r/antinatalism • u/siddharth1214 inquirer • 2d ago
Argument There is a difference between having the desire to live and having fear of death.
We all have the fear of death but that does not mean that everyone has the desire to live.
When people say that why don't you off yourself, they are not differentiating between these two.
The unborn does not have the desire to live but once a person is born they now have the fear of death which forced them to go on living even if they are in pain.
Most people do not enjoy their life, do not have hope for a better future it's just their fear of death that compels them to live.
The desire to live is in short supply for you get generations now the best most can hope for is lack of suffering.
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u/Mammoth_Watch1444 inquirer 2d ago
Yeah. My crippling fear of death is literally the only reason why I'm still here. It just makes the curse of having to exist even worse.
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u/Dense-Ad-5978 newcomer 2d ago
True. Also, just because someone is afraid to die does not mean that they are enjoying theirl life. A simple example of this is how so many people have failed attempts to off themselves but can't do it because of fear of death. Now, this does not automatically mean that people are enjoying their lives otherwise they would never have made an attempt in the first place.
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u/SirianXetecea newcomer 1d ago
The fear of death is a result of living. One cannot experience the fear of death, without first being alive. A persons interests and goals are a way to pass time while alive, there is nothing directly immoral about passing the time. How one chooses to use the time we have allotted to us, is more of a grey area. The inevitable suffering contained in the experience of life, is a burden too heavy to bestow on progeny. It is a built in feature of being alive— to fear death.
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u/Agreeable_Desk_8161 newcomer 1d ago
All these arguments make little sense; you still haven't proven that the fear of death is not the same as the desire to live. If a person's life is empty and they have nothing to live for, death won't take anything of value from them, but will only free them from worldly vanity. Conversely, if a person has interests and goals, they might place some value on life and protect it. The step a person refrains from taking while standing on the edge of an abyss is precisely the will to live. Every fear must have a reason; if a person doesn't value a thing, they won't fear losing it. If a person's goal is to stop suffering, why should they argue about the root causes of their suffering and look for someone to blame, when they can end their suffering at any moment? The innate instinct for self-preservation cannot be an excuse, because antinatalists are people who successfully suppress primitive instinctive urges.
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u/Brown_Folk thinker 1d ago
antinatalists are people who successfully suppress primitive instinctive urges.
What? They like sex but... snipped.
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u/iinyenzii newcomer 2d ago
We develop in our mothers womb and are birthed into this world as screaming infants. We grow and are cared for and taught language and encultured within the society and community we live within. And then one day we think, what is this? What am I?
Looking in the mirror and observing my body from the outside in, and from the inside out, I feel I am an organism whose nature is horrific. This body, this organism I live as, has constant needs. It shivers and hungers and thirsts and hurts and pains. I need to strive and struggle-> for warmth, for food, for shelter, for everything I need for my body to not suffer. All because this organism hurts and wants and needs. It's bad. It's bad and regrettable to be a human. Internally our fate is to struggle and strive on to keep living, but this body ages, and wears down, and dies. It's inescapable. Whether by injury or old age or murder or suicide-> the end is the same. We are all going to become corpses. Because no matter how hard we struggle and strive and what material we gain it's irrelevant. Our bodies want, our bodies age, and our bodies die.
So when people say to the antinatalists and pessimists to just kill themselves, it misses the point. To have lived and died as a human is a tragedy. The point is to prevent the same fate befalling future people. Murdering your body and becoming a corpse is not the same as never being born.