I first learned about anti-natalism from a Wikipedia article, when I was browsing through various worldviews and philosophies to enrich my own. I no longer remember whether I noticed the name somewhere else or whether I myself tried to find something about the unethicality of procreation. I did not become an anti-natalist, but the arguments presented in the article appealed to me, I found them logical and the worldview rather coherent. It was the coherence of the view that was the most important component at that time, due to the ongoing detox after my previous Catholicism. Mainly because of my skepticism about morality, I did not call myself an anti-natalist. Moral nihilism largely dominated as the default, safe model after abandoning the pointless deontological system of absolutist, faith-based, and moral dogma-based Christianity. At the same time, consequentialism seemed to be the most coherent system of action, if there were any coherent one at all. The form of it will eventually become the basis of my current ethics. For this reason, I was attracted to anti-natalism. I did not want to have children in practice, and I perceived the very decision to have them as usually philosophically ill-considered. Even with the need to have children, which fortunately never occurred to me, I probably would not choose to have a child, not right away because I would necessarily consider it wrong, but rather because I would have a problem considering it right. Certainly, I would not know how to acknowledge having a child in an already overpopulated world as advisable. The approach described in this way is quite close to anti-natalism, but I did not focus on the subject of procreation, but I was rather interested in life in space, the concepts of simulation, or multiverse immortality. My mind was a strange mixture of transhumanism and paradises, along with the overwhelming vision of a world devoid of value or purpose in a cosmic abyss, a world plunged into nonsense and filled with the pursuit of the ultimate void of death. All of that was fueling the spiral of existential crisis, even greater after the collapse of the already panentheistic deity, which turned out to be a tragically unnecessary element in my attempts to construct the simplest coherent model of the world. From time to time, anti-natalism reappeared somewhere in conversations with friends with a philosophical interest, usually in the form of a meme. "Well, and there are people who, due to all this, decided that they would not reproduce". It did not mean that the meme was funny, it was rather a form of black humor, both me and the friend I had this conversation with unanimously supported anti-natalism, if something makes sense, it does. None of us, however, had any illusions that this sensible view would not go far. It was not worth engaging in something that was doomed to failure, anti-natalists will always remain strange misfits, an abstract divorce with everyday life, with no chance of anything other than remaining a niche system forever, which is as long as the human race rots on the muddy and a littered planet. They will be the voice of nonexistent reason and never implemented real ethics amid the bursting hustle and bustle of the world, focused on being and propagating existence. I had no intention of joining the losing side, preferring to remain without any, processing nihilism. After all, the world was absurd, there was no goal, but everyone acted like they had a goal, there was no point, but everyone seemed to be guided by some. There was no value, but something had value for everyone. Absurd. No longer nonsense, absurd above all. And in all this the tragedy of human and animal life being created and thrown into this vortex of existence.
Some years have passed since then. The constellations in the sky shifted imperceptibly, the galaxy spun a bit further, also imperceptible on a larger scale. The sun grew a little lighter due to the myriads of massless photons being thrown out and the earth grew a little warmer. Several thousand species have irretrievably gone extinct, several hundreds of millions of people were born to experience a world in which I will no longer exist. The remnants of toxic theistic absolutism have washed out of the mind, giving the green light to more meaningful interpretations of the world and the make more ethical decisions. There was never a point where I would consciously become an anti-natalist, there was never a strong leap between disagreeing with it and considering it meaningful. The broadly understood suffering-focused ethics has always been more important, and anti-natalism fits perfectly as part of that ethics. The world has not ceased to be absurd, and I have not ceased to be an absurdist, with my version of it, as there is no affirmation of life there. life is absurd, we are ruled by irrationality, but that does not mean that there are no rational solutions or that we cannot get closer to them.
Life is absurd, but that does not mean that there is no primary purpose among those condemned to exist. All values and all aspirations can be reduced to one thing, namely non-fulfillment. All the sufferings and misfortunes of the world result from the existence of desires and needs. Satisfying these needs and desires is the sole purpose of every being, and the only real value actually felt is to make certain needs and desires cease to exist or lose their intensity, usually by realizing them. Looking in this way, existence does not directly contain any aspect that would be positive in itself. All pleasures, bliss, happiness, and exaltation can be brought to the reduction of the basal dissatisfaction that comes from ever-arising needs and fuels the life of every being, including all beings who experience pain and suffering through this mechanism.
We are born as animals, not so distant descendants of strange prehistoric mice and lemurs. The codes that build our bodies and affect our psyche were conceived billions of years ago before anything sentient could crawl through the undersea sand avoiding being eaten. Initially, only a few extremophiles thoughtlessly stood by the smoking hydrothermal vents, not bothering non-existent minds with the dilemmas of existence. There were no such then. For eons, the biosphere of the unfortunate earth was filled with more and more life, bacteria and archaea diversified, absorbed, parasitized, and created symbiosis. From one such symbiosis, chloroplasts developed, mitochondria from another. Eukaryotes arose, biological chimeras, and the working absurdity of their construction became a silent prophecy of the coming absurdity that surpassed everything before.
Eukaryotes gained the ability to combine into colonies, and soon these colonies developed into independent organisms, multicellular life. Over hundreds of millions of years, ever more complex mechanisms and ever more sophisticated organs have developed, guided by the blind method of trial and error that will accompany life for countless centuries until today. In Ediacaran, complicated fauna covers the shallow sea beds, creatures, unlike anything that will live, devour and tear themselves apart, eat themselves piece by piece, poison, and crush, increasingly feeling something. How ethically important this feeling is, how painful and conscious it could get, we may never know, yet we now know that it was only a shy prelude to what was to come soon. The next half a billion years of life on earth is an endless gallery of torment, lack, and pain that no one could ever suppress.
The Cambrian welcomes its dawn with an explosion of new life. The biological big bang instead of matter and light gives us the existence of all the larger phyla. Countless swarms of existence begin to multiply, in preparation for the purposeless conquest of every available nook of the sea and the land. After the Cambrian comes the Ordovician, at the end of which 60% of earthly life is swept away by an undetermined disaster. Life, however, cannot be easily erased, ever larger and worse food webs are formed spontaneously in seas filled with hunger and fear, the constant expectation of danger. This situation will not change, it will only get worse. The age of fish equips thirsty life with a cosmically refined organ. Fanciful nervous system is now capable of supporting more sophisticated subjectivity. Brains existed long before, but now they are everywhere in abundance, and they can nearly for sure feel conscious pain. These brains, getting bigger and more complicated, work to run away from dissatisfaction, thus allowing for more effective functioning and propagation of DNA. Amphibians are developing. Even though at the end of the Devonian, the next great extinction leaves less than a third of everything that lived on the planet still alive, soon afterward the lands are covered with forest, and the increasingly filled world is bringing up hundreds of generations of more and more self-aware brains. Still, this awareness can be infinitely too small to allow even one more complicated thought but has long been large enough to provide a fan of torture that allows life to avoid pain at all costs. Combined with the insurmountable urge to reproduce, this creates a nightmare world, unimaginably cruel and only imaginably beautiful.
Billions of generations have passed since then. For hundreds of millions of years, nature has been crushing, cutting, digesting, and dismembering ever more conscious beings. Several more times the world tried to wipe life off its surface, with cataclysms from the underworld, air, and space, each time to no avail. Each time nature came back to devour its children, trying to escape from fear and pain. And there is no way to blame nature, nature does not exist as any subject, it is only a useful and somewhat metaphysical description of an impersonal system, the result of the application of physical laws in an environment appropriate for the development and evolution of life.
Relatively recently, in the evolution of this system, the human species appeared, for some time the apex predator of its ecosystem, most of the time a strange abomination that, in pursuit of its sea of desires, built cities, emptied the land, exterminated the megafauna, erected pyramids and ziggurats. Unnaturally developed brain allowed him to throw stones and sharpened sticks, making him the king and lord of the world. His ambition to escape from hunger and death, his ability to grasp a stick, his curiosity about the sun and the stars made him an over-animal, a super-being, terrible deity, a demiurge, and a demon seeking his own god.
Man, however, the most powerful of beings and the most intelligent of creatures, has not become anything other than he was, he remained an animal, a poor little animal, as terrified of the world as any other.
Just as blindly guided by innate lusts and instincts, just as completely devoted to life as the only thing he has. and the only thing he can really pass on.
Propagation of life has seldom been criticized throughout history, rarely has anyone even thought that living and creating new life might be something that should not be sustained. Even more rarely, someone would dare to talk about it, even less often would he be heard, even less often understood, and even less often his views would be even briefly remembered. But those times are over. Anti-natalism is no longer an irrelevant view, it is no longer an abstract thought experiment in the broader discussion. This does not mean that it was never worth being anti-natalist, it was always worth it. Nobody convinced me that anti-natalism has a chance to become an audible voice, which is a pity because if I had met such an anti-natalist, I would probably have become one earlier. Without such a conversation, I had to convince myself of the practicality of anti-natalism, as I had supported its theory before. At the moment, I find promoting anti-natalism worthwhile, as well as spreading other ideas focusing on the suffering of farm animals, wild animals, human animals, and on the risks of future astronomical suffering.
Birth. The emergence of life is a universal problem that leads to the rest. Sometimes only a few examples can direct some to anti-natalist lines, some need to remodel the entire worldview to do so. For me, the previous elements of existential pessimism allowed me to take a sober look at the world around me, to see how much trouble and little satisfaction life brings to most beings, and how much could be changed if we refrained from thoughtlessly creating life. Ever since societies have arisen, human tribes, states, and empires have been filled with injustice. The list of atrocities by which mankind has had to go is long, torn by the fingernails of those who tried to get out, and stained with the tears and blood of those who could not avoid being torn apart by life. In order to live, and not to suffer due to the lack of satisfaction of the basic needs of the mind and body, people had to overcome ineffable hardships. Hunger, cold, plagues, diseases, old age and slow death, wars and oppression have accompanied most of us since the dawn of our history. Over the centuries, successive unfortunates were born only to die under the claws of wild animals, to fall apart from cancer that was impossible to cure, to burn at the stake. Barbarian chords raided empires, slaughtering entire villages, raping women, and skinning those who resisted. Empires smashed barbarian states, torturing their commanders and cruelly enslaving children and women. Nations killed each other, murdered them without pity and understanding.
With classical assumptions, past suffering can no longer be stopped. People killed with nails hammered into the brain through their ears, shot by death squads, dying under the hooves of horses on the battlefield are already doomed. Crucified, dying in agony through impalement, convicts with eyes pecked alive by ravens. Gassed, skinned, dismembered alive, devoured. Children tortured by kidnappers, native people dying of unknown diseases, Africans captured as slaves will no longer benefit from our help. People exhausted by malaria, starved to death, sent to labor and death camps by Chinese and North Korean regimes cannot be saved. Those chopped with machetes in the Colombian jungle, whose last moments, with their hearts taken out, the first-world inhabitants can see in the abyss of the Internet, will no longer experience any relief from their suffering. There is no one left to save them, who will help them, who will soothe their screams and crying.
Such enormous pain is possible. For this one reason alone, this frightening possibility of experiencing indescribable suffering is wholly sufficient to consider reproduction morally wrong, to risk pain so immeasurable that no bliss is ever able to compensate for it. That no delight of future generations, for which there is no need among the non-existent, is worth it. Even eternal happiness of all future generations, if the alternative is them never coming to existence, is not worth one child, crying, tortured by a soulless universe.
To some, even this would seem justified if it led to cosmic happiness of future posthumans paradise. But the question we must ask ourselves is whether we have reason to believe that real, inherent positives exist at all? Are not all pleasures, bliss, and mystical experiences, in fact, merely a reduction in our lack of fulfillment? Aren't they good precisely because they lead to the absence of desires? And the nonexistent have no desires, no longing for happiness, no craving for pleasure, and no need for Paradise. They cannot lose anything by not being alive in the best of possible worlds.
The road to Paradise itself is full of sacrificed lives, trampled dreams, and we are separated from it by an ocean of unfulfilled desires that must first be created. We first need to mold beings from nothingness to brutally trample them, trying to achieve a better world. A lot more than just one tortured child. Many future generations will have to shed their sweat and tears, getting nothing in return, and the inhabitants of paradise will get something that none of them wanted, desired, or needed in their previous, tranquil non-existence. However, the issue of the existence and construction of a transhumanist world is much more complicated, and there are convincing arguments for implementing this idea in some forms, especially as it may be necessary under certain assumptions. Reducing suffering is a priority, and it is possible some people will need to be born for that reason, and for that reason alone, the fewer the better. The fact is, however, that almost none of the children created for now will contribute to the development of our world, on the contrary, most of them will be average people, and the parents' energy, instead of being used for more valuable forms of changing the world, will focus on raising the next generation of people whose existence was not needed. Who has been completely unnecessarily exposed to a world that will hurt them and allow them to hurt others, in all its tragedy letting them experience, in the midst of the mediocrity of everyday life, a bit of satisfaction and contentment. Perhaps, at the expense of others, even relative fulfillment and happiness?
But is this average life for most of us really that bad? Are these snippets of fulfilled dreams, pleasures, and everyday satisfaction not enough? Is a bit of inconvenience and risk not worth having a beautiful adventure in a crazy and delightful world? Would most people give up their lives just because something terrible could happen to some? Maybe not. Maybe that's sane. Maybe it's another irrationality. It doesn't matter. Satisfaction, a sense of purpose and beauty, love and peace soothe us, but not because they are good in themselves. They do it because there are needs. We require beauty, love, and meaning, we have a desire to live, to continue this cycle of experiences of often questionable value because that's all we have. The only thing we can have. We are trapped in life, that's all we know and can know. It is our own, private world that can be made beautiful, with certain limitations, even if we are still locked in bodies and social systems that give freedom to such an extent that, from the perspective of our dreams, would be considered a disability. But isn't that still all we have? But isn't it still a beautiful world? For sure it is. It is both terrifying and beautiful. It's great to feel satisfied and fulfilled, but it's great to feel them only because they fill a pre-existing deficiency. They fill the space of unmet needs that already exist. The nonexistent have no such problem, they don't have such a need. Creating new beings means breaking them from non-existence and throwing them into the menacing and strange adventure of chasing desires and needs for satisfaction, in order to be rewarded for partially filling the deficiency with a mixture of neurotransmitters that make us happy with life. And it can't be profitable for anyone who hasn't experienced anything before, who, nonexistent, couldn't know any lack. A child cannot be created for its own good, for its happiness, fulfillment, and joy, because it wants neither joy nor happiness. In nonexistence there are no needs for fulfillment nor satisfaction. The only thing that can be done is to give a new person the gift of constant arising of these desires, so that from now on she will more or less effectively fulfill them. until death, which sooner or later, and almost always unpleasantly, will come to take her back into non-existence, if not into something worse, like religious hell. Even peaceful exit will be preceded by infirmity and old age, illness, or accident.
I do not consider such a scenario worth implementing at all. Even if we had the certainty that we cannot have, the certainty that the child being created will be the happiest being in the world, there is still no reason to create him for his own good. Even if for such a being there were only eternal bliss and no suffering or unfulfilled desires, the choice between existence and non-existence should be indifferent. But in reality, there is no such possibility, every life contains sufferings and needs, no life is worth arising nor creating for itself. The risk is not only mediocrity, a child may be born without eyes, without legs, with a disease that turns her life into torment. She can find herself in a toxic relationship, in an oppressive system, develop cancer, or struggle with a mental illness. She can live under constant stress, and her silent suffering will result from the risk carelessly taken by others, by parents who were playing a game in which a real-life is drawn from the pile of possible lives, completely unnecessarily, because no one asked for it.
Eventually, average life is not neutral at all. Our every action has an impact, our every move matters, each thought has a tiny chance to turn someone's life into a nightmare. How often do people have time to wonder how to live ethically? How many people really feel the need to do anything for the world? Daily struggles and responsibilities already generate so much stress and consume so much energy that using it to consider ethical choices is far on the list of priorities. Most people do not think about the impact of their actions, it is natural that we mainly care about ourselves, we have enough problems of daily living or surviving overnight. Ethical life is hard work, a heavy yoke, the rejection of which is usually simple and easy, as long as we do not cause the direct suffering of others. If we only look at the world through the prism of one of the many more comfortable ethical systems which take almost all responsibility off us, life is simpler. And we do not have to worry about causing harm, because other beings suffer far from us, either in distant countries, or locked in cages or large halls, leaving us alone with a clear conscience.
How much suffering could each of us prevent? How much suffering could be reduced? How much suffering we cause doing nothing? Are we really satisfied that our children, like us, will mostly remain silent in the face of the nightmares that are happening everywhere? It is certainly so comfortable, and in the midst of so many inconveniences of everyday life, peace of mind is a high priority. It will be the priority of millions of people who had to be born to bear up this world.
Human civilization has done one good thing. It destroyed a great part of nature filled with sentient creatures, by inducing the sixth extinction, limiting the suffering of future animals that will now never be born. Humanity did it unconsciously and ineffectively, questionable merit. The only thing that can do good now is to be aware of the enormity of suffering that already exists and trying to prevent it. The power to do that is not beyond our reach. But sadly the merit of the average lives of average people, the merit of the reproduction of ordinary, good people is the existence of world hunger, pervasive poverty, and inhuman violence. Instead of engaging in effective altruism, most people are concerned with their own welfare, and in all that tragedy there is no one responsible. There's no one to blame. In this world, there are only victims, victims of our animality, the innate pursuit of never attainable fulfillment. It is ordinary people, leading more or less joyful lives, who drive the animal husbandry industry, responsible for an amount of suffering that exceeds all human lives. All human torture and genocide vanish with the amount of suffering experienced by the beings we keep for our satisfaction. The sheer quantity, billions, and trillions of individuals make the average person's life much darker than anyone might imagine.
An important question therefore arises. The question is: Do we have a good reason to create more humans and animals? Are there values that justify creating a new minds full of aspirations and desires? Fulfillment of parents, ensuring the survival of the species, handing over the property, living a dream life with our biological descendant? Is the potential suffering, the unspeakable suffering we cannot prevent and which we indirectly cause, worth it? Is the near-infinite suffering to which future generations may be subjected, enslaved by oppressive systems, or reduced to the role of experimental animals by sophisticated technologies worth it? Is the pain that is necessary for life, the lack of fulfillment, and the endless cycle of desires something into which it pays to throw new beings? The only reason it would be worth doing this would be to prevent even more suffering, and that only places the child in the role of a mere tool for greater purposes. Such a scenario is completely incompatible with our biological parental program and would probably work only in abstract situations. We ourselves have the greatest power to minimize suffering by actually devoting our lives or at least some of our energy and resources to this goal. What is needed are people who care about existing and possible suffering, not those who intend to create new for dubious reasons.
Eventually everything will reach the endpoint. How many beings will have to suffer on the way there is now up to humanity. We are the only being that has a chance to break the cycle of successive creation, to crosscut the Ouroboros.
