The article poses the situation as a problem, and I say "screw that noise" (pun intended) with my anecdote:
I'm a man now in my mid-30s, and I cannot god damn wait until I'm old enough to be out of the "marriage market" so everyone stops fucking pestering me about marriage.
I find absolutely no appeal in the concept. The legal and social risks of associating with women beyond friendships are simply not worth it. I also consider the idea of affecting and being affected by someone to such a deep extent to be a violation of individual freedoms.
Last but not least: I consider it a cardinal sin to create kids and then tell them with a straight face that life is, on average, fucking horrible. You know what it's like to see your parents pass away? To witness their finals days? It's shit. Absolute shit. I refuse to make any kids, my hypothetical kids, suffer that. I'm not even getting into the other nasty aspects of life. Fuck all that.
Then why would you imagine parents tell their kids that life is "fucking horrible", instead of telling them that life is "plenty happy"? Like, everything you describe, you have or will go through as well, and apparently you don't find it to be "shit. Absolute shit".
Sure, there’s plenty of reasons to not have kids, I do get that. But “I’m happy with life but I think that everyone else’s is horrible misery” is an odd position to hold.
When did I ever say that? I don't care about others' lives, it's none of my business.
I find life, as far as I experience it, to be overall horrible. I'm plenty happy regardless, but it's nonetheless not something I'm interested in foisting onto my hypothetical kids.
> not something I'm interested in foisting onto my hypothetical kids
Nor is anyone asking you to. Just, don't go around assuming that parents tell their kids that "life is, on average, fucking horrible"—instead, they show their kids how to be happy, like you are.
So you wish you had never been born? Isn't that just a theoretical-linguistic proposition and not a truely held belief? We are after all stratified beings.
That is it seems you are just venting or virtue signaling (that is still OK).
Recently my life has acquired some properties that many might class as "hell on Earth". It doesn't bother me though, I will always be grateful to be breathing as I am a human being.
I mean if you lived in the days of our prehistoric hunter gatherer ancestors and didnt know if you would starve to death next Winter would you be so antilife?
By the way I am single and dont have kids which is what I selfishly prefer. But I dont think that should be encouraged for healthy males as we have a responsibility to society.
Were I given a choice in the matter with the ability to make an informed decision, I would choose not to.
That's not what happens, of course. So I'll just enjoy my time here and respect the decisions my parents made. My parents made theirs, and I will make mine.
>I mean if you lived I'm the days of our prehistoric hunter gatherer ancestors and didnt know if you would starve to death next Winter would you be so anti life?
Absolutely. Given the willpower to overcome natural instincts and desires, I would choose to not have kids because why would I intentionally want them to experience even the possibility of starving to death in the Winter?
It's fortunate that the world has become a much better place since then, but at least for me the bar is still not low enough to convince me.
>we have a responsibility to society.
I couldn't care less whether humanity thrives, survives, or goes extinct. Not like anything I do would make a difference anyway, of course. My only duty to society is to not overtly bother or violate anyone, that's it.
Interesting comments. I will say that I still think my point about our linguistic frame regarding belief (and our beliefs about our own beliefs) as opposed to an action-oriented frame is confusing to me.
Without pragmatic grounding what are we ever even talking about, our untested ideals? Action in the present moment is the important bottleneck to consider in my opinion.
Your comments reminds me how recently I sort of made a triadic taxonomy of "types of values" (value in general, like a replicating bias). I think it was (1) parasitic values, (2) self-sacrificial values, and (3) circular (stable) values.
But again using the principle of thinking of things not through any singularity sort the frame but allowing extension and similar concepts we can seem some interesting properties about this dynamic.
Let think of things as a stratified hierarchy of values having tendency that higher up strata mean a larger spatiotemporal perspective (I guess once space and time are completely abstracted then the hierarchy is more about scaling in semantic space in general.)
Parasitic values are biased toward limiting or even eliminating the replication of other lower level values. I guess this is analogous to a neuronal group acting as an inhibitory module.
In the example of antinatalism the specific value of antinatalism is oriented toward limited or stopping what we could call the self-preservation or Darwinian value (a biological value, aka instinct). Of course it depends if one wants humanity totally extinct or just down to a small number. I would agree that a degree of this inhibition is good (maybe "parasitic" is too negatively connoted a term to use)
This is interesting because the value is stratified on top of the self-preservation value and so if it succeeds in any large degree in becomes self-undermining. This is like human's killing off their ecosystem on which they are stratified.
This is really the extent of my thought on this (you probably can complete the analogy with (2) and (3)). Also it will be interesting to think through the implications of feedback from the higher strata to the lower.
I'm a man now in my mid-30s, and I cannot god damn wait until I'm old enough to be out of the "marriage market" so everyone stops fucking pestering me about marriage.
I find absolutely no appeal in the concept. The legal and social risks of associating with women beyond friendships are simply not worth it. I also consider the idea of affecting and being affected by someone to such a deep extent to be a violation of individual freedoms.
Last but not least: I consider it a cardinal sin to create kids and then tell them with a straight face that life is, on average, fucking horrible. You know what it's like to see your parents pass away? To witness their finals days? It's shit. Absolute shit. I refuse to make any kids, my hypothetical kids, suffer that. I'm not even getting into the other nasty aspects of life. Fuck all that.
So marriage can pound sand.