long way. Sure, we have absolutely raised it a to terrifying scale. But, we really aren't that different from our stick wielding forebearers.
Speaking of things we have no choice about, this is one of them. Given the vast expanses of interstellar space, there's a good chance that this really will spell the end for humanity. On the upshot, we've got a few million years (maybe a billion or two) before the Sun gets hot enough to make Earth uninhabitable (assuming we don't speed that one up ourselves). If we figure nothing out in that time, we'll be long dead before the Sun goes Red Giant. At the same time, humanity went from the first powered flight at Kittyhawk to humans walking on the Moon in the span of a single human life. We're a clever bunch and might just sort something out. I like our chances and would love to give us a shot.
Science has always been beholden to economics and war. Capitalism didn't change that. Again, you've latched on to a mythical past. It didn't exist. Leonardo Da Vinci invented a lot of stuff, much of it was designing better ways for one idiot with an upgraded stick to kill another idiot with a less upgraded stick. Even early hominids were working on better ways to gather resources and kill each other. It'd be great if we can ever change this, but until we sort out some sort of technological singularity (probably itself just a utopian myth), scientific work will take resources which means it's part of whatever economic theory is currently being used. Economics is always trying to find a way to distribute finite resources in a world of infinite wants. Every economic system has advantages and disadvantages. Capitalism is just getting its opportunity to display its disadvantages at the moment.
Given what came before (feudalism), I'll take capitalism and it's "slavery" (so edgy) any day of the week. Seriously, for anyone in a first world country, sit back and look at the embarrassment of choices and riches you have available to you today. Go to a grocery store, buy a pineapple and eat it. You have now done something that would have been considered the height of indulgence in the 18th Century. Go to your bathroom, take a shit, flush. This would have blown the minds of most of humanity prior to the 19th Century (some really rich Romans wouldn't have been all that impressed). To me, this exemplifies the weakness in your philosophy, you are quick to validate suffering but refuse to validate progress, joy or anything positive about existence. There are many, many good things in life but you refuse to recognize them, or seek to minimize them. The philosophy is so caught up in the negative, it fails to recognize the good, only calling it "less physical suffering". And I call that bullshit. The good things in life are good, not a reduction in suffering. The default state is not suffering, you only see it that way because you choose to.
I'll have to apologize, I've only made it to the end of Section 4 of the linked paper. It's getting late and I'm getting pretty deep in my cups (one of humanity's best, early inventions, booze). I do plan to pick it up in the morning, it's an interesting read. But this is starting to sound suspiciously like the eugenicist movement of the early 20th Century. The authors also seem to recognize this and are doing a lot of "no really, we're not those people":
Ya, let's have a critical look at China's One Child Policy and then come back and tell me how great your policy is. Or, you know, what Eugenicists got up to in the early 20th Century. It might just be that the reason "many folks view any efforts to contain population growth as homicide" is because it always seems to turn out that way. But who knows, maybe the authors really do have A Brave New World planned and I just haven't read that far yet.
Population growth is already slowing (something the paper mentions). Access to education and birth control already started bending that curve. In fact, most first world countries are already facing shrinking populations. No fancy "don't have kids" push needed. The economic consequences of this are going to be a "fun" ride and may lead to the sort of suffering the authors are hoping to avoid. Or not, managing a shrinking population may not be an insurmountable economic problem. Japan is kinda doing OK, after all. But, so far is seems that the most effective method for long term population control is less eugenics and more first world development.
To try and sum this all up, I'd note that you seem to be arguing less about anti-natalism and more about the harms of unconstrained capitalism. I'm all on board with the latter, less so the former. We need more socialism (at least in the US). Modern capitalism is broken and that's only going to be solved via higher taxes and greater wealth redistribution. Even people who believe wholeheartedly in capitalism should recognize that the level of wealth accumulation, rent seeking and regulatory capture have created distortions in the market which are not healthy for capitalism. We've entered a new Guilded Age and it's time to break out the monopoly busting hammer. But, let's leave the Eugenics in the dustbin of history, it wasn't good the last time, it won't be good this time.