I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why people have children. The answers are almost always familiar: to leave a legacy, to experience unconditional love, to give life meaning, or simply because “that’s what people do.” None of these answers have ever satisfied me. The more I’ve read existentialist and absurdist philosophy, the more I’ve become convinced that having children doesn’t solve the problem of existence. It merely passes it on.
Albert Camus argued that human beings long for meaning in a universe that offers none. That tension — the collision between our desire for purpose and the world’s indifference — is what he called the absurd. His response wasn’t despair, but rebellion. We continue living, creating, loving, and searching for meaning despite knowing there is no cosmic guarantee that any of it matters. I admire that response. However, I don’t believe it follows that we should create new people to join us in that struggle.
Every person who is born will experience loss. Every person will know fear, disappointment, sickness, grief, anxiety, and eventually death. Even the happiest life can’t escape these realities. Joy exists, love exists, beauty exists, but so does suffering, and no one gets to choose only one side of the equation. When people say, “Life is a gift,” I can’t help but ask: “For whom?”
Before someone exists, there is no one waiting to receive that gift. There is no consciousness longing to be born. Birth doesn’t fulfill a need that already existed, it creates a person who will have needs, desires, frustations, and vulnerabilities that otherwise would have never existed. That doesn’t make life worthless. It simply means that creating life is not morally neutral.
I often hear that having children gives people purpose. I don’t doubt that’s true for many parents. But if our answer to existential uncertainty is to create another person who must confront that same uncertainty, have we solved anything? Or have we simply deferred the question? To me, meaning is something we create for ourselves, not something we outsource to the next generation.
This is why my anti-natalism isn’t rooted in pessimism or hatred of humanity. If anything, it’s rooted in compassion. I don’t look at the world and think people deserve to suffer. I look at the world and recognize that suffering is unavoidable, even in the best of lives. If I can prevent someone from experiencing that without depriving anyone who already exists, I believe that’s worth considering. Some will disagree, and that’s fine. These questions don’t have easy answers. They force us to examine assumptions that are so deeply woven into our culture that we rarely stop to question them.
Maybe that’s all philosophy is at its best: the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions.
For me, one of those questions is “If existence is an absurd struggle that each of us must navigate alone, why assume the answer is to bring someone else into it?”
I don’t claim to have the answer. I only know that, for me, creating another consciousness has never seemed like the solution to the silence of the universe.
Sometimes the most compassionate response to the absurd isn’t to ensure someone else experiences it. Sometimes it’s simply to face it ourselves.
Sisyphus Shrugged 