i wonder what y'all have to say about this
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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me_irl
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Its not merely an "opinion", its nearly a universally held moral axiomatic fact that doing something to someone without their consent is, by default, wrong. Maybe you disagree, but most people do not. They usually just don't do any moral analysis to authentically reach the conclusion that birth itself is a moral injustice to the newly born. Because most people are willfully ignorant if the truth is uncomfortable.
I do stuff for me and people I care about, but I still resent even the expectation that I owe anyone anything, that I was born to inevitably one day die, and that I, having not choose to be here need to just "suck it up" as an adult and be a productive part of a natalist society I largely deem responsible for the grave injustice of anyone's birth.
I could kill myself and be in the right. I wont do that because death is a lovecraftian horror to me, but I could.
That said, alternatively, if I could indeed live forever I'd feel a little less disgusted with existence. At least I wouldn't have to face my mortality.
You're having an entirely different conversation than the one I'm having. I'm not arguing the ethical or morality of childbirth. I'm simply pointing out that after you are an adult, all the choices and responsibilities of making your life what you want it to be (or not to be) become yours irrespective of what happened to you prior in childhood. Thats it. No its not fair, but life isn't either.
This is absolutely your choice. There is no requirement that you are a "productive" member of society. You have the power to withdraw from society entirely if you like. There are dead towns scattered all over the world where you could simply walk into a house and start living there and no one would likely know or care for years or decades. You could scratch out a subsistence life eating whatever you could grow in the ground. You might never see another person in your life before you die (likely of preventable injury or disease). If thats what is most important to you in life, you can make that happen.
Well, I should have said this earlier.
Another complicating factor is that, I do not believe in free will.
So even though that technically means I can reject your choice based morality as well. I'll concede that it also contradicts my negative emotional feelings towards all parents and my feelings of injustice stemming from natalism and pro-birth being rational. Since... you know, they can't exactly meaningfully choose to be parents because choice is an illusion.
I'm still angry and depressed though.
Most definitions I've heard describing the lack of free will don't mean that you can't do something, but rather you were destined to do that thing. As in, it isn't the rejection of the outcome being true, but rather that you would never not do that thing was not in the cards.
That doesn't run afoul of what I described above. If you want to go live like a hermit away from society "lack of free will" doesn't prevent that, it just means that you were going to live like a hermit anyway.
Do you hold a different definition of "no free will"?
I wasn't taking the "living as a hermit" as a good faith suggestion. We're you actually serious? Because that's "If you are unhappy with human existence, go live a worse life than you are already living." My answer is no.
My issue isn't even just that "We live in a society" (lol), my issue is that society produced my existence and expects me to accept it as my problem.
My issue with free will is that its a gibberish concept that fundamentally makes no sense. Not that its "free will" vs "pre-destination"
My definition of "no free will" is that our "will" is based in physical reality, which is primarily made up of highly predictable phenomena, with a extremely and laughably tiny influence from quantum mechanics, which is metaphorically random dice rolls anyway so it doesn't matter.
A better way to look at my stance though is more to ask yourself, "What is your will actually free from?" If you think there is a metaphysical aspect to our will even then that implies that our will is then determined via the metaphysical and still isn't really free.
That said, it kind of ties together with the whole "can't choose to be born" issue, because its impossible to choose to even exist or in what environmental context and with what physical body you were born into you can't reasonably say we ever make any true decisions. Our existence stems from a domino effect starting at the big bang (or maybe something before that)
EDIT: I thought more about my response here after a time and realized I was frustrated with the direction you were taking the conversation. So I apologize. I am trying to have a practical discussion, and you took it in a metaphysical direction. There's nothing wrong with a metaphsycial discussion, but that wasn't what it started with and wasn't the topic I was intersted in exploring. I'll leave my response below unedited, but if you sense my frustration I wanted you to know why and to know I retract my frustration even if my opinions still stand.
I hope I haven't dampened your day. That wasn't my intent.
I said nothing about how to define happiness for you. You made statements that you didn't like responsibilities of society ("productive member" etc). I was offering an alternative that is available to you. I can't tell you what is going to make you happy. Thats not for me to determine. Thats one of those responsibility that is on you as an adult.
Wait, again with society? So which is it? Are you upset by society or not? If you wanted to march yourself off into a desert, and just lay down you likely could. I'd prefer you don't, though. Society will have no expectation for you out there. If you get cold or hungry that has nothing to do with society though. You can't reasonably expect the benefits of society (readily available warmth and food) without interacting with it though.
Okay, fine. There's no problem with that as an abstract concept as someone trying to apply reason to randomness (or order if you see it that way instead). Is that an actionable ethos though? Does your theory have any practical application in your own life? Does it lead you to action (or inaction)? It certainly doesn't have to, but I'm not sure how useful it is as a guiding principle of understanding the universe if it doesn't.
This is my opinion of course, but that is a straight up bonkers take. It is completely illogical and unreasonable. It is defeatist in the worst and most disingenuous kind of way.
What it sounds like you're saying is (and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you): "If I cannot choose every aspect of my being, even the things divorced from the boundaries of the physics of our known universe, I am not really able to make any decision on my own."
I'll be honest, I have serious concerns for you and what may have happened to you for you to arrive at that conclusion.
Sorry for the late response, I only have access to this account at work.
No worries, you haven't. A little bit of push back to my ideas is honestly something I find motivating. Usually other people grow tired of it.
My point wasn't that I did not personally like the responsibilities. I shouldn't have used "expect me" because that implies this is more personal than it is (my bad). Its that I resent that they exist at all for anyone. Further, that we live in a society that wants individuals forcefully born within it to sacrifice themselves for said society, and self imposed exile is not an escape from this injustice. My individual choices (lacking the power to change things on a society level) cannot permit a true escape from that.
Now, extrapolating this to an actual actionable belief to today's world would be that I think society should operate as if it serves each individual, not that individuals ought to serve society by default. And we have the technology and logistical capacity to do that.
It means that no individual can be held fully responsible for their actions and we should structure society purely around consequences, like harm reduction and maximizing contentment.
The results of this belief in my own personal life, I generally have held that it is irrational to hate someone and for a long while that gave me a lot of patience with people I knew for their transgressions or moral failures.
Admittedly, I've faltered in my patience as of late due to the state of the world. A more emotionally hedonistic attitude has taken hold in me.
Lots of debate and research regarding philosophy, resulting in a lot of critical thinking happened to me. A ruthless desire to get to the truth of reality, no matter how much it hurts.
If I were to guess if anything emotional fueled those desires, it was a desire to feel self worth. I thought I was an idiot for most of my early life and thought everyone else around me had a grip on practical life things. That I would have to fake my way through life and perpetually be in a state of imposter syndrome. Tends to make you prefer spending all your time reading and debating on the internet. (and playing video games)
After a long period of harsh self judgement and self loathing over being stupid, I realized most other people were somehow worse. So now I'm a terrified and alienated egotistical autist. I'd rather be the village idiot that I thought I was.
Is there a consensual birth option I'm not familiar with?
Without at least some sacrifices to society, society ceases to to be. So the choice is some sacrifice vs living in a lawless hellscape.
If you mean the metaphysical injustice you've described earlier as having to simply exist and responsible for procuring your own food and shelter, sure. That's life. Death is the only escape from life.
If that's where you're going, its far less metaphysical in my thinking of it. We are simply self-aware collections of atoms. There's no feeling that drove this existence. Simply evolution at work to have us arrive at where we are today. Proteins fold, amino acids coalesse, and an uncountable versions of that eventually gave rise to us.
I've been there. "Comparison is the thief of joy." Teddy Roosevelt.
I did that too. I spent a year playing an MMO religiously to the detriment of nearly everything else in my life. After the year had passed I had an epiphany. A year passed and nothing had changed. I was effectively the same person I was the year prior. I had spent one of my precious years of my life doing nothing of consequence. I was a year older and I had nothing to show for it. I thought about all the things I wished I was, wished I had, wished I knew, and how much a year of effort into one of those things would have accomplished.
I had dropped out of college after high school, not completing my degree, and while I was loathed to admit it, I always felt "behind" my same-aged peers. The older I got, the more "behind" I felt and the hard it felt to do anything about it. That is when I developed a mantra that would help me for the next 10 years. "If I hadn't played that game as I did, I would have been a year ahead in my goal." Swallowed my pride and at 30 years old signed back up for undergrad college. It took many years going part time (because I was still working professionally the entire time), but I graduated and now have a Bachelors degree. Any time I was feeling weak or felt like quitting I'd remember "If I hadn't played that game as I did, I would have been a year ahead in my goal." which in my last year became "If I hadn't played that game as I did, I would have graduated by now."
For every large life goal I set after that, I still used a modified version of my mature. Home ownership, career advancement, personal growth, further professional and personal education and skill acquisition all came from realizing that change only came from my action, and nothing came from my inaction.
I came to a different realization. I realized the race in life was never with other people, it was always with the previous version of myself. If you've ever played racing video game with a "ghost" mode where you are see a pale version of yourself representing a prior run on the same course at the same time, this is a helpful visual for me. Here's an old n64 1080, which is snowboarding game. You can see the camera is centered on the the current player on the current run, and the ghost is the one not center in frame.
That ghost is you, but he prior "you". That's who you're competing against. That's who you need to beat. He has no advantages over you. He was born at the exact same time as you, has the same gifts, the same faults. There's nothing about him that you don't have. Except you have a cheat code to the game of life that he doesn't have. You, unlike your ghost in the game, can see where the ghost had difficulty and learn from his mistakes. You can keep practicing to get better, to get farther, to get faster. You have the capacity to always beat him, but you have to try. You have to put in the effort. However, if you are the same person today as you were yesterday, at best you will only be equal to him. Without your effort to improve, the ghost will always cross the finish line the same time you do. You know what it is you don't like about yourself better than any other person on the planet. You also have the capacity to improve or fix many of those things.
The race isn't against other people, it is, and always has been, only against prior versions of ourselves.
I know there is satisfaction from self improvement. I do that and compare myself to others both. I can't help it.
Sure, but atm society is built around leaning into that individual's sacrifice for the sake of... just bolstering humanity as a whole. That's not really for any one individual within humanity as a result it doesn't truly benefit us like it ought to IMO.
I think given the level of technological level we are at, we should be working far less for the exact same comforts and progress. We aren't largely because of a culture of self sacrifice and a imposed expectation of that sacrifice on others.
I mean, no obviously. That's sort of my point.
Yes, we are a cosmic accident. That means that there is no greater purpose we serve by suffering as individuals and I don't think building a "greater" human civilization justifies individual suffering.
The closest I think is justified is to work simply to make life easier, safer, and more pleasurable. But we're beyond that, now we work because work brings you closer to god, or will bring about a grand society, or with bring pride to your nation, or because you must prove yourself, etc. Shit that doesn't mean anything.