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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

I'm late and not sure who will read this, but I've ended up at the "why do we have kids?" question.

Honestly speaking from someone who has 2 beautiful little girls and very squarely middle class life with all its ups and downs. I've recently, but slowly mentally shifted towards being a nihilist.

There are so many things to live for, I agree, but at the same time there's like a 10:1 ratio of why living sucks. My privilege, I feel, brings that closer to 1:1 but I'm pretty far from the median/bulk of the world's population. Most of the world struggles - constantly.

If life isn't enjoyable (very hedonist) why do we bother producing offspring who will be forced to endure "life"? Why does it matter that the human race survives?

I'm not the first to ask this, definitely not. I'm just sort of here and am unsure where to go next.

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I don’t want to downplay what you’re going through, but I do want to gently caution you against taking a (hopefully temporary) personal feeling as a universal human truth…

A large proportion of people certainly must think life is worth living and continuing, and probably most of them have less wealth and resources than you do!

I've never found any other truth than nihilism, and I'd say at this point I've been looking for three decades since I was a surprisingly young child. It seems like it eluded Nietzsche who I'm sure was a greater thinker than I, and so I don't hold out much hope.

The question of children is one that I've long wondered about in this context as well; my take is that there's a lot of peer pressure that goes into perpetuating society (one of my grandmothers actually told me it was the basic reason she had children). This is another area where religion is quite important; we see fertility falling as religion recedes the world over. I could never really consider consigning more people into the existential dread that I've lived with for the majority of my time, and so the thought of having children never passed my mind.

> A large proportion of people certainly must think life is worth living

Most people do what they do without considering what they're doing and why, it's just a habit. I think you are categorically wrong.

Human beings are unique in the world because they are the only species that can understand it. If you remove them from the world, there's nothing left that can throw light in the world's misteries.

The nihilist asks - why does that matter for having kids?

Is it humane to subject the vast majority of the future human race to taxes, inflation, menial jobs, so we can satisfy our curiosity?

Yes.

“I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?"

- Marcus Aurelius.

That sounds more like philosophical pessimism and antinatalism. "Humane" doesn't cut any ice with a nihilist.

yeah you're right i looked it up. definitely not strict nihilist at all.

If you remove humans, who's going to care about lighting up the world's mysteries? I doubt the birds do.

It's entirely unplausible that animals won't understand that

Ask yourself if you'd be willing to painlessly end your life, if given the option. Most people prefer to keep on living, which is strong evidence that on balance, despite all the bumps and grief of living, life is still pretty awesome.

Or, most of the folks who preferred dying over having kids did so before procreating - and the folks left don’t have that issue.

Regardless of suffering levels.

Is it, or is it strong evidence that we have an innate fear of death built in?

I'm not advocating suicide or anything of that form.

I'm asking, why should the majority of the world have kids given that life is largely a struggle and in so many places of poverty an extremely difficult one?

Because in a poverty situation, where there is zero state support, the only ones who might eventually help you are your kids? So procreating is a legitimate survival strategy.

I recognize that and am starting to wonder if that's actually humane.

Do they consciously decide this, or is this basic bio-chemistry, selected for over millennia? One would expect evolution to select for chemistry that make an organism want to continue living on. As those organisms have a higher chance of procreating and caring for their offsprings.

Context: nihilist and anti-Hedonist.

I think the main problem is viewing struggle as mutually exclusive with happiness, and happiness as the absence of suffering, which is propagated by western consumerist culture.

-Life has no intrinsic purpose, only that which you give it.

-Happiness and life satisfaction are largely independent of material conditions and struggle. Surveys show similar levels between impoverished and rich countries.

-Pursuit of happiness for its own sake is a futile philosophy and a hedonistic treadmill.

-Pursuit of more tangible values like honor, compassion, excellence ect result in happiness as a byproduct.

With respect to kids, Im happy and most of the world is happy, so I expect my children will be happy too, and be thankful to be alive.

I felt this as someone who grew up religious.

It was until this year that I properly internalized that the universe does not give a shit whether “human race survives”, or Earth survives. Or anything survives. Heat death of universe is slow but inevitable. The universe is merely a bunch of elementary particles interacting with each other via force fields. It has no ulterior motive.

All Gods are human made Gods to give us meaning.

However as a human, our experience and feelings is the ultimate personal truth. We are the hero of our own story. We have some other characters and everyone else is a NPC.

We are here because our parents survived to have us, and their parents to have our parents and ongoing for millions of generations.

Nature selects those who survive to reproduce. Human desire has been shaped by evolution. Anyone not passing on their genes, has their gene-line terminated. Those that remain preserve certain behaviors.

If there is some eternal meaning - it is selection. To survive, procreate and proliferate until the heat death of universe.

We were not built to enjoy. We were built to be paranoid and feel we can do more, be more, have more. In the hope it leads to better survival.

However dopamine - the reward molecule can be hacked.Orgasms give the highest natural release. Now most of humanity gets dopamine kicks from Porn, social media, sugar, fast food, drugs.

We are dopamine driven beings.

> If life isn't enjoyable

It can.

Whether you're happy or not boils down to hormones in your blood. Your goal is to maximize the amount of happy hormones and to minimize the negative hormones. Lots of things are biological reactions you can't do much about like "hungry = angry" but modern industrial life already covers most of that, so we're left with psychological reactions "Monday = sad" which can be trained and rewired, but you need to put all the work and basically fight your natural reactions until they change.

I decided to care less and be happier, and it's a long journey, but I see huge changes. I used to be constantly depressed, now I have moments of happiness.

I'll go out on a limb here and posit that a key underlying problem might be the society you live in. Societies make (or: impose) choices.

Every generation brings us closer to a day where we can actually eliminate suffering?

It's better to see the world development in that way

It's probably good to approach nihilism from a skeptic's angle. Think about who nihilism serves and creates profit for; the perfect consumer is a nihilistic consumer. Nihilism and hedonism are ironically linked at the hip.

What snapped me out of my nihilist arc was that whether or not life made any sense or had any purpose (and I wasn't sure at the time that it did), I certainly preferred to be as much as possible "my own tool" rather than someone else's.

Yes, most of the world struggles constantly and has struggled forever. But I am the result of that struggle that made it this far, as are we all. The best I can do is keep that survival going, and maybe make the world a little closer to a less idiotic and brutish reality than the one I entered. That requires an intense dose humility.

I am not going to change the way everything works all at once, but to view things as all or nothing somewhat entails believing that I have a lot more power than any one person does. That's unrealistic. If I more realistically instead "think local" then my actions really do matter, even if it's on the microscopic scale rather than macroscopic scale.

And surprisingly enough, thinking and acting on the microscopic scale has proven in my experience to have a funny way of creating macroscopic effects if iterated consistently over time.

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