The problem of consent
I believe (despite trying to convince myself otherwise for several years) that the main responsibility of parents is to make their children forgive them for the parents forcing them to exist (be born) without the children’s consent.
What do I mean?
Existence is inherently unpleasant, painful, sorrowful, sad, depressing, and all around inherently just a completely shitty experience. There’s nothing nice about it, nothing “worthy” about it, nothing that would be worth the negatives.
Inherently.
BUT (at least so I’ve heard) there’s other people. And finding the right “other people” can be (from what I’ve heard) a very positive and nice experience.
The issue is, this doesn’t happen naturally. Finding the positive in life is a long, gruelling, complicated, dangerous, painful process.
So let’s start over: YOU (every single one of you) exist because of the ultimately selfish and egocentric decision of your parents, whether it was “I want to selfishly save our marriage by trapping my partner into the relationship with a child”, or “I want to selfishly fulfill my selfish dream and experience of bringing up a child (who has been brought into existence without its consent)”. Or “I have no fuckin idea, I just feel the need to procreate which I selfishly refuse to fight anymore”.
Either way, the act of creating a new human being is inherently the most selfish thin one can do, EVER.
And existence is, inherently, the most shitty, painful, guesome experience anyone could ever impose on anyone else. And make no mistake it IS “IMPOSE”. Because the poor victim child has no choice, no say in it.
Therefore, by having a child you have created a being which you have immediately sentenced, condemned, to the worst fate possible — the fate of existing.
“What the…”
SHUT UP.
Existence consists of two parts: of the inherently negative one, and of the people-created positive one.
By birdthing a child, you have just automatically condemned them to the inherently negative one. Unless anything happens, you have just created a conscious being with the express destiny of experiencing all the shittiest shit that exists, just out of your selfish want. Which, I would argue, is pure evil.
So what the hell do you do now?
Exactly what I said. Your sole responsibility and duty now, is to convince that child to forgive you that you did this unspeakably atrociously selfish act.
“But… how…?”
That’s where the second part of life comes into play.
The only positive factors in one’s existence are positive interactions with others. Socializing, interacting, finding understanding, finding love, finding meaning, point, finding people you can interact with to get something positive.
But these things don’t happen by themselves. Your child interacting with others in a positive way doesn’t happen by itself. Your child finding the pearls of niceness in the shitshow of a sewage that existence is, is not something that happens by itself, and it’s neither anything inherent to existence. Because if it were, society (which was designed to counteract the sittyness of everything) wouldn’t exist.
Therefore, I believe, it’s the primary responsibility of a parent, within the first 12 or so years of life of their child/victim, to convince the child/victim to forgive their parent that the parent selfishly and unconsentually threw them into the shitstain stinking cesspool that is existence.
HOW?
Imagine a theoretical life. You wake up, you go to work where you do some stupid inconsequential shit to (for some weird reason) make money to be able to survive, then you go home in the evening, into your apartment, have a fleeting two or three hours to yourself, to do what you ACTUALLY want to do (except you don’t actually have the energy to do it because all of it was drained away in your shitpool of work), then you go to bed, sleep, wake up, go to work where you do some stupid inconsequential shit to make money, to be able to continue all of the crappy shitty cycle all over and over and over again, until you drop dead. Life done. Congratulations.
Can you point out any single positive experience with what I just described? You shouldn’t be able to. You are forced (by money you’re given to survive) to go to somewhere you don’t want to go, to interact with people you don’t want to interact with, to do shit you have no interest in doing, to waste time you had no interest in having (since you didn’t want to be born) in the first place.
All of it is just negatives piling on to another negatives. NOTHING in this loop gives you anything non-shitty (unless you start doing drugs while at home, which is still not a solution, just a decomposing bandaid slapped over a festering heart wound).
The funny thing, though, is that the whole society treats you as if you begged to start existing, and now after your begging was heard, you’re a disgusting ungrateful piece of shit.
Excuse me? I didn’t ask for this, my parents forced me into this when they decided they’re too lazy to put on a condom one day. And now all the consequences are my fault?
Correct.
So what can you do about this, as a parent?
It’s actually trivially simple, at least in concept. But apparently pretty difficult, since not many parents are able to do it.
You need to help your child to see the nice things in existence. The interesting things. This is what you can enjoy doing! This is how you can interact with people you like to feel something nice! This is what love is! This is what companionship feels like! This is what nice interaction with other people is!
This is all of the tiny stuff that, hopefully, will aggreggate to amount which will outweigh the inherent shittyness and meaninglessness of existence itself.
That is your primary purpose. Fuck reading, writing, physics, maths. That stuff can be self-taught, or it can be taught by anyone. Doesn’t matter. I mean… it DOES matter in current world, very important, but ANYONE can teach your child that. As they already do, btw, since schools exists.
But nobody, or at least, not many people, seem to be (able to) teach the really important things. This is what makes you feel happy, notice it. This is what gives sense and meaning to all of that other shit that keeps you alive. Because yes, staying alive with nothing interesting to do to fill that life with, that’s not even just worthless, that’s worse than not ever having existed at all.
School, knowledge, work, ambition, all of that shit exists to keep you alive.
Okay, but… why should you stay alive?
…because here’s these genuinely nice things. And here’s a way to get enough of them that it will overweight all of the crappy shit stuff.
…and suddenly.
DRIVE exists.
MOTIVATION exists.
THE WILL TO EXIST exists.
Because these things that I know exist and that I like are giving me 150 per day, and all these other shitty things that I’m required to submit to take away 100 per day, meaning I still feel 50 positive per day, meaning living days is nice, meaning I want to be living days, meaning I have no reason to ever realize that my parents having forced me to exist is basically the cruelest, most selfish thing anyone could have ever done to me.
The other option, what happens if parents fail in this, is a child, a person, despising life, existence, world. Wanting to destroy itself, themselves, ourselves, everyoneselves, everyone. Suicidal tendencies, murderous tendencies, nihilism. A child, a person, an existence, that would have been better off if you have never forced it (for your own selfish reasons) to start existing in the first place.
If everyone and everything acts as if you want to exist, and this is all of the stuff you need to do to exists…
…it only works as a motivation if you actually have the experience of wanting (and understading, whether conscious or not) of why you want to exist.
Otherwise it’s just people/world requiring painful stuff for no reason and giving nothing nice in return.
And that’s just torture. Because “We require your pain. We will give you nothing worthwhile in return”, that’s just a definition of torture.
Please, stop creating conscious beings for the express purpose of them being tortured by existence.
