Anti-antinatalism
Why we hate antinatalists and what it says about us
Children are a blessing, greater than most of us deserve. But even those who treasure children may decide not to have them. Don’t be too harsh to condemn. Hear me out.
Generational suicide
Antinatalism is a form of suicide. It’s the refusal to continue life on a generational, rather than individual, level. And we hate suicides, don’t we?
In my article on suicide, I touched on the instinctive vitriol we are compelled to feel against those who commit self-murder. It’s perhaps because the idea of voluntary death cheapens our perception of life’s value. The idea of suicide raises the suspicion that perhaps life isn’t as valuable, not as cherished as we had hoped it to be. If someone can choose to throw away life, then what does this mean for life itself? We don’t all value life the same. Simple economics: the less the demand, the less the perceived value. What if my life was never really that precious? What if life has always been overhyped? And we hate with a passion those who challenge our most cherished beliefs.
The unhinged rage towards antinatalists is the same as the hatred for suicides. We don’t like it when people throw away what we value. Why? Becuase we give a damn how ungrateful they are? Or because they incept the possibility… challenge our weakly held convictions about our own life’s value?
Hate
When the average person confronts the instance of suicide or antinatalism (same thing), he feels as if his cherished beliefs about life are threatened. Their decision not to continue life cheapens our perception of life in general. It even challenges the way we feel about our children; no matter how much you love your children, when people decide not to have them shakes the sanctity of our family. You begin to wonder: If family is not universally valued, then its value must not be objective.
We react the same way when people hold vastly differing opinions: it threatens our own, especially when we aren’t confident in it. This is why we so desperately try to convert the unbelievers. We need their validation. And when they insist on resisting to value what we value, we feel they deny us the validation we need for our weakly help convictions… and thus we hate them for it.
We hate what we don’t understand. We hate even more what we understand perfectly, but can’t help but deny it through our convenient belief systems.
And we detest those who remind us that what we value so dearly is not universally valued the same… It makes us furious that others would dare shatter our fairytale.
And why does it anger us so much? Is it because our certainty in the value of life is fragile and threatened by differing opinions? If it were unwavering, would our conviction be shaken so easily when faced with people who don’t value their lives? If we were so certain of the value of life, then wouldn’t we simply be indifferent to those who, for whatever reason, don’t seem to value it as much as we do?
The hatred towards antinatalism betrays a lack of conviction in one’s love for their children… It looks like it’s overcompensating for something…
Straw men
Away from the straw man of self-hating climate cultists, projecting their self-loathing by pushing antinatalist indoctrination as part of their propaganda-induced psychosis, saner people choose not to have children for nobler reasons.
Some antinatalists have non-negotiable criteria.
Some who have chosen not to have children have had such a horrible life experience that they would hate to bring a life into a world of evil. You might challenge their worldview of the world, but you can’t deny the nobility of their choice given how they see the world. If you find yourself a slave in a world of slavery, would you have children to make more slaves to live a life of meaningless torment? Would you help make more life to live a pointless existence of torment just to satisfy your emotional needs to be a self-gratifying parent? Isn’t parenthood extremely selfish in the vast majority of cases, especially when parents decide to have a child knowing that they don’t have the means or the emotional balance to give that child a good childhood?
Others with a more optimistic persuasion won’t just have children with the wrong person. This is totally understandable and just as noble. Your romantic partner must be right for the role of a good parent, otherwise, you can’t have a child with someone who won’t be a great parent — this makes you a bad parent too. People with dignity and love for the innocence of children won’t settle for less.
It’s not about having children. It’s about having children with the right person, or none at all. And finding the right person with the right principles at the right time is perhaps one of the most difficult things to get. It is almost fully subject to chance, and it’s against the odds. The vast majority of people don’t find the opportunity to be in a relationship in which both are mentally healthy and right for each other. The vast majority of people never find the right partner. And the vast majority of those decide to settle with the wrong partner just to avoid the pain of loneliness… then they vent their frustrations on their children.
How many children have wished that their parents had never met?
It’s a huge crime to selfishly create an innocent life, a child who feels unwanted by or like a burden to its parents. It’s torment for that child to be born captive to neglectful, abusive parents, forcing it to mold a personality of self-loathing and lack of self-respect. Imagine bringing a life here to condemn it to mental crippleness. A child born to parents who don’t love each other will conclude that it should never have been born in the first place, and will then delve into existential philosophy — the ultimate self-torment.
A philosopher here on Substack, the articulate and thought-provoking Horn Gate (
), has made a good case against antinatalism. He points out that most philosophers have been antinatalists, but he attributes this to their weakness and lack of suffering. I have some thoughts on that.First off, you can’t measure and gauge how much someone has suffered, and what that suffering means to their decision not to have children. There is no clear relationship between suffering and natalism. One who suffers may choose to have children to mitigate his pain, knowingly bringing more souls into his hell pit, just to have company in misery. Someone else, who might suffer the same, may choose not to have children precisely because he suffers. Conversely, one who doesn’t suffer might want to share the beauty of his perceived reality with new humans he can help bring into it. Another on the same level of non-suffering might choose not to have children in fear of distorting this bliss of his.
Second, if having children is the definition of strength and strife and even success, then a desert-dwelling inbreeding halfwit, having multiple kids with multiple child-wives, should be more successful and much stronger than the average Western know-it-all with his below-replacement number of kids… not to mention his self-assuredness on what makes someone “weak” and what “successful.” If having children is an ultimate ideal, then you should not stop at 2-3 kids. You should be having one kid every year until it’s biologically impossible for you to continue. Why stop having children if the simple act of “having kids” is such a virtuous ideal? Why is such a virtuous ideal limited to just 2-3 kids?
If you can have kids but choose not to, you are also an antinatalist, even if you have had a couple of kids. The kids you could have had, the ones you opted out of having, are more than the ones you did have. For every kid you could have had and decided not to, you are an antinatalist.
Nobility
I believe what’s virtuous and noble is the ability to put aside your selfishness. It’s resisting your emotional and biological needs to become a parent, especially when that would not serve the children you would bring into this world. There is nothing praiseworthy about responding to your biological programming, then boasting about having free will; you do not.
I believe, if your life experience hasn’t been a good one, it would be a crime to bring another life into the same existence you find unfair, abusive, and, quite frankly, consciously evil. Conversely, if your life experience has been a good one, and you feel confident that you can give to your children the best circumstances and parenting possible, then by all means, have children. But don’t expect everyone to have had your experience, nor your life’s purpose.
It’s noble not to go for the things you don’t feel you deserve, the things that, by their default innocence, deserve much more than what you could possibly hope to offer them. Can you live up to what you want? Can you ever hope to become worthy of it? Maybe. But if you know you can’t, then you shouldn’t want it.
Are you sure you can end the cycle of abuse once you have children? Are you certain you won’t be like your abusive father and his father and his father?
It’s atrocious to bring life into a world that hates it. We love our lives, but the world doesn’t. If you believe the world is just, you can challenge the belief in the contrary. But you can’t challenge the noble consequence of believing the world is unjust, which is antinatalism.
Antinatalism (for the right reasons) is a most noble act. I find it truly atrocious that we obsessively smear it and straw-man it as evil, when true evil is tolerating abusive parents bringing lives into this world to cripple them and doom them in life of inescapable brokenness.
Antinatalism, when for the right reasons, is self-sacrifice to spare the unborn the hell you have lived, even for the possibility of it.
Why philosophers don’t have children
Philosophy is not about finding the right answers. Philosophy is about crafting the right questions, often unanswerable. Yet the philosophical question brings with it more insight than any answer ever could.
Philosophers understand the absurdity of existence, the evident meaninglessness of this cosmic abandonment, this entrapment of programmable needs and deliberate denial… this hopeless inability to discern truth… this trap between wanting to escape while programmed to foster an aversion to death. Life is a Catch 22: it’s meaningless suffering to live without meaning, and it’s torturous knowing you’ll die having lived for nothing.
For those feeling trapped in life, their only wish is to never have existed in the first place. Why would anyone want to do this to any living being? Why would anyone want to condemn another life into this existence of meaningless suffering, this existential abandonment, this simultaneous torment, together with an illogical attachment to life that ensures further torment? …Almost as if suffering was the point of existence.
Yes, there are philosophers who do have children, but I wonder whether they have arrived at the ultimate philosophical conclusion: the tragicomical realisation that the only answer to the meaning of life is absurdity. And if there is some meaning for whatever created reality, then this meaning is not for us.
Even our ultimate question, our quest for meaning, is also meaningless; it’s just a need to make our suffering bearable by rationalising why it occurs — that there is some purpose and goal accomplished through it. You can take any amount of pain if you know it’s for a purpose… but there is none other than imagined purposes we make up for ourselves to soothe our despair.
There is no divine communication. We are not graced with truth because apparently we are beneath it. We are abandoned here in this existence, and this abandonment, this cruel treatment, is what indicates that we are not deserving of anything.
This is where the quest for philosophy ends. And it is not pretty.
A question of meaning
They say that the meaning of life is to have children, to propagate. But the meaning of life cannot be life; this is a fallaciously circular definition. The term cannot be contained in its definition. So, this made-up meaning does not satisfy the philosopher.
The meaning of life is not having children. That’s just something we say to rationalise our biological programming to need to have children.
“I think the honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming… stop reproducing… walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” — Rustin “Rust” Cohle, in True Detective
The sanctity of children
Yes, I understand how precious children are and how they steal your heart. You won’t meet a more ferocious proponent of positive parenting and of actively safeguarding children than me. There is sanctity in childhood innocence. This is precisely why I am reluctant to bring sanctity into a hellish existence only for this purity to be condemned and defiled.
If your life experience has been a better one, then all power to you. Maybe you can recreate the consequences that made this possible for you. Have children. But, for the exact same reason, you should honour people who choose not to have children, precisely because they value children as much as you do.
We treasure children, and we become unconditionally attached to them. But this is the concept I am stressing here: it’s an attachment to this world. It means you have loved life so far, and your children are your immortality project, your way to cheat death.
If you spend most of your life wishing you had never been born, wouldn’t it be hypocrisy to presume to bring another life here? If you acknowledged how damaged you were, would you do everything you could to safeguard your child from abuse? If yes, how certain are you of that? All abusive parents believe they are better than their abusive parents.
Ultimate philosophy
From a transcendent point of view, having children is obedience to the programming of the simulation, to the dictates of our physical and emotional programming. Natalism is doing what you’re told. It is perpetuating the Matrix. It is playing a game you were forced to play, with no one to explain the rules, abandoned to its rigged mechanisms.
Having a family is a distraction from the realisation of all philosophy: that all its unanswerable questions in fact lead to one inevitable answer: that existence is absurd and without meaning, at least for us. There is nothing within the boundaries of logic that can justify this reality. Only beyond logic, beyond us. We are alone and abandoned. If a conscious entity made this, it has zero regard for us. If not, if we are the result of chaotic randomness, then it is just the same: we are alone and abandoned in absurdity.
What a shame to judge a life that you can’t change.
What a shame to have to beg you to see we’re not all the same.
— Shinedown, in ‘What a shame’
Objections
“You’re just depressed. Anything you say is a consequence of depression, and therefore unrealistic.”
Perhaps. But what if depression is the only way to see reality without the fairy dust and glitter of manic feel-good hormones? What if depression is the price of truth, or depression is the consequence of our harsh reality? Are you so certain that blissfulness is the realistic state of mind? Is children’s naive optimism about the world realistic? Is yours? Are you sure about optimism granting realistic situational awareness? Or what if depression is the result of the realisation that it is all futile?
I’m depressed? Why don’t you ask all those children — those born in insane environments only to live a short life of hell and then perish brutally — if they are depressed. Ask them if the world is all rainbows and butterflies, if they would just take off their dark lenses. Perhaps it is you who needs to take off the lenses of augmented glitter and sunshine blinding you from the truth. Why don’t you ask them to apologise if their “pessimism” is threatening your solipsistically blissful delusion?
“But if everyone had no kids, how would the species survive?”
Who says it must? Which part of human history suggests that we deserve to survive as a species? What is this entitled narcissism of presuming to “live forever” as a species when all we keep proving is our inhumanity? Who told you that simply responding to biological impulses and instinctive programming is somehow meaningful?.. That obeying our lines of code somewhere in our neurobiology is somehow a virtue? If anything, the opposite would be a virtue, and the epitome of free will.
Free will
When you feel the urge to have children, you’re just succumbing to your programming like an obedient NPC of this simulation. There is no free will in that, nothing praiseworthy about following your biological and psychological imperatives.
When you feel compelled to love your children, it’s the same response to programming. All children have the virtue of purity and innocence, so loving them is indeed logical and meaningful. But we love our own children more because we are biologically programmed to do so. It’s just hormones. That extra love you give to your own is simply driven by programming…
I wish it weren’t. I wish life were more meaningful than the fairytale castles we build on sands in the hourglass of divinity.
The bottom line
This is not a call for antinatalism. This is not to say which is better. I can’t know that, and neither can you. Just like in my post on suicide, this is a call to tone down the hate and disrespect for something you don’t understand. If you hate the suicides and antinatalists for cheapening your perception of life, then your conviction in it wasn’t really that solid to begin with. Otherwise, you would feel compassion and sympathy, but not loathing.
The philosopher, most of all, is inevitably drawn to antinatalism. Is the philosopher mentally healthy? Probably not. Regardless, in his obsessive search for meaning, the philosopher concludes that this existence is not real because it is not meaningful. Any made-up “meaning” we decide to attribute to life is arbitrary and not transcendent, and it is not for us to give. It is not for the creation to give meaning to itself — this is the prerogative of the creator. Thus, we can decide to assign some purpose to our lives, but we cannot grant it meaning that is transcendent, that transcends this existence. Only transcendent meaning would be valid.
What meaning then… what transcendent meaning can there be to simply perpetuate this life that demonstrably has no meaning, or at least, no meaning for us?
Your hatred for antinatalism may in fact betray your own lack of conviction in the arbitrary meaning you give to your life.
But don’t take me seriously. I don’t. Take it easy. Life is overrated, anyway.
This was a good read, thanks. Pronatalism is not borne out of love of children. It is motivated entirely by demographic fear and occasionally greed. Female reproductive organs are weapons that fire ammunition-babies. Not having children, particularly for women but also for men, is to help the enemy. The welfare of the children is not a factor. The welfare or fitness of the mother is not a factor. The welfare or fitness of the father is not a factor. It does not matter if the children will grow up in abusive situations or in poverty, or if there are genetic probabilities for illness or deformities or whatever. It does not matter if the parents are suitable partners or parents. All that matters is producing more ammunition for the demographic war. To me this is insane and I dread the lives of children brought into the world by parents who see them primarily as political objects. Are these parents even capable of understanding that their children are human beings? Why would these children, in turn, seek to perpetuate what they're being subjected to? Bonkers.
i never heard of anti natalism until now. I never wanted children because I would not want to bring someone vulnerable, into the world, to be molested and exploited and assaulted and now, being white, blamed for everything in history, from both the left and the right side of the aisle.
What I notice of those that do have children, it is young adults having a child or two to please their parents, keep up with the Joneses, get financial and other help from parents, grandparents and the state. That is 100% the main way it is possible to have and afford to raise children in modern America.
It appears to me, when I look at friends and family, that many parents don't know how to be emotionally healthy, how to relate with their spouse for 20+ years, much less raise children, hence these children fall prey to incest, being molested in some way, by the priest or teacher or doctor, turn to drugs/video games/etc to cope, etc.
The only people HOSTILE to we who never wanted children are parents that had them for the wrong reasons and those child molesters or traffickers disappointed on less prey. That is why there is so much for pregnant women and mothers with young children, because enablers, human traffickers, and pedos are close by...
Any person with common sense cannot blame women that are conscientious and lacks the funds to give the best for their children, hence avoid reproducing. Anyone that hates us for that is insane. And there is a lot of insanity, on all sides.