to form babby, or not to form babby

You keep harping on that GD but it is perfectly possible to resent coming into being in the first place and abhor the idea of committing suicide. I resent my existence in no small part because I abhor the idea of suicide.

Perhaps you don't resent your existence as much as you think?

xps you can't save someone else from that by committing suicide!

i don't know how serious your posts on this topic have been, granny, but if you're actually interested and not trying to goad me, i think that it just speaks in favor of the difficulty. a parent hopes never for their child to find itself in such desperation that suicide seems like a way to fix the problems with its existence. but broadly speaking, that is the risk in principle that the parent takes on, that the child might become incapable of choosing life (when, no less in principle, no one else can choose it for them).

I'm just rebutting the gaping flaw in your logical argument

like you can personally reject that as an option, but that doesn't mean it isn't an option

your invocation of Pascal's Wager is apt, though in your application of it, instead of gaining the infinite joys of heaven, the wager consists of avoiding inflicting the known, but temporally limited pains of corporeal human existence. But would not accepting the terms of the original wager as valid nullify your inversion of it?

btw, I'm just playing around here, so you needn't play along unless it is fun.

It doesn’t free a parent of their moral hazard though.

it takes more effort to stay alive than to die

Not sure about that.

it takes a lot of effort to die, I can't even skip a meal without my body screaming at me

referring to a child as "it" is weird

anyway GD your parents can't commit suicide for you

xp Shakey these are uniformly dense spherical childre

xps i don't think you are, granny you're just churlish.

the religious and non-religious remedies to the calamitousness of existence that i mentioned upthread have traditionally put a very strong proscription on suicide, and more or less elaborated visions of existence that served to ingratiate people to life despite its sufferings and disappointments. but thinking that there are not effective remedies of that sort available does not make suicide an 'effective' remedy. the ancient stoics often pillory that idea by encouraging people to kill themselves if they really think life is so bad, but that's because their goal is to convince people that they actually have the means available to escape despair, which no less than committing suicide, involves using one's will to choose under some conception of the good. they just think that in most cases, the choice of suicide is an erroneous one.

to use this possibility in an argument that has to do with how a parent should be concerned for their prospective children seems to me needlessly brutal. what it sounds like to me is someone who dislikes the sound of the argument and supposes that the retort can be directed at the arguer. but not everyone is capable of considering arguments without transmuting them into parodies of reasoning.

again, I've brought up suicide solely in response to "there's no remedy to awful pain of existence"

to use this possibility in an argument that has to do with how a parent should be concerned for their prospective children seems to me needlessly brutal. what it sounds like to me is someone who dislikes the sound of the argument

to deny that suicide is an effective remedy sounds to me like someone who dislikes the crux of their argument being removed

anything more than one is beyond our ken

lol it's all beyond your ken. it's all beyond anyone's ken. or budget, or whatever it is. very few of the metrics seem to apply.

joygoat and ymp i very much enjoyed your posts. i am saving up j.'s until i have a whiskey and can focus on it.

guys

babies

not fuckin existence

babies

they're not just for christmas, is the vibe i'm getting

I mean yes obviously suicide will solve all my problems but I still as a person have to be capable of it, my parents couldn't even raise me well enough to be prepared to kill myself

not enough positive representations of young people killing themselves that focus on how they don't have any problems anymore

well this took a turn!

That's a parenting fail xxp

lol it's all beyond your ken. it's all beyond anyone's ken. or budget, or whatever it is. very few of the metrics seem to apply.

True enough, but we'd rather stick to the more recognizable end of the great unknown (for now).

aimless, the original wager may very well obviate this pessimistic version (or so we could call it—actually it just occurred to me independently, but pascal's wager seems like a useful comparison) of it! i don't know. as i recall, there are some issues with the premises about the infinitude of the expected 'payoff'. but in the case of my argument, i think it is more plausible that one's child's life could turn out badly 'enough' in a relatively fault-free way to make that prospect carry some force in one's considerations (if you're familiar with the probabilistic framing of pascal's wager: 'enough' to make the expected values of the different cases come out as required).

in any case, that's why i allowed that perhaps a sincere faith of some suitably existential/cosmic kind would provide a person with good grounds for believing that taking the risk on another's behalf would be acceptable. it does seem to me, though, like even a 'believer' has the same kinds of problems with respect to imparting the 'remedy' to their child that anyone does (which no doubt partly explains the dogmatism of traditional upbringings)—they're the one who has to live it, not you, which includes 'live with a sincere faith in life', basically.

Bits of this thread make me feel like I'm reading a post-analytic take on Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born.

A friend brought his kids to a party at our place the other night, and they're at that perfect age where they're like cool little adults who haven't quite become annoying teenagers yet.

At point, they were bored of the adults so they seriously just sat on the couch and read the New Yorker.

It's possible they are also just extremely, exceptionally chill & well-adjusted kids.

I'd be ok having those kids for a few years (without having put in the work that got them to that place obviously).

like for crying out loud gary I try to give people the benefit of the doubt but the idea of having kids because it's cool for you is fucking awful to me

as i recall, there are some issues with the premises about the infinitude of the expected 'payoff'

having just refreshed my memory about Pascal's wager this is also the big issue I instantly zeroed in on. the wager is based on a faulty premise. One can envision extending the logic of this wager into increasingly ludicrous scenarios, since even the most specious and ridiculous claim about "the afterlife" or "infinity" etc would apparently require similarly serious consideration.

anyway babbys, I like mine.

why would you say that? they're not there to make you happy!

selfxp

not really surprising that a thread consumed with antinatalism would ultimately become about suicide

I hope all your children disappoint and then reject you ffs

Next up: the death penalty.

because it's cool for you is fucking awful to me

turnabout is fair play lol

lol Mordy

all of these experiments in living and meaning at the cost of other humans that you created just on a fucking whim, my god

like "lol we can prevent ever conceiving a child using science but instead let's just have one how much depression could it possibly have?"

animals, all of you

literally true

Tbf animals don't just engender other animals on a whim.

in response to the original q, I didn't make babbies because I have never been particularly interested in being a parent. Particular because I am female, I have been told "just wait, you'll change your mind," by people who presumably know better than I do? On the other hand, I have never been told "just wait, you'll change your mind" with respect to say becoming a plumber or a nun. Why is that.

Anyway, a side effect of having not having babbies is that I get to feel less bad about my carbon footprint (I like to travel to places! In airplanes! But hey I did not create another carbon-beltching human!) and about my generational privilege/affluence. I am passing neither of those on to a future generation. Whatever of my privilege and wealth I don't leverage for myself will go to the support the greater good and not some more mini-mes.

all of these experiments in living and meaning at the cost of other humans that you created just on a fucking whim, my god

because you're embroiling nonconsenting humans in them

i think ppl who decide not to have children should be happy with the decision they made and not feel judged by anyone (tho might be inevitable if you have parents who yearn for more genetic offspring - but maybe they should've have more kids so they could afford one or two not to reproduce). i think the childless who are all "i cannot even understand why humans like every other living species desire to reproduce" are v silly.

I've never denied being silly Mordy, I'll even cop to being cussed to the point of delirium

I don't create anything in case it makes anyone feel worse than if I hadn't

the parents itt may recoil at the implications of the argument on their own retroactive self-assessments, or lol at the natalolism and despair of the childless who just don't ~get it~, but i think it would be more apt to use it to focus their forward-looking responsibilities. as silby says, one's child could go through the worst suffering, not 'worst' in some objective sense but worst in the existential sense, of not being able to extricate themselves from it but in not being able to avail themselves of any assistance anyone else could provide to do so. that's a heavy responsibility to consider! too many people seem to take it on lightly and then later in life engage in all kinds of bargaining and illicit transference of burdens and indifference and emotional distancing from people for whom they are in some inescapable way responsible—generally by trying to re-construe the matter as one of the child now being the one responsible, of the parent having done their part. parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live, but perhaps being able to acknowledge it would encourage more compassion toward the worst sufferings not just of one's own children but of any others.

fucking asinine xp

glad you consider your children equivalent to macaroni collage of boats