misery, and that is precisely what makes it so great, interesting, and worth living. — Wosret

Misery is not great. I's actually miserable.

The knots people put themselves in!

Yeah... I didn't say that misery was great, I said that it was one of the things that makes life great. Apples aren't pies, but they're one of the things that make pies.

So, if you want your life to be great, you should look for ways to be miserable?

I mean, you should look for apples if you want to make a pie, right?

So why not purposefully look for ways to suffer? Doesn't that make life worth living? Won't it make you happy? Why not stab yourself in the foot or tear out your eyeballs?

Or is it only a specific kind of suffering/misery that makes you happy...?

Notice on its face how absurd the claim that misery makes you happy sounds. Maybe there's some reason you believe it, I don't know?

Maybe if I was deficient enough in the misery department I might try that, but my cup runneth over. People that get bored enough stir up lots of shit. That's why idle hands are the devil's play things. Most people have plenty enough suffering and conflict to get them by just fine.

You are also misrepresenting what I said again. Misery doesn't equate to happiness, in a one to one correspondence, but boredom, lack of conflict and drama is always worse.

So you're saying, there is an ideal amount of misery a life should have in order to be happy, but that there can also be superfluous suffering? And that your life, maybe the ordinary person's life, has too much (or at least enough)?

Isn't boredom a kind of misery?

What do you expect, or want from life? What does it owe you? What would it take to live up to your standards?

Personally, nothing. I would just like to get out without too much hassle. I'm just trying to make sense of what a natalist expects/wants from life, and how misery ties into it. On its face it doesn't make much sense to me to say that misery is important for happiness. Misery is important for misery.

I think maybe people falsely equate accomplishment, growth and challenge with suffering or misery, but they're really different.

I don't think that there's any denying that it feels better returning to normal health after being sick than just always being normal health. There is a happiness there. There is a relief, and happiness in being delivered from a distressing circumstance. Every kind of food is fantastic when you're starving.

It sure would be wonderful if we could get those feelings without the preceding misery, but that isn't how the world works. Equating life itself with suffering and misery is why one would want to escape, in order for the release.

I don't expect much, I enjoy my little pleasures, and am quite pleased about how things are going for me. I can't wait to be working hard again though, any day now... as relaxing just isn't relaxing until the point of complete exhaustion.

I don't think that there's any denying that it feels better returning to normal health after being sick than just always being normal health. There is a happiness there. There is a relief, and happiness in being delivered from a distressing circumstance. Every kind of food is fantastic when you're starving. — Wosret

So, shouldn't you be looking for ways to make yourself sick on purpose, so that you can recover from it, since that's better than just staying healthy?

No, because I have more important things to do, nor do I think that life is only, or primarily about pleasure seeking. Enough pleasure, and enough misery tends to come my way, without me even trying, on the way to more important things.

Besides, I was chronically sick for 22 years of my life, and only moderately healthy for 9. Though I still experienced much back pain until only a couple of years ago. I think I've still got plenty of appreciating left to do.

And that chronic illness made your life better? If you had to relive it, would you rather be healthy for 22 years or sick?

I like who I am, my experiences are formative of who I've become, so no, I wouldn't change them.

So, going forward, if the 22 years of sickness were good for you, shouldn't you strive to make yourself sick for the next 22 years? If not, what's different about this time?

I was charitable enough to answer that question in a different way the second time you asked it, I don't think I'll come up with a third answer. Just look at my previous two.

I was charitable enough to answer that question in a different way the second time you asked it, I don't think I'll come up with a third answer. Just look at my previous two. — Wosret

I don't see anything in the previous answers that addresses the question.

So, if you want your life to be great, you should look for ways to be miserable?

I mean, you should look for apples if you want to make a pie, right? — The Great Whatever

You can't eat a great apple pie without the apples. In fact, you can't eat an apple pie at all without the apples. The apples are an essential ingredient. Whether you look for them or not, you're gonna encounter apples.

The error in your thinking is your ideal of what you take to be a perfect pie. We can't make a perfect pie, so you conclude that it's not worth making. Scrap that ideal, I say. Not only is it an unachievable hindrance, it's not even a sensible notion of a perfect pie. For a pie without any filling is lacking something quite important.

I'm hungry, so I'm going to make an apple pie - hopefully a great one - rather than sit and sulk about my hunger for an apple pie.

I was charitable enough to answer that question in a different way the second time you asked it. I don't think I'll come up with a third answer. Just look at my previous two. — Wosret

(Y)

He has merely rephrased his earlier loaded question, which, as you've already explained, is based on a flawed understanding of your position.

I don't see that you've shown this. To be celibate is to be practically anatalist, though not necessarily theoretically. What is unclear about this? — Thorongil

To practice contraception is to be practically 'anatalist', though not necessarily theoretically, so neither contraception nor celibacy are necessarily logically (theoretically or ideologically) connected to either a-, or anti-, natalism.

This is an absurd question because it never happens. The relief of suffering is only a feeling in moments where someone has suffered. No-one can relive anything. To ask whether one would relive their live differently, as if someone could still be themselves, the person who felt relief from suffering, is nonsensical. If they didn't suffer, their live would be different. They would be a different person. You aren't asking to relive their life, you are asking whether or not there is a different life which is better than theirs.

Now that is a perfectly coherent question, one which many people would answer in the affirmative. It is, however, irrelevant to the lived experienced of the individual. They are forever stuck with what happened in their life. Imagined worlds cannot alter what happened to them. Whatever suffering and happiness they are feeling/ have felt, they are stuck with. Your pontifications about a life which would have been better are entirely irrelevant to their lives. It's like walking up to a torture victim and asking: "Wouldn't it have been great if you weren't tortured?" - nothing more than a platitude on your part, which is irrelevant at best and insulting at worse.

Misery is important for happiness because, in some cases, that person's happiness occurs after misery and is an end to that misery. This is not to say that misery is what makes happiness possible, but rather to point out that many instances of happiness occur because a moment of misery has ceased. It is about the misery and suffering that the people in question are living through. For many people, to end a moment of misery is an accomplishment which brings happiness.

I'm cognizant that I walk dangerous and offensive ground myself. I could easily be construed as glorifying the most deeply traumatic of experiences, or oppressed circumstances. It seems to be the case, according to psychological standards, that the most attractive well-to-do people grow up to be the most emotionally well-adjusted. Of course the most attractive well-to-do girls are also in the highest risk group of cutting themselves, and why do they do it? Mostly because it makes them high, it makes them feel when they're numb, distressed, alone, and bored.

I'm of course not glorifying suffering, like it was a great thing to have been molested, or to have been in a concentration camp, I'm simply saying that if it happened, it's better to try to make something out of it than to be destroyed by it -- that leading a completely uneventful life is not so great either. There's of course excess in either direction, things are often good in certain amounts, but no matter how good we may imagine them to be, they'd become less so the more and more of it we got, until they'd eventually become destructive.

It's of course not glorious to have lived though horrible traumas, but it is more glorious to have survived them, and not have been destroyed by them than to have lived a completely uneventful life, filled with bored and unappreciated pleasures and security.

We can't make a perfect pie, so you conclude that it's not worth making. — Sapientia

As far as I can see I neither said nor implied this, so I don't know what you're on about.

It's of course not glorious to have lived though horrible traumas, but it is more glorious to have survived them, and not have been destroyed by them than to have lived a completely uneventful life, filled with bored and unappreciated pleasures and security. — Wosret

I don't even understand what you're trying to say. It sounds like you're just saying 'p, but not p.'

I know that I'm super deep, and it's difficult to grasp my level of monstrous profundity -- but more like "p, but if too much p, then not p". Life isn't like a syllogism, where things are necessarily so or not so, but rather a matter of degrees.

Wosret seems to be arguing the route that Nietzsche did regarding Schopenhauer; that the latter was much too decadent and became weak and posh, thus culminating in his gloomy appropriation of the world.

To a point, pain is necessary for life to have meaning, at least life in its current form. Perhaps theoretically we could change the chemical makeup of the human brain so that no pain is necessary for meaning. Perhaps in the theoretical future, the ancestors of our generations will view any kind of discomfort as pathological. But the point is that it's not a cosmic fundamental law that meaning requires pain/conflict, just that its a current fact based on our biological makeup.

The trouble here is that you can't seem to have meaning (or, as I like to see it, a heroic narrative), without there being risk as well as pain. There is pain, but there is also suffering. Suffering creates the risk. And so it seems like a Catch-22 in which, if we were to eliminate suffering but not pain, then there would be no risk, and therefore there would be no hero; for what would there be to overcome/triumph?

If life is set out in front of us with no risk, then there is no meaning because there is no conflict, there is no motivation. But if one should fail in their endeavors, and therefore suffer, suddenly meaning really doesn't have any part of the equation. Meaning goes out the window as soon as someone begins to profusely suffer. Existence, instead of being a heroic game, becomes a thing to endure and wish was better.

And this, in my opinion, is precisely why birth can be seen as a tragic event. The future is unknown, and therefore optimistic foreshadowing is useless and may lead to considerable harm.

I could be put in worse company!

Maybe someday they will come up with such a way to change our chemistry, and we can all lay stoned in a blissful stupor on the floor. When our loves die we can feel nothing but pleasure, and when our children are crippled in accidents we can grin with bliss. Oh what a wonderful world that will be... we won't all be nightmarishly insane at all!

You say that we can't have the meaning that makes life worth living without a real risk, and then say that it is precisely because there is a risk that life isn't worth living. A catch 22 indeed, the justifications for living, and not living being identical. I'ma arbitrarily side with the living.

You should read this.

Forced chemical happiness, bliss as the response to every foreseeable circumstance isn't hollow, and somehow promotes personal growth and deep insight? People claim feeling that way on some drugs, because they heighten the feeling of significance, but if it isn't genuinely significant, then it is hollow. Whatever magical alterations this guy imagines are delusional. I guarantee that stifling the range of human emotion, to the wet dream equivalent of buddy's imagination would just result in desperate attempts to feel something different, (unless the past range of human emotion was entirely hidden from the populous) out of boredom. Oh, would they not get bored also? Then everyone would starve to death staring at the wall (because no discomfort from hunger, no impetus to favor any activities over any others). What's that, people will be perhaps programmed to sustain their lives without discomfort nudging them? Then they're a generation of robots.

Also, I doubt that the author comes from a back ground of a regime of "pain disease and unhappiness", so whence comes his special insight into the condition that allows for such righteous indignation? I'd like to see him go do missionary work to places he imagines is like that with that kind of attitude, and find out how the people react to him. Besides that, wouldn't it be better to actually work on the causes of pain disease and unhappiness, and mitigate, and arrest them where they are in excess, rather than forgetting and dooming them in favor of a future "intelligently designed" eugenics project?

I find that loon far less than persuasive.

The future is not really unknown in an important sense with birth: namely you will suffer terribly, which is guaranteed. Given this I don't see any good justification for giving birth, it seems straightforwardly wrong.