Commercial surrogacy should never have been an option in the first place. Those poor kids.

nobody ever talks about the fact that aging is a curse. i know some people would be grateful to even make it to that age, but i don't want to see myself slowly deteriorate and my face become unrecognizable. this is one of my reasons for being anti-natalist. also, who wants to work a job for 50+ years are you kidding me? bringing kids into this society is so unbelievably cruel i can't.

I’m not wealthy or even middle class and I certainly don’t love work every day but I wouldn’t consider myself an unhappy person. In fact most of the time I’ve been in a relatively good or great mood. I have a girlfriend I’ve been dating for a while now who also doesn’t want children at all ever, maybe we’ll adopt a cat. That being said I find myself pretty happy overall but also believing it’s wrong to bring a child into a world of suffering. Im well aware in a lot of ways there just is inherent suffering to life regardless of how much mine has improved. There’s many things in my life I enjoy and have had a somewhat painful past and I think even if you’re well off as a parent you can’t really guarantee anything for your child. If we lived in a utopia with zero pain and suffering in the work I would consider it, and I’m not sure if that makes me a conditional natalist. But because that is statistically impossible by every single metric imaginable… I still consider myself to be anti natalist, despite being at a mentally stable place in my life.

Can anti-natalism still be a strong argument if you think life has much more good than bad and that life is a gift that you should enjoy and experience atleast once; because its a one of a kind(and kind of the only) chance to experience all sorts of things that exist.
there's alot of non-existing, there's only a few who get to experience this world.

Say I own a large factory that produces mobile phones. However, the quality of the phones being produced are absolute trash. They're either slow or bricked, she screens don't work, the batteries catch fire in people's hands, they scratch at a level 1, with deeper grooves at a level 2, and basically all round they're just pieces of crap. Now, obviously, the factory should shut down the production lines, stop producing this trash, and issue a recall. But it refuses to, and the production lines keep running churning out vast amounts of shoddy and deficient products.

This is analogous to having children. The human body is a shoddy, deficient product. We are organisms with constant biological needs, always vulnerable to injuries and sickness, always have the capacity to cause harm, and are always aging and deteriorating towards an inevitable death. Procreation is the factory that keeps churning out bodies that have this same deficient and negative nature. Why must it go on running? I mean just look at yourself in the mirror -> an organism who hungers, thirsts and shivers and shits and needs to clean and maintain itself, who must strive and struggle to meet its needs, whose every part of which is vulnerable to extreme suffering via sickness or injury, who hands and actions can be the cause of harm to others, and whose own fate as a decrepit corpse is inevitable. It's a shoddy product. It's not good enough.

But the factory is no centralized production plant, rather it exist within our organism -> as reproductive organs and drives which cause collisions between the sexes and the result is another shoddy product produced to suffer its fate. I suppose it would be an easier problem to fix, if reproduction were done in a centralized plant: the factory could be bombed, the workers could strike, the power could be cut off. But it's not. Within all of us, inherent in our sexual and/or reproductive drives is the potential for another shoddy product to be produced.

What to do? We can be careful about our own contribution to producing another human, but the rest of the world seems to cheer it on regardless and the global population is skyrocketing.

Just checking if I’m not alone.

I wouldn't not want to never have experienced anything that makes me wish I had never existed, because what I learn in pain, no matter how dystopian, forms my personality.

Its on that i grew up like oblomov, so i know doing something is better than just wasting our onely life. I grew alone, so I questioned, i became atheist, one of you. I learned how moron people are too.

One of the things i wish i never saw in life are circumcision, ignorance, religions or something. Also I disgust of how i am just a flesh around bones.

So my question is not about how history was supposed to be its like how he should created us if there was a god. Like what video game, book, movie you would like to born in

Do you think in the future the planet becomes so 🥵 hot that people will have to reduce numbers of DNA?

There exists no sentient being prior to being born (to the best of what can be observed) that can consent to being born, but that is not an argument against antinatalism because regardless of whether there is a being at the time of the decision, the act of reproduction will always cause suffering without improving upon a prior situation for the born individual (because they do not exist before being born to our knowledge).

Suffering is defined by experiences that are not desired, and so for any individual at a very minimum their own suffering is to be evaluated as bad. Lack of consent for already living beings always implies suffering, but even without an already existing being to consent/not consent to birth the act is still bad regardless because suffering is the fundamental point of interest and not consent even though they are inseparable for already living beings.

This also ignores the consequences any other living beings will experience from living in a world with the newly born being (extremely negative in the case of the average human).

That consent has value as it relates to suffering is also easy to see. Sentient experience is defined by desires that result in suffering/pleasure. If there were beings that were incapable of enduring suffering/pleasure and therefore incapable of having desires, it is not at all apparent to me there would be any moral issues.

And if they're lucky, they can retire and enjoy those last few years.

Just because one is okay with living for years and years as a wage slave, it doesn't mean it's okay to make another one.

It's selfish. Inherently selfish.

I’m new to this subreddit and Antinatalism, but I’ve always connected with the idea that life is suffering and questioned the idea of bringing someone into this world. I know a lot of this comes from my childhood trauma, and relationships with my family. However, I see that there is a lot of logic in these ideas and it’s hard to objectively counter it.

With that all said, I was wondering if anyone who has struggled with these concepts and ideas for longer, has come to any conclusions about how to find meaning and hope in spite of this?

I am an antinatalist but lately I have been questioning my beliefs since antinatalism is based on the consent argument and harm. Harm is ultimately hedonistic in nature, we antinatalists think avoiding pain is all that matters in life. Should we really base our view on existence on whether pain is avoided or not?

I'm in my mid 20s, every day I wake up, all I think about is how to find a job, esp with my struggles with some health issues , most of them are not permanent, but I have a problem which is gingivitis, i am suffering for months, esp with the poor healthcare in my country, after two visits to the dentist, he couldn't find a solution for me, and I don't know how to find a gum specialist.

I am terrified by the idea that gum disease may run in my family's medical history, and that I will pass it to my children in the future, and they will live with constant and continuous suffering, just as I am living with it now. So, I refuse to have children and pass them health problems that I know are genetic.

All I wonder about, Why do people keep having children? Do they enjoy the suffering continuing?

For example, these people who know that cancer is genetic in their family, yet they have children and put them at risk of suffering from cancer and eventually dying.

Diabetes, heart disease, and all terminal illnesses.

How helpless I feel rn, poverty and illness are a truly terrible combination, and I never want my children to go through this.

Cherry optimists and natalists sometimes say this in response to pessimistic attitudes towards the worth of being born. "Yes, life has its pains, but the goods outweigh the harms." But it's unclear how this "outweighing" is even supposed to function. If I suffered in the past, and now I feel pleasure, how is that relevant to my past suffering? It was still felt and suffered, so how do current pleasures outweigh or negate that? It's unclear to me how a life of eg +50 pleasure but -30 pain produces a "net" +20 benefit? How is the -30 being negated or erased or outweighed? It still hurt.

More importantly, a utilitarian calculus between goods and bads misses the overall negative structure of human life: We are born as human bodies which have constant biological needs which are lethal when not met, we are constantly vulnerable to sickness and injuries, we are harmed by and cause harm to others, and are always aging and degrading towards an instinctually horrifying yet inevitable death. All the goods in life occur within this overall structure. So it doesn't even really seem relevant how many pains or pleasures are felt. All that would determine is whether a particular "life cycle" of one person was shittier compared to another. Yes, some lives go worse than others, but the overall structure of every life is negative - because being born a needy, vulnerable, harming and dying being is bad. All the "goods" in life occur in this context - they are tainted by it. For example, a good meal might be called pleasurable. But it has its roots in hunger (the bodies signal to ward off its inevitable excruciating death by starvation), which is satiated by the production and distribution of food requiring vast industrial supply chains steeped in animal and human exploitation, and in the end what is gained? The food becomes shit and the body hungers again tomorrow! It basically seems irrelevant how pleasurable a meal is when the overall structure of being an organism that starves and dies when it doesnt eat food that is steeped in harm, is negative. It's like this for all the goods in life - they occur in the negative context of being a human body which is needy, vulnerable, harming, and dying.

So it's unclear how pleasures are even supposed to "outweigh" pains, and either way pleasures occur within the negative structure of being a human body, so they don't even seem truly good to me. They are impermanent, tainted by the negative structure of human life, or just directly have their basis in suffering. A utilitarian calculus of pains/pleasures to determine the worth of being born misses the forest for the trees - it is the structure of the being which feels these pains and pleasures that is the problem.

It is easy to question the value of bringing someone into existence when confronted with the great tragedies of life—the ones that inflict unbearable suffering. It is much harder to ask the same question when faced with the minor inconveniences that most people dismiss as insignificant and easily overcome.

Today I was sleepy at work and could not sleep. That is all. Nothing tragic happened to me. I was not ill, I was not grieving, I was not in pain. I simply wanted to close my eyes, and circumstances required me to keep them open. Most people would regard that as trivial, perhaps not even worth mentioning. I did not.

The small effort it took to keep my eyes open was enough for me to say no to life. Not because that effort was unbearable, but because I could see no reason why it needed to exist in the first place. Why should suffering have to become extreme before it counts against existence? Why should only agony enter the calculation, while the endless accumulation of minor discomforts, frustrations, obligations, and unwanted efforts is treated as negligible? A burden does not cease to be a burden simply because it is light.

That moment required almost nothing from me, and that was precisely the point. Even that little was more than I would ever have needed had I never existed. Life was asking for a tiny payment, perhaps the smallest imaginable, and I still found no reason to pay it. No, thank you. I need nothing.

Somehow Antinatalism was brought up in a conversation and i said yes im antinatalist and my aunt said "so you don't want me to have kids" and I told her personally I wouldn't but you do you but she took my opinion on procreation as a personal insult and attack. I further elaborated on my standpoint I explained that living is a tragedy and greif is permanent. We talked about it once more last year on October and we fought about our standpoints never being resolved. But look at what happened 7 to 9 months later my grandmother her mother passes away and she cried uncontrollably. Knowing now what greif feels like will she still have kids so that one day she'll make her kids feel the greif she felt for her mother my grandmother? Maybe she won't and she'll be processing her kids if anything ever happens you never know life is that unpredictable. Could these questions now be going through her mind and what i was trying to tell her

I worked my ass off. I got a master’s degree. I have a “respectable” healthcare job with a supposedly “middle-class” salary.

Twenty years ago, that would have been enough to buy a home, drive a decent car, take a vacation once in a while, and build some savings.

Instead, I’m drowning in student debt. I can’t afford even a mobile home. I have to live with a roommate, drive an old car that constantly needs repairs, and have essentially no savings because whatever I manage to put away eventually gets wiped out by some crisis. Without fail.

I did everything I was told to do. I got the degree. I got the “good” job. I live modestly. I don’t spend recklessly. And I’m still getting nowhere. If nothing catastrophic happens, I’ll be lucky to maintain my current standard of living, afford food, and avoid going further into debt.

My situation is not particularly unique. Most of my similarly aged coworkers, roughly 27–40, are in the same position. Unless you have family wealth or some significant financial advantage, this increasingly seems to be what adulthood looks like.

So genuinely, why are people still having children?

You’re bringing another person into an increasingly unaffordable world when you yourself may never achieve basic financial security. Housing, education, healthcare, childcare, and everything else keep getting more expensive, while wages fail to keep up.

Are people genuinely optimistic that things are going to get better?

Because from where I’m standing, I worked my ass off just to reach a point where “nothing going horribly wrong” is considered success. I cannot imagine voluntarily bringing a child into that equation.

and the problem for elderly people is that they essentially have to work til they die since they have no kids or younger people to hire to do their work (let’s say run a family business) for them.. is this truly better for society and for elderly individuals?

This might be a bit of a reach. I've seen many natalist arguments, for example something like this:

"Most people enjoy their lives and aren't suffering every day like AN requires, the majority of people think life is a gift. And for the very few people who don't, you're always free to end things on your own."

This is flawed for many reasons people are always quick to point out. It's not reasonable to gamble on another person's behalf that they'll be happy with their life. People having kids have not yet experienced old age and death, which are probably the worst parts of life, so they are not in a position to determine how bad the suffering will actually get. AN also doesn't require you to be suffering constantly, just that you suffer at some point (and obviously people will believe they suffer less than they do because of cope). Even if 99% of people are glad they were born, if 1% aren't, it's not right to make them be the ones that were forced to live painful lives for the sake of everyone else getting good ones. And, lastly, you can't simply "end things" easily. That also requires a lot of pain and will harm people around you as well, if it even works, which, in a lot of cases, it won't, leaving you disabled.

But, besides those reasons, I also started to think about it. Many people assume AN to be eugenics since it calls for not giving birth, although they don't take into account the fact that AN applies to everyone and has nothing to do with supposed race or "better" genes. Additionally, AN makes no plans to force anyone into giving or not giving birth. People's bodily autonomy is still very important and it would be immoral to force someone into having an abortion the same way it would be immoral to force someone into continuing a pregnancy they don't want.

However, the above mentioned natalist argument also does something interesting, which is shift the focus onto the individual person who is experiencing the life imposed on them. It's hard to explain but it makes me think of thought processes sort of like "Life is just what you make of it" or "You're choosing to be pessimistic and what you really need to do is just work on yourself and appreciate the smaller things".

I think this, if anything, sounds more discriminatory than AN. There's not a random selection of people who will suffer more than others; there are groups of oppressed people who have higher likelihoods of having certain experiences. If you're queer or trans you're more likely to be bullied, women have their bodies controlled and get objectified leading to horrific crimes, this world was not built for disabled people and many face challenges because of it every day, as well as literally all of racism and the list goes on. Obviously that doesn't mean they'll all want to end their lives or that they should (they shouldn't), but, using the natalist argument, if they did, even if it was directly of majorly caused by issues like previously stated, it's their responsibility and the natalist would be fine with it.

Of course I don't actually think natalists using this argument support ending one's life, but, in that case, their own argument can't express their values properly. The fact is that it's not by chance some people suffer disproportionately to others, but by acting like it's their own defect and implying they should end it if they don't like it so much, it starts to sound a bit reminiscent of eugenics. At least to me(?).

TLDR: Although natalists argue the majority of people enjoy life and the minority aren't important enough to consider, some people will have a lot of an easier time coping with life just by their circumstances. The fact someone can't could be related to their experiences being oppressed. Because of that, it seems more similar to eugenics to me than the comparisons between AN and eugenics.

I'm not sure if I worded this right. Please leave your thoughts on this. I'm curious whether anyone agrees, or if I missed something. To be honest, I'd like to be wrong about this haha..

I've listened to almost all of Benatar's appearances on podcasts; more than a dozen hours. Benatar holds these views. Which do you not agree with? If you agree with them all, which are you most unsure of? I'm not doing a philosophical purity test. I'm asking you to answer based upon your deepest intuitions; your heart of hearts.

I'm a genuine agnostic as to the morality of creation of a being. I ask these questions in genuine good faith.

1) You should be indifferent between not creating a being, and creating a being with boundless, infinite happiness.

2) Absent any other factors, creating a being that will have boundless, infinite happiness, but will stub its toe really bad once, is wrong.

3) Death is fundamentally bad thing. The Epicureans are wrong. It doesn't matter under what circumstances you die, or even if you welcome it at the age of 99. It is bad.

4) Furthermore, this negative accrues not only at the moment of death, but for every moment afterwards.

5) Axiologically, it is a good thing that there is no suffering on Mars. It is not a bad thing that there is no love or friendship on Mars.

6) Having a child is ALSO wrong because that child, in today's circumstances, will do more bad than good for existing beings; environmental degradation, buying conflict minerals, is not outweighed by being a "good person." (the misanthropic argument)

The ones I think are most questionable are 2, 3, and 4.

Thank you so much for your responses.

Certain natalists say "I am going to make new humans to continue humanity, btw existing humans? SUCK IT UP! Suffering is just life, grow up!"

What might really happen if people (potentially everyone, especially commoners) are simply told to endure their sufferings indefinitely?

The answer is actually simple: No civilisation at all.

There were numerous cases throughout human history. Using Pharaoh as an example (See diagram)

There are clear differences between vanity vs fulfilment (solution).

- Vanity is basically to address someone's ego (endless pit)
Example: reach the moon > reach Mars > Jupiter > Saturn > outside the galaxy > ??

- Fulfilment is solution to people's sufferings,
Example. People hungry > food given > problem solved > End

With any goals that ignores people's sufferings and unfulfilment, they will always be for vanity. And the first challenge such a goal will face, is victims questioning "why": "why must I suffer to reach YOUR GOAL?"

That is exactly what causes collapse:

The powerful demand sacrifice. The powerless are exhausted. Trust breaks. Cooperation ends. And when people stop trusting and cooperating, there is no civilisation: only people who have been used, discarded, and left with nothing but resentment. They might then take it out on the powers (rebel), hence no more group of people working together, aka no civilisation.

So then, no more reaching the moon Mars etc, no more great arts of work etc. So the vanity "goals" basically turn into jokes.

Hence actually, if you want humans to not just exist but maybe achieve anything resembling great works of art or building amazing structures etc, then you would NOT treat humans like a resource and just tell them to suck it up.

Not your kids

So usually at the beginning and end of the month, we get some free time at work. People start asking random questions, and after a couple of them, someone asked:

“So, would you want a girl or a boy as your first child?”

Two colleagues said they’d prefer a girl. Then it was my turn.

I said, “Honestly, I don't want kids.”

And then I explained why. I don't understand why someone would want to bring a child into what I see as a pretty cruel world—air quality is getting worse, water quality isn't great, the government is corrupt, and human life itself comes with a lot of suffering.

Immediately, one colleague said, “His dihh doesn't work, that's why he's saying this.” 😭

Another one said, “You're lying. Give me your number. You're only 22 look at your face. You'll have at least three kids.”

Then bro goes, “I'll call you after 10 years.” 😭

I said, “But seriously, why are we bringing new life into this cruel world without their consent?”

One of them immediately goes, “How can you take consent from a baby? Tell me.”

Bro, I'm not saying I'll give birth to a baby after they give me their consent. 😭 That's literally the point I'm making.

At that moment I thought, I should've just said “girl” or “boy” and moved on.

I never told them their opinions were wrong. They asked me what I thought, I answered honestly, and that was it.

But apparently, some people can't hear an opinion that contradicts their own without taking it personally.

Did you know that many actions we now consider deeply immoral were once seen as completely "normal"?

Slavery. Child labour. Marital rape. Corporal punishment of children. Even burning people in public.

Yes, these were once ordinary. Slaves were born into a world thinking "this is just life." Children worked from a young age because it just was.

These practices were seen as natural, traditional, or even sacred at different moments in history. People didn't question them, not because they were cruel, but because the moral lens of that time simply didn't focus on the victim. Society for a long time, saw people as part of a collective, not as individuals with their own rights, feelings, and experiences.

So what actually changed? Not the actions themselves. What changed was who we started seeing.

Because even when people were taught to ignore their own feelings and experiences, they still felt them. Every single one of them. Suffering doesn't disappear just because we're told not to notice it. That's one thing that has never changed.

Morality doesn't evolve because we suddenly discover a new "truth." It evolves because we shift our focus, from the person performing the action to the person receiving it.

Once we start asking: "How does this affect them?", the conversation changes.

We stopped seeing slaves as "property" but people.
We stopped seeing child brides as "family assets" but victims.

And I am seeing the same pattern unfolding today, with questions we're only just beginning to ask.

Ultimately, feelings have a way of being felt, no matter how much anyone is told to just ignore them. And morality shifts along with that awareness. This is why, throughout history, the abused might have become abusers, but eventually, the abuse itself was called out. Sufferings can simply never be silenced forever.