Antinatalists may try to make the best of their “life-sentence”, but still don’t wish the same suffering for the unborn. I couldn’t exist without the aid of my daily medication. It takes so much to make living halfway tolerable, if only a few circumstances would be slightly worse, life would be utterly inacceptable. It is hard to imagine, how one could guarantee their offspring, that their life will be tolerable. Moreover, if someone commits suicide it is the end of years of suffering, and the suicide itself causes pain. The “bare bodkin” of Hamlet doesn’t exist, if it would, well…..

But seriously, everyday is a struggle for pretty much everyone, why should we put someone who has no choice in the matter through this situation?

“Let me ask you this, Mr. Porter. Is it possible to adhere to a philosophy that is not connected in a significant way to your own psychological make-up and/or childhood experience?

I await your thoughtful response.”

Ultimately I think it is possible – e.g. it might just be what everyone else believes. But if you mean adherence by choice, then I think psychological make-up must enter into it. Even if you adopted a philosophy bearing no obvious relationship to your own life experience, that choice would have to come from something in you.

I’d say it would provide the best framework for fatherhood. Existential pain is, in my opinion, of necessity and strikes everyone who reflects further than on what to have for dinner tonight. Hiding this collective and basal pain from our children, treating it as a taboo, is nothing other than an act of deceit. Giving a child a rosy cottonlined image of the world is to make its inevitable existentialist awakening and pain more dramatic and more damaging than it has to be. Had we all tried to understand our existentialist pain, had parents encouraged thought and discussion about our position in existence, the meaning or nonmeaning of it all rather than providing an illusion and desperately treating it all as one big happy garden party, neurotically ignoring the pain of it all (save perhaps the distant sufferings of Christ), the world would perhaps be a more peaceful, more healthy place. Less rosy perhaps, but more healthy. To contemplate one’s existence is not unhealthy, or abnormal. It is and should be treated as the most basic and most important contemplation we undertake, a need as basic as any other. What else is there to contemplate? If I had been so vain (Santa Clause forbid) that I thought of myself as having a right to procreate I would have tried to make sure my inevitably doomed children grow up under no illusions, even if it would mean they would probably blame me for having come into existence (I would have had to apologize). Fortunately I find existence so shit that I am going to spare any future being the experience. The best is of course not to create these insatiable and often pain-rendering needs for meaning in the first place. And yes, one day I will (although antinatalism does not require it, you fierce opponents out there!) put an end to my boring, though pretty comfortable, upper-middle class existence. I’m just going to contemplate it a little while longer.

Some religious heads got the first part right but religion thrives on people’s suffering. The only way to truly end the suffering inherent in the human condition is to not procreate.

The act of getting children should be approached with the care with which we treat nuclear bombs that have a large chance of exploding and destroying the universe.