u/RedundantBiomass

I looked it up and the odds of a person dying in their sleep is only 1 out of 8. That means if a person has a kid and they actually stick around and care for their parents in old age, that kid will have an 87.5% chance of watching each parent go fast and painful or slow and painful, before facing those same odds themselves. Assuming nobody dies tragically before then, which is a big assumption. Dont you envy children? They have so much to look forward to!

Organizations like the Institute for Family Studies propose unconstitutional measures such as restricting access to the internet on certain days to increase fertility, making it clear we cant sit back while others trample human rights and conspire to force more unwilling participants into this suck game called life. Antinatalism is the perfect antidote to this claptrap, so we need to spread the idea that having children is unethical as widely as possible. I favor gently spreading awareness, not trying to guilt, badger or cajole people into adopting it since weve seen that approach backfire against some other ethical positions complimentary to AN. People need to come to it on their own terms in their own time, but that cant happen if they dont see not having children as a real, viable option. Thanks for reading.

It is a question commonly asked of antinatalists and the childfree (and one those *with* children should ask of themselves more often). An article/audio clip from NPR discusses how people living alone are handling that question and changes that could be made to make doing so easier as more people age alone, either by their own choice or forced by circumstances. This is a situation we here will all face at some point, so curious to hear how people are planning to deal with their aging.

On this somber 250th anniversary of the United States let's reflect for a moment on a word that is deeply ingrained its our national mythology - freedom.  Merriam Webster defines freedom as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.   

Choice has to exist for there to be freedom.  We know in great detail how sexual reproduction works and have developed the means to prevent or end pregnancy, yet  few people choose not to have offspring.   Constraints on that choice are numerous.  Every organism alive now is part of an unbroken chain billions of years long, with evolution selecting  for behavior that encouraged reproduction at every link.  When humanity emerged, cultural institutions appeared and evolved on the same track - those that created more followers could impose their will on the less numerous.   The ability to think and reason provided a survival benefit at first, but had the side effect of allowing people to eventually realize that we are merely the packaging for our genes, which don't care if we suffer horribly so long as we reproduce before we die.   

We have a choice about whether to reproduce but biological and cultural inertia do everything possible to trick or coerce us into thinking we don't.   It's easy to say you are free while going with the flow.   Going against it invites pushback through shaming, guilt, insults, even violence.   When you exercise your choice, your freedom, despite the cost it is precisely in those moments you know you are actually free.   So to my fellow antinatalists wherever you are, congratulations on breaking the chains the unthinking imperative of your genes would bind you and your offspring with!  Relish your freedom and work to help others realize they can have it too.

Most people depend on a script provided by society to give their life structure and meaning. Go to school, start a career, get married, buy a house, have kids, etc... We've all woken up to the fact that having kids isnt fair to the unborn and in doing so have torn some key pages from the script.

The easy answer is gone. In its place, what do you do or believe that brings meaning to your life? Was it easy or a struggle? Have you abandoned other parts of the script? If so did AN come first, or did other changes lead you to AN?