Is it better to be asleep, dead, or to have never existed? | On 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation'
A New Yorker interview with anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar has stuck with me since 2017. Reading it alongside Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, this is an essay about sleep, death and never existing at all, and why none of the three quite work as a way out.
One of the most influential articles I ever read is a 2017 piece in The New Yorker. It's called The Case for Not Being Born and it's an interview with the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar.
Benatar's point is incredibly simple: life is pain and it's better to have never experienced it than to live through the pain.
He argues that life is full of things you don't want to do, occasionally punctuated by moments that make it better (but not quite worthwhile). His examples include: paying the bills, going to work, standing in the supermarket checkout queue. All of the mundane, infinitely repeatable, tasks that collude to make up a life.
Yes, if you're lucky enough to be so wealthy, you may get one fantastic holiday a year, but is one good month out of every 12 worth living a lifetime for? David thinks not. He reckons the scales of the bad outweigh the good to such an extent that having a child and subjecting them to the pain of heart break, bullying, financial stress, the capitalist grind, and a lifetime of debt is outright immoral.
I agree.
And it's why I've spent two years on a waiting list to get neutered like a dog (#FreeTheEunuchMaker).
