Blog - Takeaways - antinatalism 

Page / - last modified by Victor Zhang on 23:27, 25/03/2025 

Takeaways - antinatalism 
last modified by Victor Zhang
on 23:27, 25/03/2025

Table of Contents

•	As evolution imprinted in us, it's intuitive to just wave off the idea that having children might be bad
•	However, it one truely care about suffering, this isn't a topic that could be dismissed without a careful thought process.
•	I first learned about Prof. David Benatar in a very early Sam Harris podcast (however not the first time I had the idea, it's the first time that I hear a more structured argument about it and knowing that I'm not the only werido):
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/107-life-actually-worth-living
 
•	Also newer debate/discussion with Cosmic Skeptic
•	There are much questions uncleared as some of the points are inheretly subjective
•	Also Prof. Benatar also said there's know "knock down argument" for antinatalism, which I totally agree, one can only lean towards it by observing the life status and examples around you
•	Even when people do not grant the problem of asymmetry, from my observation, even for people who won capitalism, their life (at least in public eye) don't seem like particularly lacking suffering (of course not in materialistic sense).
•	This gets to a mechanism of my speculation that has lead to this happening
•	We somehow evolved a mechanism like "compressor" (in audio processing sense, not data compression), that when we have some "good" experience, we experience "good" for that instance and only in that instance we feel that level of "good" and our system has raised the bar and next time when experience same level of "good", it's not as good, and level below that becomes suffering. And the "release time" parameter is super long some even life time.
•	Extreme example: drug (specifically about hard drug here), first few take of it (not first hand experience, but based on description) feels great, and over very short amount of time, the taking of that drug becomes necessity. Not taking the drug produce abstinence reaction which is extreme amount of suffering. Not the "good" become normal, and normal becomes suffering.
•	Not so extreme example: makeup, I've come across numerous ladies who says they can't look themselves in the mirror without makeup. When first time putting makeup, it's a raise of flourishing, yet our "compressor" raised the bar and now the with-makeup state becomes normal, and without makeup becomes suffering.
•	Common example: when suffering from starvation/sickness, the suffering is persistant, yet when the craving of fullness/wellness is fulfilled, the "wellfed" or "healthy" buff only last at most one day and then it becomes normal and people don't feel good anymore.
•	So even without asymmetry, life seems to contain more (at least perceived) suffering than flourishing. Adding the most chunk of life - boredom. The good analogy here is like what's mentioned in a previous podcast by CosmicSkeptic - "It's like a bad but not terrible movie, half way in, do you really want to leave now, probably not. But if knowing it's going to be like this would you come to the movie in the first place, also probably not "
 
Posted by Victor Zhang  · Permalink