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Comment by dgut | Hacker News Reader

The story about the mother leaving her two children is too sad. Sometimes I wonder if the quickest way to end humankind's pain is to just stop existing as a whole... No matter how well-off you are, there are N humans in great pain somewhere else, and you can never be sure your descendants wouldn't have to experience great pain in the future.

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That reasoning is a pretty substantial part of why i don't want children. Then there's this lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...

Except people with worse mindsets are not following your footsteps. People conscious of this problem should have many kids, raise them well to improve civilization, if you want to minimise suffering.

Of course if a physical solution to ending existence without introducing a lot of suffering can be found, even better.

That's quite naive. You are just a pawn in this world, chaos is the dominant factor, and you'll be drawn to wherever the tide takes you. Just be happy you were born in this particular time and place because history shows peace is the exception, not the rule.

What you are saying is one of the two only noble options we really should consider though.

It's the only intelligent choice, although I wouldn't blame anybody who chooses to have children. Having children made me feel more empathy for others. Once you have experienced love for your own children, you feel more pity for those parents whose children live in pain, and for the children because you can feel their pain more intensely. Besides all the "small" human issues, such as mental issues as in this case, consider that human history is essentially a history of war and pain. I don't see any reason the future will be any different.

Oddly my comment is being downvoted. Most HNers act like a quasi religious group.

There are other choices. Adopting a child doesn't make the world any worse, most likely improves the life of that child, and grows your own sense of a purpose in life.

> Most HNers act like a quasi religious group.

That is a pretty broad brush.

Maybe it grows your sense of anything, but for that child, life will never be quite right. Children who are adopted have a higher chance of developing mental disorders, alcoholism, major depression and so forth. [1] A portion of them go through a bumpy road before being adopted by the "right" parents, most are never adopted. About 140m children worldwide are orphans. [2] The event of being abandoned is already a very painful one with long-term consequences. If anything, this goes to prove my point.

[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-paradox-of-adoption/

[2] https://www.sos-usa.org/our-impact/childrens-statistics

That reasoning is a pretty substantial part of why adoption should be pushed much more than procreation.

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