Description
Life is a mixture of good and bad, or so they say. Trouble is, there’s no way to determine where a particular life might fall along fortune’s spectrum. For every child born into the lap of luxury, there’s another born on the point of a knife. There are no guarantees as to what may transpire as the immediate present unfolds into the uncertain future. Things change in an instant. Two things, however, are certain. Everyone will suffer. And everyone will die. Back to where we came from. Knowing this, and understanding full well that any particular life embodies the potential for experiencing extreme pain and unhappiness — unceasing in some cases — is procreation really worth the risk?
Jim Crawford doesn’t believe it is. In Confessions of an Antinatalist, Crawford reflects on what it means to exist in the belly of a ravening serpent-life whose only prey is itself, and whose teeth are very, very sharp.
Excerpt:
Hope is my enemy. She is a succubus who descends upon sleeping humankind, whispering in their collective ear that there IS a future. A bright future, as a matter of fact; as long as we persevere in extending our essences through the lives of our children, and through their children. She is a liar, a snakeoil peddler bartering chimera for generative fluid, which she sucks out of us before casting our withered husks onto the fire. And so we fall, row upon row like seasons of corn, but not until we relinquish our seed into her exploitive hands. For in the end, we all die, and only Hope lives on. And we rot, sometimes mourned for a season, but presently forgotten. Ultimately, and like it or not, we are the future’s dirt. THIS is the state of affairs we choose to subject our children to.
