Monday, March 21, 2022

Microstory 1846: Antinatalist

I was invisible in grade school, which is how I liked it, I guess. It did get weird a few times. At least once a semester, a “really cool person” would ask me if I was new. I lived in the same place, and went to the same feeder schools, my whole childhood. No, I wasn’t new. I have never been new. I didn’t care about my grades, or socialization, or my future. I could always see how petty and unimportant everything was. Literally everything. There was no point to any of our actions. I’ve heard people tell stories about how they’ve helped people by their good deeds, but so what? Who cares about helping those people? The only reason to make people’s lives better is if they make other people’s lives better, but if you follow that logic trail far enough, you’ll find out that it’s turtles...all the way up. It doesn’t actually amount to anything. It’s just a pointless chain of meaninglessness. It wasn’t until junior year of high school in philosophy class where I first heard the term antinatalism. I was honestly blown away by it. Everything the text said about it felt like I was the one who wrote it. I came up with the concept all by myself, I just didn’t know someone had done the same before me. There must be others like me, right? We could be spread out and quiet, but they had to be there somewhere? I discovered there was this whole online community of like-minded individuals who saw the world as I did. I learned more about the movement from them, and for the first time in my life, I felt seen. I felt like I wasn’t crazy. It legitimized my whole everything. I had to know more. I had to know how we could get the word out there. Other people needed to understand that the things we said made sense, and it wasn’t just nihilistic bullcrap. Needless to say, any efforts I made to spread the word were as fruitless as life itself is.

There’s a lot of misinformation about antinatalism that I felt obligated to clear up. We don’t advocate for murder, for suicide, or even abortion, though some might be leaning towards that. I suppose I can only give you my perspective, but others come to it from different angles. There is so much suffering in the world, and there are so many people who could be easing that suffering, or who are actively causing it in the first place. So basically if you do that math by eliminating not only all the bad, but all the causes of the bad, the equation amounts to zero. The only way to reach a state of zero war, zero hunger, and zero pain is...wait for it, zero people. There will always be conflict, and hatred, and strife unless we discontinue the human race. To our knowledge, no one has ever even once asked to be born. It is always forced upon us, and what results is a life of sadness and disappointment. I can’t say whether the good outweighs the bad, or the other way around, but the way I see it, it doesn’t matter. I know that the bad is too much; it weighs the goodness down enough to warrant getting rid of it. And like I said, the only way to get rid of it is to not exist. Nothing else has worked so far, and I see no reason for it to start working now. As I mentioned, we’re not about suicide. If you’re suicidal, and you want help, you should go seek that help. I’m not personally going to help you, but I will neither stop you, nor encourage you. But I’ve always been reckless, because living my life with such care when I don’t believe anyone else should ever be born from this moment on would feel like hypocrisy to me. I came to these woods to see the beauty, because being away from people is the only time I ever feel moderately content. But as the hypothermia slowly takes over, all I can think is, I don’t wanna die.

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