creating more people, creating the illusions that there is something more to work for. — schopenhauer1

The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens owning little or no property. The origin of the name is presumably linked with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property from which their military duties and voting privileges could be determined. For citizens with property valued 11,000 assēs or less, which was below the lowest census for military service, their children—proles (from Latin prōlēs, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring". The only contribution of a proletarius to the Roman society was seen in his ability to raise children, the future Roman citizens who can colonize new territories conquered by the Roman Republic and later by the Roman Empire. The citizens who had no property of significance were called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family."[2][note 1]

Herr Schopenhauer- your well thought out post is a masterpiece. Well done. — Teller

I would, if I may, take a small issue with your thoughts in Section 1. If I understand you correctly, you are questioning the ethics of procreation in this time of uncertainty, fear, illness and death. I would say it may be wise to stop and take time to reflect on the nature of Nature.
Human beings in their wisdom or lack of it, have given us the present world. Humans will have to deal with it. I would like to think that you might not want ALL Nature to cease replicating just because of questionable human behaviour.
This may be a good time for us to reflect on the fact that we are as much a part of Nature as anything in our existence. It might be a good time to keep this in mind. — Teller

People will keep breeding. I assure you. And even the poor, the least secure, will keep breeding. — jjAmEs

Do you know this author? He treats the declining birth rate in sophisticated nations. Many of us want to remain children rather than have them. I chose this path. This is the narcissistic path. — jjAmEs

The view that being a parent makes you an X type of person (put any description there), seems like a way to perpetuate the whole scheme of having more children in the first place. — schopenhauer1

A recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality. The original French title of Whatever, Extension du domaine de la lutte (literally "broadening of the field of struggle"), alludes to economic competition extending into the search for relationships. As the book says, a free market has absolute winners and absolute losers, and the same applies to relationships in a society that does not value monogamy but rather exhorts people to seek the happiness that always eludes them through the path of sexual consumerism, in pursuit of narcissistic satisfaction. — link

Even religion and finding meaning falls under "entertainment" here. These survival/comfort/entertainment pursuits create the epiphenomenal organizations of societal institutions which we then become ensnared in to keep our personal pursuits of survival, comfort, and entertainment continuously going. Thus we become enmeshed in keeping this gargantuan meaningless system that uses its participants from its epiphenomenal need to maintain its power, control, and legitimacy, in order for people to pursue the basic human conditions of survival, comfort, and entertainment. — schopenhauer1

One is one's own child. One lives for one's own accomplishments and reputation rather than vicariously through the success of the child. In that sense, parents are no less narcissistic. Indeed, 'doing it for the children' is nice justification of household selfishness. Kids play a huge role in justificatory rhetoric, as I'm sure you know. — jjAmEs

I really have and continue to endure this vision. It's one lens on reality among others. I'd just add that 'meaningless' only makes sense if 'meaning' is grasped as some trans-biological vague thing that perhaps cannot be specified. Personally I think time is involved here. All things are perishable, therefore all things are meaningless. That seems to be the implicit logic. It's as if that we future-oriented beings crave/suppose something like a point at infinity (an eternal God or his surrogate) in order to feel grounded in our doings. — jjAmEs

Perhaps humanity will willingly work together to end the pointless repetition and suffering for future generations. — schopenhauer1

I think you give humanity too much credit. If somebody was already planning on bringing children into a world and life that involves work, suffering, sickness, need, grief, etc - into a life that culminates in an inevitable death - then I highly doubt the existence of just another way among many to suffer (covid-19) will be the tipping the point that sways them into antinatalism. — Inyenzi

Perhaps humanity will willingly work together to end the pointless repetition and suffering for future generations. — schopenhauer1

If humanity can realize the absurdity as a whole community and instead of forcing people into the work of life, slowly diminish that work for future generations by simply not having them. — schopenhauer1

..we are approaching a time when, in Moravec's words, 'almost all humans work to amuse other humans.' In rich countries, that time has already arrived. The old industries have been exported to the developing world. At home, new occupations have evolved, replacing those of the industrial era. Many of them satisfy needs that in the past were repressed or disguised. A thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques has sprung up. Beyond that, there is an enormous grey economy of illegal industries supplying drugs and sex. The function of this new economy, legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which - though it is busier than ever before - secretly suspects that it is useless. Industrialisation created the working class. Now it has made the working class obsolete. Unless it is cut short by ecological collapse, it will eventually do the same to nearly everyone. — John Gray

Yes that was my point. But a decision to be childless will affect no future person. — schopenhauer1

Perhaps if we view the human project as a relay race rather than an individual race, it'll make more sense. — TheMadFool

Enlightenment thinkers rejected the religious interpretation of history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of progress—the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study of the history of civilization (Condorcet 1795; Montesquieu 1748). Vico's philosophy of history seeks to identify a foundational series of stages of human civilization. Different civilizations go through the same stages, because human nature is constant across history (Pompa 1990). Rousseau (1762a; 1762b) and Kant (1784–5; 1784–6) brought some of these assumptions about rationality and progress into their political philosophies, and Adam Smith embodies some of this optimism about the progressive effects of rationality in his account of the unfolding of the modern European economic system (1776). This effort to derive a fixed series of stages as a tool of interpretation of the history of civilization is repeated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it finds expression in Hegel's philosophy (discussed below), as well as Marx's materialist theory of the development of economic modes of production (Marx and Engels 1845–49; Marx and Engels 1848). — link

The 'religion' of progress seems to be our secular replacement for a religion involving afterlife. — jjAmEs

Some thinkers have tried to justify the trauma of human existence in terms of the coming attainment of immortality or utopia through technology. The old-fashioned version of this is just Heaven, but intellectuals secularized it.... Christianity is transformed into a secular religion of earthly progress. It's already in Bacon's last utopian work and Descartes' 'lords and masters of nature.' History is a nightmare from which we shall awake... — me

Our forbears began roughly 2 million years ago, did their bit towards ending suffering and passed on the baton to the next generation and it in turn did the same and here we are, at the present moment, playing our part in this chain of lives with the express purpose of ending the pain and suffering that comes with living.

Pandemics, disasters, wars, etc. are a part of this journey as much as sprains, fractures and even deaths are part of a relay race; the person who began the race and the person in the middle of the run will not make it to the finish line but, with courage, determination and a little bit of luck, someone will. — TheMadFool

Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?
...
Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.
...
Like most philosophers, Kant worked to shore up the conventional beliefs of his time. Schopenhauer did the opposite. Accepting the arguments of Hume and Kant that the world is unknowable, he concluded that both the world and the individual subject that imagines it knows it are maya, dreamlike constructions with no basis in reality. ... Schopenhauer accepted the sceptical side of Kant's philosophy and turned it against him. Kant demonstrated that we are trapped in the world of phenomena and cannot know things in themselves. Schopenhauer went one step further and observed that we ourselves belong in the world of appearances. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer was ready to follow his thoughts wherever they led. Kant argued that unless we accept that we are autonomous, freely choosing selves we cannot make sense of our moral experience. Schopenhauer responded that our actual experience is not of freely choosing the way we live but of being driven along by our bodily needs - by fear, hunger and, above all, sex.
...
Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end. — Gray

This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind. — Gray

I don't have much to disagree with other than to say it's all a matter of opinion, but I thought I would point out that it is these kinds of crises that cause baby booms. — VagabondSpectre

If your position holds, then it's almost an irony that as our mistakes and circumstances clarify and worsen -as the hole deepens- we inevitably start digging with greater fervor.

Of course, it's a necessary jerk from an evolutionary-survival perspective... — VagabondSpectre

Perhaps if we view the human project as a relay race rather than an individual race, it'll make more sense. There's the finish line - end of all suffering for humans and, if possible, for all living things. Our forbears began roughly 2 million years ago, did their bit towards ending suffering and passed on the baton to the next generation and it in turn did the same and here we are, at the present moment, playing our part in this chain of lives with the express purpose of ending the pain and suffering that comes with living.

Pandemics, disasters, wars, etc. are a part of this journey as much as sprains, fractures and even deaths are part of a relay race; the person who began the race and the person in the middle of the run will not make it to the finish line but, with courage, determination and a little bit of luck, someone will. — TheMadFool

Absurd in relation to what, though? Do you see the self-eating snake? For some it's aesthetically justified. For these the extinction is the ultimate threat and not the ultimate release.

What is this vague sense of something that should be there that would be all things from absurdity? What is the meaning that would rescue humanity from meaninglessness? Even God seems like a vague approximation and not the god-shaped hole itself. Against what background are the doings of man absurd? What's he seen that he likes better? If not simply a more user-friendly environment? A new and improved Garden Of Delights? — jjAmEs

I hear you, and I feel a certain relief in not having forced someone into this maze. A different personality might feel guilty for not giving a new soul the opportunity of this maze. I've known great ecstasy and terrible suffering. I can't make a final judgment on life, though 'in youth is pleasure' makes sense to me. I'm losing the highs and the lows. It's the self-important dreams of youth that help light up life. The path of the grim sage is a strange one, and its haunted by divine laughter. 'Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.' I experience my own dark lines as a kind of stand-up comedy. As long as I stick around to gripe, I'm still invested. The gloomy existentialist still hopes for a piece of tail. The ideological violence is the rattle of a peacock feather, a seductive virtual eye of quasi-renunciation and pseudo-transcendence.

Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; and now I know it.

'My Own Epitaph' John Gay

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kohelet-ecclesiastes-full-text

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Worstward Ho! (Beckett)

This vid can be interpreted as a parody of metaphysics (also Beckett):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXoq_H9BrTE

This is nice too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpgOcWZHEcY

This last one is insanely concentrated: life is a mouth that can't shut up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LDwfKxr-M — jjAmEs

Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability. — Schopenhauer WWR

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something; and then distance and difficulties to be overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us—an illusion which vanishes when we reach it; or else when we are occupied with some purely intellectual interest—when in reality we have stepped forth from life to look upon it from the outside, much after the manner of spectators at a play. And even sensual pleasure itself means nothing but a struggle and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is attained. Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast upon existence itself, its vain and worthless nature is brought home to us; and this is what we mean by boredom. The hankering after what is strange and uncommon—an innate and ineradicable tendency of human nature—shows how glad we are at any interruption of that natural course of affairs which is so very tedious.

That this most perfect manifestation of the will to live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to extinction—this is the naïve way in which Nature, who is always so true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of this will as in its very essence barren and unprofitable. Were it of any value in itself, anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not thus end in mere nothing. — Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence

Your needs and wants require others to work. Their needs and wants require you to work. I don't just mean in the economic sense, though that can be literally taken that way. — schopenhauer1

According to Buddhist tradition, after several years of mendicancy, meditation, and asceticism, he awakened to understand the mechanism which keeps people trapped in the cycle of rebirth. — link

The absurdity comes from the repetition of human affairs- it all comes back to surviving, maintaining comfort, entertainment in some cultural context. We know what it is, we have seen it billions of times, yet we want more people to be born to experience this same thing. — schopenhauer1

Why keep the scheme going? Why keep the absurd repetition going to yet another life? I mean, we get the picture.. survival, comfort, entertainment, repeat. But doe we HAVE to keep repeating! — schopenhauer1

what's the problem with repetition? — jjAmEs

“heaven” is as much (if not more so) a matter of our internal states as external ones — Pfhorrest

the solution isn’t some weird new kind of sex, it’s the restoration of your libido. — Pfhorrest

You make a great point in this thread. The pessimism is absolutely warranted. But not many will vibe with your position since, I'm willing to bet, many, if not most on TPF, (just as in the world) are already heavily invested and their interests deeply embedded in the scheme. The positive thing I take from all the absurdity: at least I now know with absolute certainty that the present generation is as stupid as I had previously suspected. — Merkwurdichliebe