This is a linkpost for https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/selections-from-the-trouble-with
Adding in a bit of my own worldview, I find this topic interesting, because I think people often conflate the "trouble" with being born and the "trouble" with being self-aware. As I see it, there's no suffering from just existing. It's only when you know you exist and can see yourself in pain that suffering is arises, and from that the aspect of pain is not existence, but a particular kind of self-awareness that's focused on suffering and the way in which each moment is being assessed to be net negative rather than neutral or net positive.
I used to be in a deep depression for many years, so I take this sort of existential quandary seriously and have independently had many similar thoughts. I used to say that I didn't ask to be born, and that consciousness was the cruelest trick the universe ever played.
Depression can cause extreme anguish, and can narrow the sufferer's focus such that they are forced to reflect on themselves (or the whole world) only through a lens of suffering. If the depressed person still reflexively self-preserves, they might wish for death without pursuing it, or they might wish for their non-existence without actually connoting death. Either way, any chronically depressed person might consistently and truly wish that they were never born, and for some people this is a more palatable thing to wish for than death.
I eventually recovered from my depression, and my current life is deeply wonderful in many ways. But the horror of having once sincerely pled not to have been has stuck with me.
That's something I'll have to work through if I ever choose to have children. It's difficult to consider bringing new life into the world when it's possible that the predominant thing I would actually be bringing into the world is suffering. I expect that I will work through this successfully, since recovery is also part of my experience, and I have adopted the axiom (at least intellectually) that being is better than non-being.
I've been aware for some time that there was a Romanian-Parisian existentialist philosopher named Emil Cioran who wrote On the Heights of Despair and The Trouble With Being Born. The other day when mentioning him I pulled up a copy of Trouble for the first time and everyone present found it all hilarious. It’s all unconnected aphorisms:
Not all of the aphorisms were like this. In fact I liked reading the book. It’s interesting to compare aphorism books to tweets.