I'm not reading a book
Read this. I did and it was glorious.
Creating new people, by having children, is such a fundamental part of life that it is rarely thought to require a justification. Most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. For most of human history, up until very recently, procreation had been an inevitable consequence of sex rather than the calculated decision to bring new people into existence. Those who do make a premeditated decision to have a child may do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake. While there are many good people who go to great lengths to protect their children from harm, few of them realise that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring them into existence in the first place. We infrequently contemplate the pain, frustration, disappointment, anxiety, grief and death that await any new born child. We cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be certain that at least some of them are guaranteed to occur. On the other hand, none of this befalls the non-existent. Only those who exist suffer harm.
All things considered, a charmed life is incredibly rare. For every one such life, there are millions of wretched lives. Some people, such as those in impoverished countries, know that their child will be among the unfortunate, yet proceed to create them anyway. Nobody knows, however, that their child will be one of the (comparatively) lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence, and even the most privileged among us could beget a child who might suffer unbearably in any number of ways. They could develop a degenerative disease, be afflicted with mental illness, be maimed, raped, tortured, or murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Ponzi scheme, given that existence confers no net advantage over never being born. It is therefore hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm can ever be justified. Procreators are ultimately playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun, one they aim not at themselves, but at their future offspring. Furthermore, if we count not only the severe harms but also the more routine inconveniences and struggles of daily life, which are seldom considered, we find that the deck is stacked against us to a staggering degree. We are given an infinitesimal amount of time to spend doing the things we enjoy, in a universe where time is an inexhaustible commodity. The sheer scale of such wasted potential is painful to contemplate.
Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of the quality of our lived experience. This is because we unknowingly practice a form of self censorship in the formulation of our desires and goals. While many of them are never fulfilled, there are many more potential desires that we do not even formulate, because we know that they are unattainable. We know, for instance, that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot gain a genius level of expertise in all the subjects we are interested in. We therefore set goals that are more realistic, and in so doing we hope to live a life that is, by human standards, a long and fulfilling one, and we hope to gain expertise in some narrowly focused area. Even if our realistic desires and goals are fulfilled, our lives still fall abysmally short of how well they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted.
Further insight into the poor quality of human life can be gained by considering various features that are thought to be components of a good life and noting what limited quantities of these characterize even the best lives. Knowledge and understanding are widely thought to be goods, and people are often in awe of how much knowledge and understanding some people have. However, on the spectrum from total ignorance to omniscience, even the cleverest, most educated people are much closer to the unfortunate end of that spectrum. Compared to what we do know and understand, there are innumerable things we do not know and understand. If knowledge is such a good thing and we have so little of it, our species is not fairing very well at all. Similarly, we consider longevity to be a good thing, assuming said life is above a minimum quality threshold, and yet even the longest human lives are ultimately fleeting. If longevity is such a good thing, then a life in full vigour lasting a thousand years would be much better than a life of eighty or ninety years, especially when those final years are marred by physical and mental decline. The longest human lives are much closer to one year than to a thousand years. It is even more distant from several thousand. Compared against such hypothetical standards, we do not fare well at all.
Most of us are oblivious to the heavy preponderance of negativity in our lives, because we have accommodated to the human condition. Our expectations and evaluations are rooted in this unfortunate baseline, and we therefore fail to see the terrible truth that hides in plain sight. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we routinely expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of life on that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us as much as they are. Because the negative features I describe are common to all lives (though some lives are considerably more miserable than others), they play very little role in how people assess the quality of their lives. It is true for everybody that the worst pains are more intense than the best pleasures, and that pains often last much longer. We all have to work hard to ward off unpleasantness and seek out positive experiences. Thus, when people judge the quality of their own lives by comparing them to the lives of others, they will neglect to include these universal features in the equation.
It is often suggested that the bad things in life are necessary in order to appreciate the good things, or at least to offer some form of contrast in order to appreciate them fully. In this view, we can only enjoy pleasures as much as we do because we also experience pain. Similarly, our achievements are more satisfying if we have to work hard to attain them, and fulfilled desires mean more to us because we know that desires are not always fulfilled. There are many problems with this argument. First of all, these claims are not always true. There is much pain that serves no purpose at all, such as labour pains or the pain caused by terminal diseases. While the pain associated with kidney stones might now lead somebody to seek medical help, such pain served no purpose for most of human history, since there was no treatment available. There are also a few pleasures we can enjoy without having to experience pain. Pleasant tastes, for instance, do not require any experience of pain or unpleasantness. Similarly, many achievements can be satisfying even if they involve less striving, or even no effort at all. In fact, there may indeed be a special satisfaction in the *ease* of attainment. There may be some individual variation. Maybe some people are more capable of enjoying pleasure without having to experience pain, and more capable of taking satisfaction in achievements that come with ease. Second, insofar as the good things in life do require a contrast in order to be fully appreciated, it is not clear that this appreciation requires quite so *much* bad as there is. We do not require millions of people suffering from chronic pain, infectious diseases and tumours in order to appreciate the good things in life. We could enjoy our achievements without having to work quite so hard to attain them.
To the extent that the bad things in life really are necessary, our lives are much worse than they would be if the bad things were not necessary. There are both real and conceivable beings in which nociceptive (specialized neural) pathways detect and transmit noxious stimuli, resulting in avoidance without being mediated by pain. This is true of plants and simple animal organisms, and it is also true of the reflex arc in more complex animals, such as humans. We can also imagine beings much more rational than ourselves, in which aversive behaviour is mediated by a rational faculty rather than a capacity to feel pain. In such beings, a noxious stimulus would be received but not felt (at least not in the way pain is), and the rational faculty would, as reliably as pain, induce the being to withdraw. It would be much better to be that sort of being than to be our sort of being. Similarly, it would be better to be the sort of being who could appreciate the good things in life without having to experience bad things, and without having to work exceptionally hard to attain the good things. Lives in which there is no gain without pain are much worse than lives in which there could be the same gain without pain.
Upon even casual reflection, there seems something rather absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die, obliterated for eternity. It’s hardly surprising that so many people ask what this is all about. Our lives are entirely ephemeral on the cosmic scale, but we need not step back quite that far to see that there seems something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities that we would not choose to waste our time with if they weren’t a necessity. The purpose of these chores is to keep the whole cycle going, whether it be working, shopping, cooking, feeding, defecating, abluting, sleeping, laundering, dishwashing, bill-paying, or tedious engagements with innumerable bureaucracies. Even if these tasks are thought to serve other goals, the attainment of those goals only yields further goals to be pursued. This cycle continues until one dies, but the treadmill is intergenerational because people continue to have children, thereby creating new mill-treaders. This has continued for generations, and will continue indefinitely until humanity meets its inevitable end in extinction, which is the way of all species, and it is hubris to think we will be an exception. It seems like the ultimate exercise in futility, a long and repetitive journey to nowhere.
If we take a sober look at the human condition, unclouded by sentimentality, we see an unpleasant picture. However, there are powerful biological drives against fully recognizing how awful our situation is, which explains why so many people are able to put it out of their minds for much of the time. This is a mixed blessing, since those who do not sufficiently feel the weight of the human predicament serve as vectors for its transmission to new generations. It is unlikely that many people will take to heart the conclusion that coming into existence is always a harm, and it is even less likely that many people will stop having children. It is far more likely that my views will be either ignored or dismissed. Since this response will account for a great deal of suffering between now and the demise of humanity, those who issue it cannot be considered philanthropic. I am by no means implying that everyone who dismisses my arguments is a bad person, but their dismissal does betray a callous indifference to the harm of coming into existence.
Life’s big questions are big in the sense that they are momentous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror. Life is bad, but so too is death. Of course, life is not bad in *every* way, and neither is death bad in *every* way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together they form an existential vise, the wretched grip that enforces our predicament, from which there is no escape. Incidentally, few prospective parents consider the aesthetic impact of their potential lineage. How many more producers of excrement and urine, flatulence, sweat, mucus, vomit, blood and tears do we really need? How much more human waste do we need to process? How many more corpses do we need to dispose of? It would be an aesthetic improvement if there were fewer people.
