It is about preventing needless suffering. So, if suffering constitutes an overwhelming part of life, one should not procreate in order to avoid it. Sure, we may have our coping mechanisms to get around the suffering, but why learn and deploy them when it can be avoided altogether? It is not for the benefit of the child that they are being brought into existence.
This just doesn't track with my lived experience. I have personally had my fair share of pain in life, but not so much that I wish I was never born, or that I want to prematurely die. The suffering is there, but not so much that it is overpowering or unbearable.
Am I enjoying life because I'm deploying coping mechanisms and don't even realize it? Maybe. Is my brain tricking me into thinking everything is fine? Maybe. Does it matter? I really don't think so. The subjective experience is what matters.
I would say overall that I've enjoyed existing and am thankful for it, and I don't know how to square that with the argument you're presenting.
Avoiding all procreation to prevent the possibility of future generations experiencing some level of bearable suffering seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Should be P = V^2 / R, but other than that, yes exactly.
Everyone saying "it scales with voltage" or "it scales with resistance" are describing different sides of the same coin. At the end of the day, the thing we're talking about is just power, you can pick and choose whichever version of the power formula that you want.
You're right, current is a fine proxy for practical purposes like sizing wires and such. I was just being a bit pedantic in that heat fundamentally is power dissipation.
It's an interesting take. You may be right about the biological weighting of suffering vs. happiness, so in some high-level, scientific sense perhaps "life is suffering" is a valid statement. But if I start asking people on the street if, based on their subjective lived experience, they agree with that statement, I can guarantee that not everyone would.
And that's the rub for me: I see antinatalists taking this position as if "life is suffering" is subjectively true for all humans, and I don't think that's true, or at least not to an extent that leads to the conclusion that no one should reproduce in order to save the next generation from the suffering.
So it seems to me that one driver of antinatalism is people with depression incorrectly assuming that the next generation will experience life the same way they do. All it takes to prove that assumption wrong is a single person who disagrees that their subjective lived experience is one of constant suffering.
There are obviously specific situations or conditions which would lead to suffering for any potential children -- not enough money, food, security, etc -- but my understanding is that isn't the kind of thing we're talking about here.
(Though there also seems to be a certain flavor of antinatalism which is something like "our universal shared conditions are going to get so bad that everyone will suffer" due to global warming, lare-stage capitalism, whatever. That one I can understand.)
Also, my depression and anxiety play a large part in my decision not to bring children into the world. I don’t want them to go through all this bullshit (and this is where antinatalism comes in).
This is interesting, because my initial (possibly naive) reaction to learning about antinatalism was that it sounded like a projection of depression. It sounds like the core thesis is "life is not worth the suffering and therefore shouldn't be forced onto anyone", and it seems like depression is a prerequisite to holding that particular view.
Finding the childfree reddit years ago was the first time I had found a community which supported this lifestyle, so when I moved to Lemmy joining this was an obvious choice.
Would you say that "community support of the lifestyle" is the main draw here? It seems like there's a lot of content here about how society in general tries to paint not having kids as a weird choice.
Interesting, yeah the antinatalism is definitely the unexpected part I was picking up on. Would love to get one of those folks to explain how they ended up with that kind of viewpoint. I can't really wrap my head around it.
The other responses so far sound very reasonable and in line with what I expected.
You simply underestimate how many people will be lining up to buy bootleg lettuce out of the back of a van so that they can save 10 cents off the for-profit store price while not having to suffer the indignity of going to the commie store. Only have to move a few tons a day to make a tidy profit, it's easy money!
This goes against all the hard data we've got from the past 80 years of the Fed independently managing interest rates, but yeah dawg, I'm sure your vibes-based economic theory has finally cracked the code that Shadow Emperor JPow has been hiding from us, and all that rampant inflation from 0% interest rates is fake news.
For the sake of argument, let's use your numbers and say an average astronaut ends up taking a dozen flights on rockets designed to NASA's 1-in-270 "loss of crew" standard. If that probability holds, then we would expect 4.4% of all astronauts flying in modern rockets to be in a fatal accident during their 12-mission career.
For comparison, lifetime driving fatality risk for American drivers is right around 1%.
For a more recent data point, how about NASA's safety requirements for SpaceX manned flights, circa 2020?
Josh Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Spaceflight Now that the agency’s calculated “Loss Of Crew” probability for SpaceX’s Demo-2 test flight is 1-in-276, exceeding the commercial crew program’s requirement threshold of 1-in-270.
Would you get in a car if you had a 1 in 270 chance of dying during each trip? Those aren't great odds for surviving a year's worth of daily commutes.
Are you asking to change the definition of a car trip to the ~500,000 miles it takes to get to the moon and back?
In that case, rate of fatality is around 1 in 200 "driving to the moon and back" trips. 0.5% chance. So taking the rocketship is still significantly more dangerous.
More realistically, 500,000 miles is roughly a lifetime of driving. So these astronauts are being exposed in a single trip to a fatality risk equivalent of 2+ lifetimes of driving.
Or to look at it from a different angle, 5 out of the 413 total manned space flights have ended in fatalities, or 1.21%.
Auto travel in the US has a fatality rate around 1 death per 100 million driven miles. Assuming an average trip of 20 miles, that's 1 death per 5 million car trips, or 0.00002%.
So, roughly 10,000 (EDIT: actually 100,000, missed a zero!) times more dangerous than driving.
As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent.
This just doesn't track with my lived experience. I have personally had my fair share of pain in life, but not so much that I wish I was never born, or that I want to prematurely die. The suffering is there, but not so much that it is overpowering or unbearable.
Am I enjoying life because I'm deploying coping mechanisms and don't even realize it? Maybe. Is my brain tricking me into thinking everything is fine? Maybe. Does it matter? I really don't think so. The subjective experience is what matters.
I would say overall that I've enjoyed existing and am thankful for it, and I don't know how to square that with the argument you're presenting.
Avoiding all procreation to prevent the possibility of future generations experiencing some level of bearable suffering seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
See Blue_Morpho's comment above. The things you're describing as the product of resistance and the square of the current is power.
Heat is literally power dissipation. Saying "heat is a function of power" is essentially a tautology.
Should be P = V^2 / R, but other than that, yes exactly.
Everyone saying "it scales with voltage" or "it scales with resistance" are describing different sides of the same coin. At the end of the day, the thing we're talking about is just power, you can pick and choose whichever version of the power formula that you want.
You're right, current is a fine proxy for practical purposes like sizing wires and such. I was just being a bit pedantic in that heat fundamentally is power dissipation.
Heat is actually a function of power, which is voltage times current.
It's an interesting take. You may be right about the biological weighting of suffering vs. happiness, so in some high-level, scientific sense perhaps "life is suffering" is a valid statement. But if I start asking people on the street if, based on their subjective lived experience, they agree with that statement, I can guarantee that not everyone would.
And that's the rub for me: I see antinatalists taking this position as if "life is suffering" is subjectively true for all humans, and I don't think that's true, or at least not to an extent that leads to the conclusion that no one should reproduce in order to save the next generation from the suffering.
So it seems to me that one driver of antinatalism is people with depression incorrectly assuming that the next generation will experience life the same way they do. All it takes to prove that assumption wrong is a single person who disagrees that their subjective lived experience is one of constant suffering.
There are obviously specific situations or conditions which would lead to suffering for any potential children -- not enough money, food, security, etc -- but my understanding is that isn't the kind of thing we're talking about here.
(Though there also seems to be a certain flavor of antinatalism which is something like "our universal shared conditions are going to get so bad that everyone will suffer" due to global warming, lare-stage capitalism, whatever. That one I can understand.)
This is interesting, because my initial (possibly naive) reaction to learning about antinatalism was that it sounded like a projection of depression. It sounds like the core thesis is "life is not worth the suffering and therefore shouldn't be forced onto anyone", and it seems like depression is a prerequisite to holding that particular view.
Sounds very reasonable, thanks!
Would you say that "community support of the lifestyle" is the main draw here? It seems like there's a lot of content here about how society in general tries to paint not having kids as a weird choice.
Interesting, yeah the antinatalism is definitely the unexpected part I was picking up on. Would love to get one of those folks to explain how they ended up with that kind of viewpoint. I can't really wrap my head around it.
The other responses so far sound very reasonable and in line with what I expected.
You simply underestimate how many people will be lining up to buy bootleg lettuce out of the back of a van so that they can save 10 cents off the for-profit store price while not having to suffer the indignity of going to the commie store. Only have to move a few tons a day to make a tidy profit, it's easy money!
Dave's not here man
This goes against all the hard data we've got from the past 80 years of the Fed independently managing interest rates, but yeah dawg, I'm sure your vibes-based economic theory has finally cracked the code that Shadow Emperor JPow has been hiding from us, and all that rampant inflation from 0% interest rates is fake news.
For the sake of argument, let's use your numbers and say an average astronaut ends up taking a dozen flights on rockets designed to NASA's 1-in-270 "loss of crew" standard. If that probability holds, then we would expect 4.4% of all astronauts flying in modern rockets to be in a fatal accident during their 12-mission career.
For comparison, lifetime driving fatality risk for American drivers is right around 1%.
For a more recent data point, how about NASA's safety requirements for SpaceX manned flights, circa 2020?
Would you get in a car if you had a 1 in 270 chance of dying during each trip? Those aren't great odds for surviving a year's worth of daily commutes.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/05/22/nasa-review-clears-spacex-crew-capsule-for-first-astronaut-mission/
A trip to space is actually about 100,000 times more likely to lead to a fatality than a 20 mile car trip.
People really underestimate how dangerous space travel is.
(The math is in another comment below if you're curious.)
Good catch! Lost track of my zeros
Are you asking to change the definition of a car trip to the ~500,000 miles it takes to get to the moon and back?
In that case, rate of fatality is around 1 in 200 "driving to the moon and back" trips. 0.5% chance. So taking the rocketship is still significantly more dangerous.
More realistically, 500,000 miles is roughly a lifetime of driving. So these astronauts are being exposed in a single trip to a fatality risk equivalent of 2+ lifetimes of driving.
Or to look at it from a different angle, 5 out of the 413 total manned space flights have ended in fatalities, or 1.21%.
Auto travel in the US has a fatality rate around 1 death per 100 million driven miles. Assuming an average trip of 20 miles, that's 1 death per 5 million car trips, or 0.00002%.
So, roughly 10,000 (EDIT: actually 100,000, missed a zero!) times more dangerous than driving.
It is massively dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents