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<h1>Antinatalism</h1>
<p>published: 2020-03-21</p>
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<p>It is unethical and highly immoral to bring children into this world.</p>
<p>The absence of pleasure is not bad. If I sit on my bed in my room and stare at the wall, that is not inherently bad. True, there are far better things I could be doing with my time, far more than it would be prudent to list here. But there are also far <em>worse</em> things I could be doing. To stare at the wall brings me no harm and no gain. It is a neutral action.</p>
<p>But the presence of pain <em>is</em> bad. If I get a cut on my finger, it stings, and I might bleed a little, and I have an increased risk of infection in that area until the wound heals. There is no benefit to getting that cut or experiencing that pain. If I lose a treasured object and I feel sad, that is bad, and I gain nothing. This is to distinguish the pain of a negative experience from the pain of a positive one: if I want to get physically stronger, and I exert myself until my muscles are sore, although I am experiencing physical pain, it is a positive event for me.</p>
<p>Given that the absence of pleasure is not bad, but that the presence of pain is bad, it logically holds that it is better to be absent of pleasure than it is to be experiencing pain. To be alive is to be able to experience pain. Before I became alive, when I was in the metaphorical "void", I did not experience any pain.</p>
<p>A child that has not been conceived cannot feel pleasure, but it cannot feel pain either. Studies are inconclusive whether or not an embryo conceived and then aborted can feel the pain of its abortion, but whatever pain it does feel, if any at all, is brief, and then it returns to the void of nonexistence.</p>
<p>This is not to say that, once conceived, one is obligated to bring the pregnancy to completion just because the life has been forced out of the void. The earlier one can abort a pregnancy, the better, as the potential pain the embryo feels is minimized. It also does not make abortion necessarily a good, merely the less bad of two bad options: the potential short pain of abortion, or the pain of birth <em>and</em> the pain to be endured throughout however long the child's lifespan is, which is not guaranteed to be outweighed by the potential pleasure to be experienced.</p>
<p>This also does not justify murder, as one might think: after all, after the murder, one is dead, and one cannot feel pain in death, right? But murder is an involuntary subjection to death. Murder <em>forces</em> death upon the victim just as conception <em>forces</em> life upon the birthee. <em>Suicide</em> would be justified, as it is a voluntary ending of one's life (and often a surprisingly rational response to a perceived future life where the pain far outweighs the pleasure one is to receive). But the key word here is "voluntary". Every person owns their own body (self-ownership) and has the right to do whatever they want to their body (morphological freedom) so long as they do not force others to give them the fruits of their labor in order to do so (you can pay a surgeon to give you an elective cosmetic surgery, but you cannot force them under the threat of violence, your own or by the government, to do that surgery). If they decide to end their own life, then that is their right.</p>
<p>But it is impossible for birth to be voluntary, as it is impossible to ask an unborn person for their consent to be born. As far as we know, there is no alternate dimension where the souls of all the unborn people reside, waiting to be born, that a prospective parent could contact to ask for consent. And even if there was: how would one even go about asking for consent? A requirement of having rights in most "civilized" countries is to be alive. You know, to have corporeal form? To have a body? As far as I know, we don't (yet) live in the timeline where notary publics in banks can hold seances to ask the unborn to sign off on the consent forms to being born. And this scenario assumes that the "soul", or whatever you want to call it, already has the sentience and knowledge and cognitive ability to fully understand the ramifications of what they would be consenting to. There is no way (currently) to contact the unborn except to give them corporeal form, to give them <em>life</em>, at which point it's a <em>little</em> too late to get consent.</p>
<p>And what if, even in this outlandish scenario, they <em>didn't</em> give consent, and the parent gave birth to them anyway? The parent gambles with a life not their own in the hopes that their child will have a good life. Say there's a lottery a parent can play where there is a fifty-fifty chance of either their child receiving a million dollars upon turning eighteen and their child being diagnosed with a painful and horrific terminal illness upon turning eighteen. One would be right to judge that it would be cruel to put a child on the line to play in said lottery, even though the benefit of the good outcome would be towards the child. So why is it okay to make a child play the lottery of life when it is far more likely for them to get a bad outcome, even if not as harsh as the terminal illness, than to get a good one? The average person in a "civilized" country is far closer to being homeless than they are to being a billionaire. And while the terminal illness is catastrophic, what about the total sum of all the suffering and pain the average person experiences in their lifetime? Is death by a thousand cuts worth the brief (and often false) respites in between?</p>
<p>Why force the child to take the chance? Why force the child to experience the inevitable pain of existence when, by refusing to procreate, the prospective parent can for sure prevent their child from ever suffering?</p>
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<h1>Living In The Epilogue</h1>
<p>published: 2020-03-26</p>
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<p>It's become a bad habit of mine recently to leave my bedroom window open regardless of the weather. The temperature hovers around the high-thirties to the low-forties, indecisive whether it wants to scatter snow over the ground in a last attempt to drag out the last dregs of winter or to give up and let it all melt. Any snow that dares to come down is almost always gone within twenty-four hours, leaving blistered and brown grass in its wake like a little kid repeatedly woken up in the night, confused whether to be awake or asleep, never truly able to be either.</p>
<p>But it's always chilly outside. And since the vents barely work in my room, I can rarely tell the difference by touch alone. The tips of my fingers going numb, the vague ache in my thighs, the sounds of birds chirping and singing in the air: these are the only reminders to close it again at end of day.</p>
<p>If I remember.</p>
<p>There used to be other sounds in the air. The neighbors congregating in one of their yards. A toddler playing in the backyard connected to ours, flitting in and out of the plastic playground like an indecisive bird. The sounds of cars and trucks and motorcycles gunning their engines to show off what they perceive to be raw power on the nearby roads.</p>
<p>At my previous house, I used to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the vehicles speeding through the nearby highway. And at college, <a href="../../2019/11/other-world.html">walking back to my dorms from work</a>, I would watch the glow of the headlights coming down the rolling hills like fireflies, like meteors crashing down to earth.</p>
<p>And it was on those roads that the stories came to me, running in sonderous snippets, unaware heralds of a strange sense of disconnection- of dissociation- that they could not yet articulate into words.</p>
<p>And as I wove them into coherent narratives, I found my own narrative starting to unravel at the seams.</p>
<p>In elementary school, as I didn't fit in neatly with the rest of the special-needs kids since I had too much cognitive ability to be content with essentially being babysat in a room full of toys all day, I instead got shoved into the &quot;gifted and talented&quot; program, which was the school administration's way of saying, &quot;Congratulations, you're good at licking the boots of the state's educational system! Let's pull you out of your normal classes and give you harder ones while still expecting you to do all of the homework for both <em>simultaneously</em>.&quot; I and about ten other kids were sold the lies that we were <em>so much better</em> than those other kids who only got the <em>normal</em> classes, that we were destined for greatness, that we would succeed in all of our educational endeavors with flying colors. We were written a story with us as our own protagonist, given plot armor, promised a happy ending.</p>
<p>I never found out how the others ended up, since the transition to junior high separated all of us, and then the sapling that I was, finally taking root after ten years of mass rejection from the soil, was ripped up and transplanted to a town where I'd never see any of them again anyway.</p>
<p>We as humans think in stories. It's hard to do otherwise. You burn your hand on the stove, and then never again as you remember the story of how your hand throbbed in pain. You learn how to do a skill, and in visualizing it in your head, you play a mini-story of some formless person acting out those steps so that you can mirror their actions in your own. You pass down your values and morals to little children by telling them fables.</p>
<p>You drown the pain of existence by stitching yourself into a story, a coherent one, one with a moral and a gist and some sense of a definite ending.</p>
<p>But stories in the human sense are not real. They are <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110831022543/theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2010/12/living-in-epilogue-social-policy-as.html">social constructs</a>. You convince yourself that you are living in a narrative because to do otherwise is to concede that there is no purpose of life, no grand scheme of things, just the endless expanse of day after day after day.</p>
<p>Gamers who play story-based games with post-games- in other words, games that let you keep playing even after the final boss fight- rarely stay long in the post-boss world. Without the grand struggle to strive for, the big boss to defeat or the lover to save or the treasure to acquire, the world becomes boring, pointless. One pours their time into games to create heaven, and then finds that, without conflict or an objective, there is no compelling reason- <em>story</em>- to keep them hanging around.</p>
<p>Heaven is, for most religious-minded people, the final end stage of their constructed story of life. Heaven is the cessation of struggle, of desire, the eternal epilogue.</p>
<blockquote>&quot;We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality...&quot; <br />- Sarah Perry, <em>Every Cradle Is a Grave</em></blockquote>
<p>And I'm trapped in the epilogue. There is no rhyme or reason to my life. If there was a grand struggle to this story of mine, I can't discern if it's over or where it is now if not- and the confusion is <a href="../../../poetry/s/sakura.txt">taking a toll</a> on my <a href="../../../flashfiction/c/cetra.html">ability to write</a>. The confusion is terrifying. Who am I if I <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">have no story</a>? A <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin4.html">body without organs</a>? How am I supposed to string together a coherent narrative if I don't have one of my own to fall back on?</p>
<p>And I fall, and I fall further into the vortex with my wings ablaze, and I fall forever...</p>
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