Post by cupcakes on Jan 23, 2018 17:59:06 GMT
tpfkar
Jan 23, 2018 1:39:25 GMT @miccee said:
"Life is hard" refers to the cost of life. And life has tremendous costs not just for the particular person/animal living that one life, but on any other person or animal affected. So for one single human life, there is a cost to other humans and also the animals who needed to be tortured, have their habitats ruined, etc, in order that the needs of that one human can be met.I'm as sensitive to the beauty in the world as anyone; but I wouldn't have been deprived of it had I never been born...and neither would you, nor anyone else. It's impossible to imagine a world without anyone to appreciate the beauty, because by trying to imagine it, you place yourself within it as an observer. But there's no reason to think that the universe as it existed before sentient life was a tragic place with any void of experience that urgently needed to be filled.
Back in the seventies, I wanted to move out of the suburbs that I had been raised in. My father had grown up on that piece of land when it was still farmland. By the seventies it was a long-established suburb that had sprung up in the fifties. I wanted to live in the country, with my horse in a pasture behind my house. So I moved miles out of the city to find that.
But over the years, the human developments have diminished that countryside that I loved. Many a natural pasture or woodland has been made into a housing development. Country roads have become six lane highways. Family farms are becoming a thing of the past. Nature is shrinking.
I chose an area that hasn't developed that much, but if people continue to reproduce at the rate they are going, soon there won't be any natural areas left. There won't be any beauty in nature left. If people stop having children, with zero population growth and perhaps a loss of population as a goal, the world could be sustained, and have less suffering for the sentient life already here. As sentient life diminished, living beings might have a better quality if life, and when sentient life ceased, unborn lives would never miss what they never had.
I don't feel any sadness that my unconceived children never got to ride my horse or see the changing colors of the leaves. I do feel glad that they didn't have to experience the dysfunction that runs in my family, a source of suffering for me even now. I also didn't genetically pass on the gene for cancer; my treatment for that was a terrible, miserable ordeal. I got an extended life as a result of the treatment, but made sure no child of mine would have to suffer that way.
It just seems to me that a shrinking population would lessen suffering.
Take, eat; this is my body.