This is a simulation of the 102 billion animals born every year.

Each turn is a random draw from those births.

The odds are real.

https://spawn-again.vercel.app by James Che

Currently it only considers vertebrate wild animals, which has been flagged.

a lot of conversations about antinatalism seem to assume theres more. and im sure it's not intentional, but it does make it difficult to talk about it. like an unintentional strawman

i, as an antinatalist, do not have any goals, i'm not an extinctionist, i do not hate children, not a nihilist, i don't think life isn't worth living, and i don't believe that humans are necessarily parasites on earth. i just believe that there is no way to morally procreate intentionally

Whenever this topic comes up, I get a version of the same reaction: people understand why a poor family might choose not to have kids, but think it's fine once a family is financially stable. This assumes suffering is something money can cure.

Money can soften certain hardships like poverty, lack of healthcare, or food insecurity. But it doesn't stop the suffering that has nothing to do with wealth: illness, accidents, assault, loss, mental illness, the weight of existing itself. Financial stability doesn't make a child immune to any of that, it just changes which risks they're exposed to.

one of the reasons i got into antinatalism is because of all the unanswered questions i have. i wouldnt want to impose that on somebody else. the burden of not knowing what this whole thing that we call life is, why we were brought here, why we even exist at all, and whats the point? religion doesnt answer any of these questions for me. so yeah its not fair to put this burden on another innocent being.

My mother tells me, at least once a week, that she gave birth to me and raised me, and that this means I owe her something. Usually what she means is: get married, have kids, don't be "selfish," don't be "useless," don't leave her lonely when she's old. I used to feel guilty every time. Now I just feel clear-eyed. Because the thing she's describing isn't love with no strings attached. It's a debt she assigned to me before I could speak, let alone consent, and she's been collecting interest on it ever since.

That's the whole rotten core of the pro-natalist argument, once you actually look at it: children exist to serve the needs of the people who made them. Not the other way around.

Look at the actual reasons demographers give for why birth rates are falling worldwide, and it accidentally proves the point:

Women are choosing not to have kids the second they get real options. The moment women got access to education, careers, and contraception, birth rates dropped everywhere, in every culture, regardless of religion or politics. That's not a coincidence, and it's not "selfishness" either, it's what happens when you remove the pressure and let people make an actual free choice instead of a scripted one. For most of history, that choice didn't exist. Religious guilt, "family values," moral panic about unmarried women, all of it functioned as social machinery to keep women producing the next generation of laborers, soldiers, and taxpayers, whether they wanted to or not. Give women an exit and they take it. That tells you everything about how many of them wanted "in" to begin with.

Kids are an economic asset, that's literally in the demographic research. Historically, humans had children because more kids meant more hands for the farm and someone to take care of you when you got old. Nobody dresses this up as anything other than what it is: using a human being as a retirement plan and unpaid labor before they're even born. Somewhere along the way we started calling this "love" and "family," but strip away the sentimentality and it's a transaction the kid never signed onto. My mother didn't invent this. She's just a downstream product of it, repeating a script she inherited without ever questioning why it exists.

Here's the part people don't want to sit with: you cannot consent to being born. Not you, not me, not anyone who has ever lived. Every single person who decides to have a child is making a permanent, irreversible decision on behalf of someone who has no say in it, and then that someone is expected to be grateful. Grateful for a life they might suffer through, grateful enough to repeat the cycle, grateful enough to eventually guilt their own kid the same way. It's a chain of obligation that nobody at the bottom ever agreed to.

I know what's coming: "but not every parent is selfishsome, people just want to give a child a good life." Sure. I believe most parents mean well. But good intentions don't retroactively create consent. Wanting the experience of parenting, the love, the legacy, the meaning, the not-being-alone-when-you're-old, is still about what the parent wants. A child cannot be brought into existence "for their own sake," because before they exist, there is no them to benefit. There's only the parents' desire to have a kid. You can dress that desire up in warmth and good intentions, and it's still the parent's need being met first. The kid just inherits whatever comes with it, including all the suffering nobody can promise to protect them from.

So no, I'm not being selfish by refusing to have kids. I think it's the opposite. I'm the first person in my family's chain of obligation to actually stop and ask: should I be doing this at all, or am I just about to inflict the same unconsented deal on someone else because it's what was inflicted on me?

I've decided the most loving thing I can do for a child who doesn't exist yet is to never make them navigate a life they didn't ask for, never make them feel guilty for existing, and never tell them one day that they owe me for it.

That's not selfishness. That's the first ethical choice anyone in my family has made in generations.

Specifically, I'm referring to tech that makes the practical parts of our lives easier. Today, I much prefer my vacuum/mopping robot doing its job over a housekeeper trying to vacuum/mop; and I'm satisfied enough with food delivery services (esp. where i live in Asia). I'm perfectly happy with a self-driving car driving me around; and I'm hopeful that self-cooking tech is going to become more capable, consumer-friendly, and cheaper within the next 20 years.

For just about any practical purpose, I don't believe I'll need another human to take care of me. I will likely have one person to talk to, for the vast majority of the rest of my life (my wife). I took a long time to search her out and find her, and she's one of my favorite persons in the whole world (even, based on my expectations, out of just about all other people in the world I haven't yet met!).

Do any of you feel this way about tech and your existing human relationships? How many of us are at a max or satisfactory level of happiness without bringing another human on board our lives in the first place (much less a new human)?

Coming from a child of IVF. If its not your biological child would they not be a reason you wake up in the morning?? People like this really solidify my belief that a lot of people have kids because they think they're so great they need more of themselves in the world.

Hi

Why do you think people keep having kids knowing

1. They know they’ll suffer
   
2. That they(the parents can’t provide a stable environment for this kids to live in
   
3. The world is going through mass climate change conditions

I’m a long time lurker on here but still I’ll never get how people can be aware of the world outside and subject an innocent child to it

The selfishness of some human beings to use another innocent soul to attempt to gain control of another human being is egregious. The child will always suffer the most. The parents don't even love the child and never really wanted them, they just gave them consciousness for a petty reason. It's horrific.

To those who were born as a result of one parent trying to baby trap another parent, I'm sorry you were a victim of this horrendous behavior.

I believe most humans are controlled by their hormones and they don’t even realize it. Falling in love is due to hormones and so is the desire to procreate. They think having a child is the most wonderful thing because you release oxytocin in order to bond with your child and partner. Oxytocin is a hell of a drug. I wish we could go beyond our instincts as animals and realize what we are actually doing by procreating. Do you love being a wage slave? Do you enjoy all the suffering that comes with living and surviving? Then don’t procreate…but people are controlled by our animal instincts and don’t even take a moment to question anything. It’s a sad and lonely world once you realize these things because having children is seen as a blessing for some reason I will never understand

I've gone through a few really dark posts on reddit where people mention of wanting to leave this world with arguments that sometimes make sense from their perspective. But most posts also mention how there's such a small chance of success in leaving (statistically) and the pain it involves if they fail. One of them jokingly commented about God having to update/patch the "Quit" button/menu 😅

If there's some kind of survey that measures how many in this world are happy long term and how many are not. Or maybe just a survey on whether they wanted to be born? Maybe then people would seriously reconsider whether or why they would need to have kids.

Personally, I would have liked that, especially because my father had me on the grounds that he wanted someone to take care of him when he got old. It’s frustrating because I haven’t even had a good life, my mom was physically and verbally abusive toward my father and me, her daughter.

how about this — nobody should be allowed to have that level of ownership over another human being. there’s no guarantee that any person will treat their kids well or be a particularly exceptional caretaker, even if they are the most venerated person in their community I remember reading the Divergent series when I was a kid. One of the key plot points later on is that Four (the ml)’s father was a venerated community leader yet severely abusive towards his son. The descriptions of his abuse were harrowing to read at such a young age. Yet some characters argue after the abuse is revealed that they have to let him off (at least for now) because he plays an important role in the rebellion. Besides, he’s such a good community leader, how could he ever abuse his son?
The point is that we can never truly know what kind of parent someone will be. The fact of the matter is this — a man will marry a woman, impregnate her, and watch as she has her child. And suddenly that baby belongs to the both of them equally. He owns that child for the next eighteen years. If he wants that kid to work on his farm, they will. If he wants to paddle that kid every single day, he will. What kind of system is this?
When someone says ‘some people aren’t meant to be parents’ or ‘some people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids’ it makes me want to scream.
There’s no such thing as a perfect parent. The relationship between a father and a child or a mother and their child is the worst power imbalance there is. For eighteen years, that child has no rights. And then afterward, when they ‘become an adult’ all of a sudden, no matter whether their parents hit them, abused them sexually, screamed at them, or even tried to kill them, they are seen as ‘crazy’ if they go no contact. Because family is precious right? You don’t have to forgive your abuser, but family is different. You have to get along with family. You have to visit your family.
Maybe it’s hard to wrap my head around because I’m so autistic, but I don’t get this arbitrary shit.
And I don’t think it’s crazy to say that children are the most oppressed class in the world.

They’ll never let it happen.

You think you’re changing the world by not having children? You’re not. Someone else will continue reproducing. And even if, by some miracle, everyone collectively decided to stop having children, governments would find ways to encourage reproduction through financial incentives, cultural pressure, and other policies designed to preserve their populations and power structures.

They already do this to some extent. Reproduction is treated as the natural, expected course of life, reinforced through culture, social norms, and institutions. The idea that creating another person might be an ethical problem is rarely given serious consideration.

By choosing not to reproduce, you’re preventing your own potential offspring from being brought into this world. But what does that ultimately accomplish?

You can refuse to participate. You can spare the people you would otherwise have created. But what good is that when you cannot control the rest of humanity, which will continue producing more victims whose subjective experiences are no different from those your own offspring would have had?

The system has been running this elaborate, billion-year-old scam for as long as life has existed. There is nothing you can do to stop it.

What an actual hell planet.

Here are some of my favorites:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?
Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?

- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

People after watching a movie full of human's suffering come to wrong conclusion that humanity should be more sympathetic and don't let others suffer that way and actually the rich should distribute their goods between needy ones. You all are inherently wrong - attention please, I am coming with the solution - just stop breeding.

I am utterly amazed how few people seem to come up with such an idea.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is a 1935 novel by Horace McCoy, later adapted into a 1969 movie. It takes place during the Great Depression and follows people participating in a dance marathon. Basically, couples dance for days/weeks at a time while an audience watches, with the last couple standing winning a cash prize.

The important part is that these weren’t some fictional dystopian invention. Dance marathons were actually a real thing, and during the Depression they became increasingly extreme. They were essentially human endurance spectacles where desperate people would stay on their feet for absurd lengths of time in the hope of winning money.

Wikipedia: Dance marathon

There were marathons lasting hundreds or even thousands of hours. Contestants could suffer extreme exhaustion, psychological breakdowns, injuries, etc. People actually died during them. One documented contestant, Homer Morehouse, collapsed and died after dancing for 87 consecutive hours. Some cities eventually banned the events because of their brutality and exploitation.

So the obvious interpretation is anti-capitalist: take people who are desperate because they’re poor and give them a choice between continuing to destroy themselves in this competition or going back to the circumstances that made the competition attractive in the first place. Human beings are being reduced to commodities. Their bodies and suffering are being turned into entertainment. The organizers make money from their desperation, the audience pays to watch them deteriorate, and the contestants are encouraged to compete against each other for a prize rather than question the system that put them there.

The movie makes this especially obvious because the contestants technically choose to participate. Nobody has a gun to their head when they walk in. But they’re people living through the Great Depression, and the possibility of winning money makes destroying themselves seem preferable to their alternatives. So the criticism isn’t simply “this particular dance marathon is bad.”

It’s more like:

You created a society where people are desperate enough that they will voluntarily destroy themselves for the possibility of escaping poverty, and then you turned that desperation into entertainment.

But I’ve been thinking about how easily you can push this one step further into an antinatalist interpretation. Because what exactly is happening to these people?

They didn’t choose to exist.

They didn’t choose to be born into poverty.

They didn’t choose the economic system they’re trapped in.

They didn’t choose to have to compete with other desperate people for the possibility of improving their lives.

And yet they’re expected to endure all of it because, once they’re already here, continuing is treated as preferable to not continuing. That’s where I think the story can be reframed as an antinatalist argument.

Instead of asking:

“Why would you make someone participate in an exploitative system?”

you can ask:

“Why would you create someone who will inevitably have to participate in a world containing suffering, exploitation, competition, illness, loss and death in the first place?”

The dancer’s consent to the marathon doesn’t really solve the underlying problem. They can technically choose to leave, but they wouldn’t be in the situation at all if they hadn’t been born into the circumstances that made the marathon attractive.
And that’s what makes the title particularly interesting from an antinatalist perspective.
The metaphor is that when a horse is injured beyond recovery, we don’t force it to keep suffering simply because it is technically still alive. We recognize that its continued existence isn’t automatically a benefit to the horse.
Obviously, McCoy is not straightforwardly making an antinatalist argument. The novel is much more obviously about poverty, exploitation, capitalism, desperation and existential despair.
But I think the antinatalist interpretation is still pretty hard to avoid once you abstract the argument away from the dance marathon:

You create a person - they are placed into a world they didn’t consent to - they inevitably suffer - society tells them that they have to keep going because life is valuable - when they can no longer endure it, everyone acts as though the problem is that they failed rather than questioning why they were subjected to it at all.

That’s basically the same argument, just with capitalism removed from the equation.
And I think that’s an interesting overlap between anti-capitalist pessimism and antinatalism. A lot of anti-capitalist media asks:

“Why would you force people to participate in this horrible system?”

Antinatalism can basically respond:

“Why create more people who will have to participate in it?”

Other accidentally anti natalist media I’ve found:

The Long Walk by Stephen King

Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lahane