Absurdism and Anti-Natalism

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.

Anarchist Praxis

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between ideology and praxis. People ask questions like, “What’s your political label?” “What system do you support?” “What would society look like under your beliefs?” Those questions matter, but I’m becoming more interested in a different question:

“What do you actually do?”

Praxis is where the idea stops being theory and becomes action, and for me, that’s been complicated.

I’m not someone who can spend all day organizing meetings, traveling to events, or showing up to every action. There are limits in my life that make participation look different than people often have of activism. For a long time, I saw that as a failure; like if I couldn’t participate in the “right” way, I wasn’t participating at all. I don’t think that anymore.

My politics are built around the idea that people shouldn’t be valued only by productivity, so it doesn’t make sense to apply that standard to myself. My praxis doesn’t look dramatic. It looks like mutual aid. It looks like helping where I can. It looks like supporting people directly.

It looks like research, writing, sharing information, donating when possible, amplifying causes I care about, and trying to contribute with the energy and resources I actually have. It also looks like political education. I don’t think one post changes the world, but ideas do matter. Conversations matter. Giving people language for what they’re feeling matters.

Sometimes my praxis is writing.

Sometimes it’s posting.

Sometimes it’s helping someone find resources.

Sometimes it’s surviving a hard week and still caring afterward.

I think there’s pressure online to treat activism like competition. Who’s doing enough? Who’s radical enough? Who’s committed enough? I’m less interested in that these days. I want politics that include people who are disabled, exhausted, isolated, broke, busy, overwhelmed, or simply doing what they can. I don’t think participation only counts when it’s visible. I think showing up however you can still counts.

Maybe praxis isn’t about becoming the perfect activist. Maybe it’s about refusing to become passive. Maybe building a better world starts smaller than we think.

Heart of Darkness from an Anarchist Perspective

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness remains one of the most unsettling critiques of colonialism ever written. While the novella is often discussed in terms of race, psychology, or literary style, it also offers a powerful lens through which anarchists can examine the relationship between power, domination, and human corruption.

At its core, it’s a story about authority unleashed from restraint. The European powers claim to be bringing civilization to Africa, but Conrad quickly strips away this illusion. The colonial project is revealed not as a humanitarian mission but as a system of exploitation, extraction, and violence. The rhetoric of progress serves as a mask for the pursuit of ivory, wealth, and control.

For anarchists, this critique feels immediately familiar. States and empires often justify their power by claiming to act in the interests of civilization, security, or prosperity. Yet beneath these justifications lies coercion. The Congo in Conrad’s novella is not an aberration of imperialism but a logical consequence of concentrated power operating without accountability.

The character of Kurtz emodies this dynamic. He arrives in Africa with lofty ideals and grand ambitions. He is eloquent, educated, and apparently committed to humanitarian principles. Yet given near-total authority over his station and separated from meaningful social constraints, he transforms into a tyrant. The heads displayed on stakes outside his compound are not merely symbols of what happens when one individual gains unchecked power over others.

An anarchist reading rejects the comforting notion that Kurtz was simply an exceptionally evil man. The more disturbing possibility is that the structures around him encouraged and rewarded domination. The company admired him because he produced results. His brutality became acceptable as long as it served the economic interests of those in power. Kurtz is less a monster than a product of a system built on hierarchy and extraction.

Heart of Darkness also challenges the colonial distinction between “civilized” and “savage.” Throughout the story, it is the supposedly civilized Europeans who commit acts of extraordinary cruelty. Conrad suggests that civilization itself does not eliminate violence; it often organizes and legitimizes it. This insight resonates strongly with anarchist critiques of the state. Governments frequently claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, presenting themselves as guardians of order while engaging in warfare, repression, and exploitation on a massive scale.

At the same time, the novella is not a straightforward revolutionary text. Conrad offers little hope for resistance or liberation. His worldview is deeply pessimistic, often portraying darkness as an inherent aspect of human nature. Many anarchists would disagree with this conclusion. Thinkers such as Kropotkin argued that cooperation and mutual aid are just as natural to humanity as competition and domination. From this perspective, the problem is not humanity itself but the institution that concentrate power and reward exploitation.

This tension is what makes the novella so compelling. Conrad diagnoses the sickness of empire with remarkable clarity but remains skeptical that humanity can overcome it. Anarchists may accept his critique of authority while rejecting his pessimism about human potential.

More than a century after its publication, Heart of Darkness remains relevant because the questions it raises have not disappeared. How do systems of power corrupt those who wield them? How do institutions justify violence in the name of civilization? And what happens when economic interests are placed above human dignity?

Conrad doesn’t provide answers. He leaves us with Kurtz dying words: “The horror! The horror!” For anarchists, those words can be read as a final recognition of what lies at the heart of empire: not civilization, but domination.

Anti-Natalism is Not Class Hatred

Every time anti-natalism comes up in leftist spaces, the same accusation appears almost immediately: “So you think poor people shouldn’t have kids?” That’s not what anti-natalism is.

There is a massive difference between criticizing poor people for reproducing and questioning whether bringing anyone into existence is ethical under conditions of unavoidable suffering. Yet anti-natalism is constantly flattened into a caricature of eugenics, elitism, or “capitalist talking points.” That reaction often misses how deeply capitalism itself depends on endless reproduction.

Capitalism needs workers. It needs consumers. It needs renters, debtors, soldiers, and future laborers. A system built on perpetual growth requires a constant supply of new human beings to sustain it. Reproduction isn’t outside capitalism, it’s one of the mechanisms through which capitalism perpetuates itself. So when anti-natalists question reproduction, they are not necessarily attacking working class people. They are questioning the expectation that creating new life is automatically moral, necessary, or liberatory.

A common response from socialists and communists is that the real issue is material conditions. People suffer because capitalism creates poverty, insecurity, alienation, and exploitation. Therefore, the solution is not to discourage childbirth, but to build a world where people can thrive. Improving material conditions is obviously good. Fewer people suffering under poverty, medical debt, or homelessness is objectively preferable to the alternative. Anti-natalism asks a different question entirely.

Even in wealthy countries with strong social programs, people still experience grief, illness, depression, anxiety, aging, loneliness, and death. Even in ideal conditions, existence becomes packaged with loss and vulnerability. No amount of economic reform eliminates mortality or guarantees a meaningful life. The anti-natalist argument isn’t simply “the economy is bad.” It’s that existence itself imposes suffering on people who never consented to being born in the first place. That’s a philosophical argument, not a classist one. The distinction matters because people often confuse anti-natalism with selective breeding arguments. Eugenics says certain people shouldn’t reproduce because of who they are: poor, disabled, racialized, “undesirable,” etc.

Anti-natalism applies universally. It doesn’t target one class or group. The argument isn’t “poor people shouldn’t have children.” The argument is “creating sentient beings inevitably exposes them to suffering, and we should seriously question whether that is ethical at all.” Those are fundamentally different positions.

As a matter of fact, many anti-natalists are deeply critical of systems that pressure poor people into parenthood while simultaneously denying them healthcare, housing, childcare, and stability. Criticizing reproduction under oppressive systems is not the same as blaming oppressed people for existing within those systems.

Another issue is how deeply reproduction is romanticized across political ideologies. Conservatives frame childbirth as tradition and duty. Liberals frame it as fulfillment and personal choice. Even many leftists frame it as hope for the future or an act of resistance, but very few people interrogate the assumption that creating new life is inherently good.

There is immense social pressure to reproduce. People who don’t want children are often treated as immature, selfish, damaged, or nihilistic. Meanwhile, having children is treated as morally neutral or even virtuous by default, despite the fact that parenthood imposes life — and all its suffering — onto another person without their consent. Anti-natalism disrupts that assumption, which is why it provokes such hostility.

Human beings are biologically and socially driven toward reproduction, but inevitably it’s not the same thing as morality. People will continue doing many things that deserve ethical scrutiny. The fact that something is natural or historically common doesn’t automatically make it ethical. Anti-natalism isn’t a legislative project to forcibly stop reproduction. For most anti-natalists, it’s a philosophical position about harm reduction and ethical responsibility.

At its core, anti-natalism is often rooted less in hatred of humanity than in empathy for it. Many anti-natalists arrive at their position not because they despise people, but because they’re acutely aware of suffering, poverty, violence, trauma, disease, loneliness, exploitation, ecological collapse, and the quiet pain woven into ordinary existence. To them, refusing to impose life on another person isn’t cruelty. It’s restraint.

You don’t have to agree with anti-natalism to engage with it honestly. Dismissing it as merely “capitalist propaganda” ignores the deeper ethical question it raises: If life guarantees suffering, and no one can consent to being born, why is creating life treated as morally unquestionable?

On Remaining, Regrettably

I regret to inform you that I will not be dying today.

This is not out of hope, nor courage, nor any particularly admirable trait. Let the record show: I remain unconvinced by life’s supposed “beauty,” unmoved by its sales pitch, and deeply suspicious of anyone who describes it as a gift without including a receipt.

No, my continued existence is, at best, a clerical error I have chosen not to correct.
I have reviewed the arguments. I have read The Myth of Sisyphus and noted the insistence that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. I do not imagine him happy. I imagine him tired, irritated, and increasingly passive-aggressive toward the rock. And yet, he pushes.

Not because it matters. Not because it ends. But because the alternative would grant the universe a kind of victory it has not earned.

I have also consulted Emil Cioran, who kindly confirmed that existence is, in fact, a mistake. A relief, honestly. It’s nice to have that in writing. Still, even he lingered; complaining, observing, refusing to exit the stage he so clearly despised.
Which brings me here: not hopeful, not redeemed, but… present.

Let it be known that I do not stay for the usual reasons. Not for destiny, nor progress, nor the vague promise that things will “get better.” I stay out of curiosity, irritation, and a stubborn refusal to let absurdity have the last word.
If existence insists on being meaningless, then I will insist on experiencing it anyway. If only to document the failure.
I will drink bad coffee. I will argue with strangers. I will laugh at things that probably shouldn’t be funny. I will continue to observe humanity with a mix of fascination and disappointment, like a critic who refuses to leave a terrible play.

And yes, I will continue to wake up—begrudgingly, skeptically, but consistently.
Not as an act of faith.
As an act of defiance.
So no, this is not a farewell. It is, if anything, a protest. A refusal to resolve the tension. A decision to remain, not because life is good, but because it is absurd, and I am not finished mocking it.

Sincerely,
Someone who is still, inexplicably, here

The Strangest Thing About Being an Anti-Natalist

The strangest thing about being an anti-natalist isn’t the philosophy, it’s how angry people get about it. I’m not proposing laws. I’m not advocating forced sterilization. I’m not suggesting the state regulate reproduction. All I’m doing is saying I don’t think having children is ethically justified, and that I personally choose not to do it. Yet somehow that turns into accusations of eugenics, nihilism, fascism, or wanting to wipe out humanity.

This is interesting because the philosophy most people are actually arguing with — usually without realizing it — comes from thinkers like David Benatar, whose book Better Never to Have Been makes a pretty straightforward argument: bringing someone into existence exposes them to suffering to which they never consented. That’s it. That’s the core of it. And once you see the argument clearly, it’s hard to unsee.

Nobody consents to being born. That’s not rhetorical flourish. It’s just a fact. Every other major moral system we use in society revolves around consent. We treat it as one of the most basic ethical principles we have. Yet the biggest decision anyone will ever experience — the decision that creates their entire existence — is made without it.

Now, obviously, consent from a nonexistent person is impossible. Anti-natalism recognizes that, but that impossibility doesn’t magically make the ethical problem disappear. Instead it raises a question:

If creating someone exposes them to pain, illness, loss, anxiety, and eventually death … what’s the moral justification for doing it?

“But life is good!”

This is the first response. People say life is beautiful, meaningful, joyful. Sometimes it is. Anti-natalism doesn’t deny that pleasure exists. The argument is that pleasure doesn’t justify imposing suffering on someone who didn’t ask for the gamble in the first place. You can’t miss pleasures you were never born to experience, but if you’re born, you can absolutely experience suffering, and everyone does.

There’s also the eugenics accusation. One of the strangest criticisms I’ve heard over the past two days is that anti-natalism is a form of eugenics. This makes absolutely no sense. Eugenics is about selective reproduction. Deciding who should reproduce based on genetics, race, disability, or social status. It doesn’t say certain people shouldn’t have children. It says no one has a morally compelling reason to create new people at all. If anything, that’s the opposite of eugenics. Eugenics wants better babies. Anti-natalism questions whether creating babies in the first place is ethical.

Then there’s the whole “But what about the future?” This is another common argument that refusing to reproduce is defeatist. People say humanity needs future generations to fix the world. But this argument quietly assumes something strange: That the solution to suffering is creating new people who will inherit it. Imagine solving poverty by creating more poor people who might someday fix poverty. Imagine solving war by creating more soldiers. At some point the logic starts to look less like hope and more like a pyramid scheme.

The intensity of the backlash says something interesting. Anti-natalism isn’t just a philosophical argument. It pokes at one of the deepest assumptions our culture has: that having children is automatically meaningful, noble, and morally good. Questioning that assumption feels threatening. If reproduction isn’t inherently justified, then one of humanity’s most fundamental behaviors suddenly requires ethical scrutiny. That’s uncomfortable. So the response is often to attack the person making the argument instead of engaging with the argument itself.

At the end of the day, my decision to not have children doesn’t harm anyone. It doesn’t take anything away from people who wants families. But the philosophy matters because it forces us to confront a question most people never ask:

“Why do we assume creating life is morally neutral — or even good — by default?”

Maybe the answer is still yes. Maybe humanity keeps going forever. But if that’s the case, it should at least be a decision people think about seriously instead of treating reproduction as something automatic. If nothing else, anti-natalism forces that conversation. And judging by the reactions I’ve been seeing online the past two days, it’s a conversation a lot of people would rather avoid.

Not My Words, but I Share the Sentiment

“Consumerism is going to be the death rattle of this country. Not war. Not some foreign boogeyman. The shopping cart and the endless scroll.

“I keep seeing people say “why is nobody doing anything about what came out of the Epstein files?” and the answer is painfully obvious. Because the Super Bowl is this Sunday. Because your show just dropped a new episode. Because you can swipe your thumb and get another dopamine pellet like a lab rat that learned the trick too well.

“Back in Marx’s day, religion was the opium of the people. A soothing fog to dull the pain of exploitation and keep everyone compliant. Same function, different costume. Today it’s Amazon Prime, TikTok Shop, and Netflix. Monthly subscriptions instead of sermons. Next-day shipping instead of salvation. Infinite content instead of heaven. The promise is identical: don’t change the world, just endure it quietly while we keep you sedated.

“We are drowning in revelations and choosing distraction. Not because people are stupid, but because attention is terrifying. Paying attention means admitting the world is rotten in ways that can’t be fixed with a purchase, a binge, or a brand identity. Escapism is safer. Escapism doesn’t ask anything of you. Escapism lets you feel informed without acting and angry without risk.

“Consumer culture doesn’t just sell products. It sells anesthesia. It teaches us to process horror by changing the channel, to respond to abuse with vibes and reactions and content. Outrage becomes another consumable. Even disgust gets monetized, packaged between ads, then forgotten by the next refresh.

“So nothing happens. Not because nothing matters, but because we’ve been trained to treat everything as temporary content. Scroll past the monsters. Clap for the halftime show. Keep the fantasy running. Reality is bad for engagement metrics.

That’s the trap. A population too distracted to revolt, too entertained to organize, too exhausted to look directly at the truth for more than twelve seconds at a time. Consumerism doesn’t need to silence us. It just needs to keep us busy.”

A Treaty with the Abyss

I’ve only written two poems in my entire life. Well, that’s not entirely true. I used to write lyrics for a band my friends and I were forming that never got off the ground. I’ve been in a bad place as of late and jotted this down last night to kind of try to help me through what I’m going through. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s any good, but I thought I’d share it here. Maybe it can help someone else. Maybe I’m just screaming into the void as usual. Like I said, I’ve just been in a bad way and felt the need to write something and couldn’t come up with anything but these words. I didn’t do much thinking on it. I just wrote down what came to mind. Just my own discombobulated mind spilled out on paper and now here on the Internet.

I wake up each morning
as if returning to a mistake I didn’t make.
The sun rises out of habit,
and I rise out of spite.

Some days my mind is a broken cathedral,
echoing with sermons I never asked to hear.
Other days it’s a carnival mirror–
every reflection warped
every laugh track broken.

There is a rhythm to the collapse,
a pulse that insists I keep going
even when I want to negotiate my exit
with whatever god still bothers
to read the fine print of my thoughts.

Bipolar dawns come and go:
one morning I am incandescent,
a lighthouse for a ship that will never arrive;
the next I am the ocean floor,
quiet enough to make silence uneasy.

But existence refuses to end on cue.
It drags on with the stubbornness of a bad joke
that no one remembers telling.
And I still stay for the punchline,
not out of hope,
but because even futility has a texture
I’ve learned to hold without breaking.

If there’s any mercy in this world,
it’s that numbness, too, is a kind of shelter.
And on the days when the abyss leans in
as if to whisper a shortcut,
I answer the only way I know how:
Not today.
I’m busy watching the ruins glow.

Infinite Jest and the Test of Boredom

Infinite Jest is one of those books I re-visit a lot on this site. It’s in my top five favorite books of all time. When people ask what it’s about I tell them the surface level answer: It’s about a film so entertaining that people watch it without doing anything else until they die. Oh, and tennis. It’s more than that though. I talked to a friend of mine about it who introduced me to the book in the first place. I told him, “I think, at its core, Infinite Jest is a book about our inability to deal with boredom.” Not even our inability, our refusal. It’s about the sheer panic that rises in us when we’re left alone with our thoughts, without a screen or distraction to drown out the noise inside.

The author — David Foster Wallace — saw boredom as the truest test of freedom. Not freedom in the political sense, but the freedom to exist without the constant need to be entertained. The freedom to pay attention — to life, to others, to ourselves — without numbing out. The irony, of course, is that we’ve built a society where that kind of freedom feels unbearable.

The book also tackles addiction, and the addicts in Infinite Jest aren’t just addicted to substances, they’re addicted to escape. To anything that shields them from the crushing weight of unfiltered consciousness. But Wallace’s genius was showing that this isn’t limited to drug users. We all have our fix. Some people chase achievement. Some chase pleasure. Some chase attention. The forms change, but the hunger doesn’t.

At the center of the book is “the Entertainment,” a film so irresistibly pleasurable that viewers lose the will to do anything but watch it until they die. It sounds absurd, but it’s not that far off. Every endless scroll, every algorithmic loop, every dopamine hit of digital validation is a step toward that same self-erasure. Wallace wrote the book in the 1990s, but he saw where we were heading: a culture where overstimulation replaces meaning, and distraction becomes the dominant mode of existence.

What makes the book so overwhelming — so sprawling, so labyrinthine — is that it mirrors the chaos of modern consciousness. The fragmented attention, the tangled connections, the endless search for something that feels real. The structure itself resists our hunger for easy satisfaction. You can’t skim it; you have to wrestle with it. And maybe that’s the point. Reading it is an act of resistance against the same forces it warns about.

Wallace once said that “the real, profound boredom” we experience in everyday life is where freedom begins. But to get there, we have to stop running from it. We have to stop medicating every quiet moment with noise. Boredom is uncomfortable because it strips us bare. It forces us to confront who we are when we’re not performing, producing, or consuming.

That’s the real terror of the book. Not addiction, not death, not even despair, but the silence underneath it all. The realization that maybe we’ve built our entire lives around avoiding ourselves.

In that sense, the novel is both a warning and a mirror. It asks whether we can still be present in a world designed to keep us from ever being present. It asks whether we can stand the boredom long enough to rediscover what’s real.

Boredom, it turns out, isn’t the enemy. It’s the doorway back to awareness. It’s where meaning has been hiding all along: in the space we’re just too afraid to enter.

The Product

There’s a factory somewhere that manufactures meaning. Nobody knows where it is, but we all buy what it makes. You can’t survive without it. Every morning, I wake up to the same alarm sound — like a shriek filtered through cheap optimism — and I clock in at my terminal, typing things for other people who think they’re changing the world by moving numbers around. The boss says we’re “innovators.” I say we’re dream janitors, sweeping up what’s left of hope.

At night, I scroll through faces that look like me: sleep-deprived, smiling, sedated by purpose. They post about “grind culture” and “mindfulness,” like saints of a new religion where salvation costs $9.99 a month.

I used to believe I was different. I wrote poetry. I loved someone once. Then I started to feel the product wearing off. It began small. A crack in the script. I’d catch myself staring at my reflection in a window not recognizing the thing looking back. Like someone had replaced me with a cheaper copy, printed on recycled despair. My laugh started to sound overdubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and resignation.

I told my therapist. She smiled, a perfect mechanical crescent, and asked if I’d tried “meaning supplements.” She handed me a sample pack. They were glossy pills the color of television static. “Swallow one before sleep,” she instructed.

That night, I dreamed of the factory. Rows of bodies in chairs, their eyes wired open, pupils projected onto screens. Every time one blinked, a machine printed out a new slogan: Live. Laugh. Persist. The air was thick with burnt plastic and serotonin. I tried to run, but my legs dissolved into assembly lines.

When I woke up, my mouth tasted like melted silicon. The mirror showed me someone else entirely. It was the same face, but smoother. Cleaner. My pores had been edited out. My thoughts too.

I went back to work and everyone looked perfect. No one blinked anymore. The boss said we’d hit a new quarterly record. He clapped, but the sound was hollow, like hands slapping a coffin lid.

Now, sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear the factory humming under everything: under the city, under my heartbeat, under the polite noise of civilization.

We’re not employees. We’re inventory.

Every morning when I swallow the next pill, I understand a little more: the product is us.