Haley! So strange that you’ve decided to discuss anti-natalism, I’ve known of this school of thought for a while but I’ve been reading Emil Cioran’s “the trouble with being born” (I think this is the official English title, but I’m reading it in French, where it’s called “l’inconvénient d’être né”, quite literally, “the disadvantage of being born”) and it’s very much the main idea. It’s a collection of aphorisms, and I think a few of them are expressed in jest, at least to some degree, because as you have noted it’s impossible not to see the humor in a live person earnestly lamenting the very state in which they choose to remain (suicide is always an option). I must say I’ve always felt deeply embarrassed by the degree to which this philosophy resonates with me. My father tells me that when I was 7, I went up to him and said “Dad, I made a mistake...I was born”. Lol. Maybe I’m more depressed or jaded than I perceive myself to be, but even at my happiest, I can’t help but see the philosophical merit, contrary to you (and every other pundit and journalist who’s ever commented on anti-natalism). I think, on some level, I feel a certain pressure to reject these ideas or to find them ridiculous, and I try not to entertain them. But when I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I see no real point in all the pain we endure. I can’t romanticize it, and any attempt to inject “nuance”, like you mentioned, by invoking the joy and humor that can be found in spite of the suffering or alongside it, feels like I’m conveniently lying to myself because I’ve been conditioned by society and programmed by billions of year of evolution to hold on to existence with every fibre of my being. It’s also interesting that you mention how much more strongly you’ve felt it when Avi was away and you had to live in “listless solitude”. I’ve been single for three years and I’ve never been lonelier, 8 months into a global pandemic. I would give up a limb to only feel loneliness for two weeks a year. Maybe your relationship status changes your perspective on a lot of things (would a single woman as easily eschew makeup or shaving when there’s no one to validate her attractiveness? I digress...)
That said even when I’ve been in relationships, surrounded by friends and family, I never formed too deep of an attachment to the concept of being alive. Yet I am still here with no intention of going anywhere. It will all be over soon anyway. Like Dorothy Parker said, “you might as well live”.
Your writing about anti-natalism reminded me of this book called I, Rigoberta Menchu about an indigenous Mayan woman living in what is now Guatemala. In the beginning of the book she writes about how when a baby is born in Mayan culture (and they have many babies), the family and community all come together to mourn and grieve, because the baby is going to endure so much suffering throughout its life. That framing has become really important to me in thinking about having my own children; it feels like a way to avoid the Cartesian rigidity that anti-natalism asserts, without putting one's head in the sand and avoiding all the *very legitimate* indications that we should not be bringing more humans onto this planetary precipice with us, only to peer over into the abyss.
I'm always here for a Goldfinch quote...thanks for adding so much joy and substance to my Sunday mornings!
this main piece is such a beautiful collection of thoughts, so it feels disrespectful (but also entertaining hopefully) that the strongest reaction I had to the newsletter this week was "actually SO MUCH happened in the butter video?!" (which I watched last night and have available for immediate recollection) the metaphorical seagulls! the 10 kilos of butter rolling! lol let me calm down
Anti-natalism sounds like my thoughts when I'm deeply depressed. It makes me wonder if Benatar has depression and/or a bad life or bad disposition. Maybe that's reductive. It's just hard to believe someone's life could be so joyless they are preaching the end of humanity.
I read that article months (years? who knows) ago and have been thinking about it ever since! It was especially on my mind this weekend so seeing your newsletter this morning really tripped me up! How did you know!? I can't deny that I get a thrill from scaring my family when I tell them that I sometimes align myself with this school of thought but it also scares me personally sometimes that I can drift into it and agree with it so easily. Thank you for putting all of that into words. Feeling seen, as they say!
Haley, today’s essay made me so happy I signed up to support you! There are many things I will go back to, but the whole anti-natalist discussion is reduced in my mind (too simplistically I know) to being a pessimist or an optimist. I have thought about that a lot in my life, being the product of a pessimistic father and an optimistic mother. I take after my mother, which has been the easier path, while my brother took after my father. I was married for 28 years to a pessimist. Now, I am with much more of an optimistic man. Life is complex indeed, but sometimes breaking it down into simple terms can make the days easier...
Thanks Haley, I felt really engaged reading this particular newsletter! And I always appreciate adding another week of content to my Pocket.
This pain/pleasure paradox has occupied a lot of my conversation this year, and I’m curious: how do you think your upbringing adds to your outlook now, if at all? I recall in your podcast with Amalie that you were invested in the church, before leaving at the threshold of adulthood. Benatar’s piece pulled up a lot of fascination/frustration in that they’re fundamental grapplings, but I wholeheartedly disagree haha. Anyway, I’m very intrigued as a secular-to-Christian to someone who has run the opposite path, but landed at a similar answer!
There are much more eloquent things I could say about how I enjoyed this newsletter but instead, I'll share that all I could think about while reading about the octopus was 'live fast die young bad girls do it well'
Re: locking yourself out, I did the exact same thing a few days ago. My housemates were all out (despite there being a city-wide stay at home order where I live in Melbourne, Australia) and I went outside to get a delivery and was holding the door open with my foot. I got distracted when the postman yelled at me from across the street to check the name and the door slammed shut. Had a moment of, "oh fuck" and paced around the backyard for a few minutes before remembering how easy my house would be to break into and climbed in my window by taking the fly screen off. Entering month four of a harsh lockdown and suddenly locked out! The irony is not lost on me. Thanks for an incredible newsletter, a lot of these themes hit hard this week.
I can't overstate how grateful I am for today's newsletter. I'm nearing the end of the first trimester of my first pregnancy, and have been really struggling with the idea that I'm essentially forcing life on someone who didn't consent to it and may not have chosen it if they could've had a say. It's been pretty overwhelming to be ruminating on whether life is worth it, while I'm living one and also making one. I've tried to have this conversation with people I'm close to, but it doesn't seem to resonate with most of them, so it was really gratifying and comforting to read your words today (and those of everyone leaving comments!), especially because I respect and trust you so much at this point, having appreciated your writing and learned so much from you over the past few years.
I haven't read Benatar's piece, and I wasn't aware of anti-natalism as a concept, but I agree that thinking about life experiences as though they're tallies in a Good column and a Bad column, resulting in some kind of net score, is reductive and not really a useful way to evaluate experiences. One thing I keep coming back to is "This Is Water," the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave, which discusses re-framing how you see the world in a way that's empathizing, unifying, and life-affirming. Seems like a potentially worthwhile counterpoint to Benatar's.
I know I'll continue to struggle with this question, which is okay, but I'm grateful that your words helped me re-introduce a little nuance into the questions I'm struggling with, as they so often do. Thank you!!
Not sure if you’ve mentioned this in other newsletters, but have you read the new Eula Biss book “Having and Being Had?” It’s kind of a treatise about living/making art in capitalism but a lot of it is also about the intertwined experiences of material comfort/discomfort. It strikes me as a sort of lower stakes companion to the pleasure/pain discussion. The form of the book intertwines the personal and embodied experience with historical precedents and sort of reminds me of Maggie Nelson, which is always a plus in my mind. I think it might resonate with you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1. is he trolling (even though you said he isn't?) and just showing that anti-natalism is logically coherent
2. the word philosopher is a great distractor and in fact "anyone" navel-gazing can be called a philosopher even if they're not contributing anything helpful at all/only feeding their own self-importance
3. what is this guy's personal life. if he truly believes this and has all the math to prove it, i still have the amateur hunch that his argument would simply fall apart if he experienced something as pedestrian and cliche as "true love," to be able to feel it romantically, platonically, familially.
4. anti-natalism reminds me of reading The Stranger in my HS senior English class, tbh, it did resonate with me then, and that's probably the last time something like anti-natalism would have resonated.
I think ever since becoming an adult (12 years ago) I generally like the idea of candy more than I actually like eating it. The childlike effortlessness/unawareness of picking out gummies one by one sitting cross-legged in pastel sweats staring at a laptop is a real dream aesthetic. I LOVE chips, though. Can't stop loving chips.
Haley! I'm 36 and I didn't realize that growing up is about making mistakes, not avoiding them... my mind is sort of blown. All of a sudden I'm wondering, were all those mistakes good? I thought they were bad. But they taught me so much and got me where I am today. Who am I? What is going on? I think it will take a while to sink in. Thanks, as usual xx
Benatar was my undergraduate philosophy lecturer in Cape Town! He notoriously knew every person in his lecture by name (there were often 500+ in first year Phil class). I thought about him recently and tried to google him and discovered a weird conspiracy that his image does not appear anywhere on the internet. He also always always wears a peak cap. Funny that you mentioned my octopus teacher in the same essay as it’s also based on Cape Town.
Also, I skimmed an article in The Atlantic on Tuesday that had an interestingly relevant sentence about how often it was commented by senators how amazing judicial nominee Barrett is on motherhood and why has it not ever been said about fatherhood in the same context. Or something like that. I would like to read it again but I cannot figure out how to find it on The Atlantic's website. Any tips? Thank you!
Haley! So strange that you’ve decided to discuss anti-natalism, I’ve known of this school of thought for a while but I’ve been reading Emil Cioran’s “the trouble with being born” (I think this is the official English title, but I’m reading it in French, where it’s called “l’inconvénient d’être né”, quite literally, “the disadvantage of being born”) and it’s very much the main idea. It’s a collection of aphorisms, and I think a few of them are expressed in jest, at least to some degree, because as you have noted it’s impossible not to see the humor in a live person earnestly lamenting the very state in which they choose to remain (suicide is always an option). I must say I’ve always felt deeply embarrassed by the degree to which this philosophy resonates with me. My father tells me that when I was 7, I went up to him and said “Dad, I made a mistake...I was born”. Lol. Maybe I’m more depressed or jaded than I perceive myself to be, but even at my happiest, I can’t help but see the philosophical merit, contrary to you (and every other pundit and journalist who’s ever commented on anti-natalism). I think, on some level, I feel a certain pressure to reject these ideas or to find them ridiculous, and I try not to entertain them. But when I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I see no real point in all the pain we endure. I can’t romanticize it, and any attempt to inject “nuance”, like you mentioned, by invoking the joy and humor that can be found in spite of the suffering or alongside it, feels like I’m conveniently lying to myself because I’ve been conditioned by society and programmed by billions of year of evolution to hold on to existence with every fibre of my being. It’s also interesting that you mention how much more strongly you’ve felt it when Avi was away and you had to live in “listless solitude”. I’ve been single for three years and I’ve never been lonelier, 8 months into a global pandemic. I would give up a limb to only feel loneliness for two weeks a year. Maybe your relationship status changes your perspective on a lot of things (would a single woman as easily eschew makeup or shaving when there’s no one to validate her attractiveness? I digress...)
That said even when I’ve been in relationships, surrounded by friends and family, I never formed too deep of an attachment to the concept of being alive. Yet I am still here with no intention of going anywhere. It will all be over soon anyway. Like Dorothy Parker said, “you might as well live”.
Your writing about anti-natalism reminded me of this book called I, Rigoberta Menchu about an indigenous Mayan woman living in what is now Guatemala. In the beginning of the book she writes about how when a baby is born in Mayan culture (and they have many babies), the family and community all come together to mourn and grieve, because the baby is going to endure so much suffering throughout its life. That framing has become really important to me in thinking about having my own children; it feels like a way to avoid the Cartesian rigidity that anti-natalism asserts, without putting one's head in the sand and avoiding all the *very legitimate* indications that we should not be bringing more humans onto this planetary precipice with us, only to peer over into the abyss.
I'm always here for a Goldfinch quote...thanks for adding so much joy and substance to my Sunday mornings!
this main piece is such a beautiful collection of thoughts, so it feels disrespectful (but also entertaining hopefully) that the strongest reaction I had to the newsletter this week was "actually SO MUCH happened in the butter video?!" (which I watched last night and have available for immediate recollection) the metaphorical seagulls! the 10 kilos of butter rolling! lol let me calm down
Anti-natalism sounds like my thoughts when I'm deeply depressed. It makes me wonder if Benatar has depression and/or a bad life or bad disposition. Maybe that's reductive. It's just hard to believe someone's life could be so joyless they are preaching the end of humanity.
One of the best things I read in lockdown, about the greenland shark - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/katherine-rundell/consider-the-greenland-shark
I read that article months (years? who knows) ago and have been thinking about it ever since! It was especially on my mind this weekend so seeing your newsletter this morning really tripped me up! How did you know!? I can't deny that I get a thrill from scaring my family when I tell them that I sometimes align myself with this school of thought but it also scares me personally sometimes that I can drift into it and agree with it so easily. Thank you for putting all of that into words. Feeling seen, as they say!
Haley, today’s essay made me so happy I signed up to support you! There are many things I will go back to, but the whole anti-natalist discussion is reduced in my mind (too simplistically I know) to being a pessimist or an optimist. I have thought about that a lot in my life, being the product of a pessimistic father and an optimistic mother. I take after my mother, which has been the easier path, while my brother took after my father. I was married for 28 years to a pessimist. Now, I am with much more of an optimistic man. Life is complex indeed, but sometimes breaking it down into simple terms can make the days easier...
Thanks Haley, I felt really engaged reading this particular newsletter! And I always appreciate adding another week of content to my Pocket.
This pain/pleasure paradox has occupied a lot of my conversation this year, and I’m curious: how do you think your upbringing adds to your outlook now, if at all? I recall in your podcast with Amalie that you were invested in the church, before leaving at the threshold of adulthood. Benatar’s piece pulled up a lot of fascination/frustration in that they’re fundamental grapplings, but I wholeheartedly disagree haha. Anyway, I’m very intrigued as a secular-to-Christian to someone who has run the opposite path, but landed at a similar answer!
There are much more eloquent things I could say about how I enjoyed this newsletter but instead, I'll share that all I could think about while reading about the octopus was 'live fast die young bad girls do it well'
Re: locking yourself out, I did the exact same thing a few days ago. My housemates were all out (despite there being a city-wide stay at home order where I live in Melbourne, Australia) and I went outside to get a delivery and was holding the door open with my foot. I got distracted when the postman yelled at me from across the street to check the name and the door slammed shut. Had a moment of, "oh fuck" and paced around the backyard for a few minutes before remembering how easy my house would be to break into and climbed in my window by taking the fly screen off. Entering month four of a harsh lockdown and suddenly locked out! The irony is not lost on me. Thanks for an incredible newsletter, a lot of these themes hit hard this week.
I can't overstate how grateful I am for today's newsletter. I'm nearing the end of the first trimester of my first pregnancy, and have been really struggling with the idea that I'm essentially forcing life on someone who didn't consent to it and may not have chosen it if they could've had a say. It's been pretty overwhelming to be ruminating on whether life is worth it, while I'm living one and also making one. I've tried to have this conversation with people I'm close to, but it doesn't seem to resonate with most of them, so it was really gratifying and comforting to read your words today (and those of everyone leaving comments!), especially because I respect and trust you so much at this point, having appreciated your writing and learned so much from you over the past few years.
I haven't read Benatar's piece, and I wasn't aware of anti-natalism as a concept, but I agree that thinking about life experiences as though they're tallies in a Good column and a Bad column, resulting in some kind of net score, is reductive and not really a useful way to evaluate experiences. One thing I keep coming back to is "This Is Water," the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave, which discusses re-framing how you see the world in a way that's empathizing, unifying, and life-affirming. Seems like a potentially worthwhile counterpoint to Benatar's.
I know I'll continue to struggle with this question, which is okay, but I'm grateful that your words helped me re-introduce a little nuance into the questions I'm struggling with, as they so often do. Thank you!!
Not sure if you’ve mentioned this in other newsletters, but have you read the new Eula Biss book “Having and Being Had?” It’s kind of a treatise about living/making art in capitalism but a lot of it is also about the intertwined experiences of material comfort/discomfort. It strikes me as a sort of lower stakes companion to the pleasure/pain discussion. The form of the book intertwines the personal and embodied experience with historical precedents and sort of reminds me of Maggie Nelson, which is always a plus in my mind. I think it might resonate with you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Benatar makes me think:
1. is he trolling (even though you said he isn't?) and just showing that anti-natalism is logically coherent
2. the word philosopher is a great distractor and in fact "anyone" navel-gazing can be called a philosopher even if they're not contributing anything helpful at all/only feeding their own self-importance
3. what is this guy's personal life. if he truly believes this and has all the math to prove it, i still have the amateur hunch that his argument would simply fall apart if he experienced something as pedestrian and cliche as "true love," to be able to feel it romantically, platonically, familially.
4. anti-natalism reminds me of reading The Stranger in my HS senior English class, tbh, it did resonate with me then, and that's probably the last time something like anti-natalism would have resonated.
I think ever since becoming an adult (12 years ago) I generally like the idea of candy more than I actually like eating it. The childlike effortlessness/unawareness of picking out gummies one by one sitting cross-legged in pastel sweats staring at a laptop is a real dream aesthetic. I LOVE chips, though. Can't stop loving chips.
Haley! I'm 36 and I didn't realize that growing up is about making mistakes, not avoiding them... my mind is sort of blown. All of a sudden I'm wondering, were all those mistakes good? I thought they were bad. But they taught me so much and got me where I am today. Who am I? What is going on? I think it will take a while to sink in. Thanks, as usual xx
Benatar was my undergraduate philosophy lecturer in Cape Town! He notoriously knew every person in his lecture by name (there were often 500+ in first year Phil class). I thought about him recently and tried to google him and discovered a weird conspiracy that his image does not appear anywhere on the internet. He also always always wears a peak cap. Funny that you mentioned my octopus teacher in the same essay as it’s also based on Cape Town.
Thanks for doing what you do! 😊
The article by Sasha is so great.
Also, I skimmed an article in The Atlantic on Tuesday that had an interestingly relevant sentence about how often it was commented by senators how amazing judicial nominee Barrett is on motherhood and why has it not ever been said about fatherhood in the same context. Or something like that. I would like to read it again but I cannot figure out how to find it on The Atlantic's website. Any tips? Thank you!