“Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!”
Jewish saying
“Increasing one’s value by having children might be like increasing one’s value by taking hostages.”
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, David Benatar
Collective fear, rage, trepidation, anger, and guilt swirled around the Arklow pub scene two Saturdays ago like some inescapable Netherworld vortex of negative energy, daring to consume even the most blissfully carefree and childless. Bitterly resentful parents attempted to drink and drug themselves from the consciousness of their life-changing decision to have children and all the resulting pain this entails, such as the dreaded back-to-school season. Crotch Goblins and Semen Demons who stole parents’ dreams and ambitions for an unburdened existence long ago now act only as dutiful guardians and indentured servitude to the endless consumer demands of the vampiric mini despots and OG super spreaders they so ruefully spawned.
New shoes with lights in the fucking heels, Paw Patrol this, Peppa Pig that, inedible cardboard school meals, Cul Camps, pre-natal depression, post-natal depression, general parenting depression, school bullying, “blended” fuckin families, “stepfathers that step up”, affairs, bitter separations and divorces, fathers that disappear, secret danger wanks in the Jacks, intergenerational trauma, cyber-bullying, parents bullying/cyber-bullying teachers/rival parents/pupils, navigating the Irish class system beginning in Junior Infants right through to private schooling and the subsequent jobs for boys and girls, unauthorised smart phone usage, that fucking Aldi ad with the stranded family joyously feasting in the broken down car in a vain corporate hope of normalising the insanity of Technofeudalistic-era parenthood to begin with, orthodontic train tracks, record levels of domestic violence and coercive control, Taylor Swift tickets, yearly sports jerseys and branded children to keep up with the all the other mindless social media commodity fetishists and conspicuous consumer rivals in the perennial online best parent in class competition (added bonus points when the child is unfortunate enough to be the tug rope between an estranged mother and father) and all the other uniquely banal and reprehensible behaviours associated with parenthood.
Your humble narrator caught up with some of the most intoxicated and visibly upset parents in the most nightmarish edition of the Wicklow People’s ‘Out and About’ since the aftermath of the Kynochs disaster.
Separated by a barring order, father of two, Jimmy “Knuckles” Burns professed his profound regret over having knocked up “that fuckin bitch” who is now living in their former house that he still pays for as he wallows in his old childhood bedroom.
“With all my previous drug dealing and domestic violence convictions, all the work I can get is up on de sites in Dubla with the rest of the Hunger Games combatants. It’s like being in prison up dere man, with all the faction fights. If it’s not the Guatemalans at the Hondurans, then it’s the Moldovans at the Romanians. We are all sucked into labour we would rather not be doing, and the resulting frustrations and rage are then meted out against each other accordingly.
Gettin the bus home though, I just look at the picture of me darlings on me cracked iPhone screen and know that it’s all worth it even when I only see dem once a month cos of dat fuckin WHORE!!!! Here, do wanna bump? Its the only time I get to do it outside of me Ma’s back shed,” offered an erratic and powder-nosed Knuckles. In the interests of journalistic integrity and research, I accept Master Knuckles’ generous offer.
“Don’t mind if I do myself Mr. Knuckles, I’m celebrating too, 40 odd years of anti-natalism and, as David Benatar so eloquently stated in Better never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, not “occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering” as “assuming that each couple has three children, an original pairs cumulative descendents over ten generations amount to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering.”
“But they’ll change your life (much like cancer does, I thought to myself) and they look just like ya, totally unique from the 8.24 billion other gobshites on planet earth, your legacy after you are dead and gone and a personification of Dawkins ‘Selfish Genes’ that will undoubtedly refuse to wipe your arse back when you are one day pissing and shitting yourself alone and quivering in a soulless, profit maximising, multinational owned, Soylent Green-style nursing home/abattoir. Dere my fuckin world, and I wouldn’t change dem for anyting! It’s de hardest job in de world, but de rewards are fukin endless. Especially de endless visits and threats from Tusla!” interjected an indignant and bedraggled interlocutor and parent of seven, 34-year-old Chantelle O Ridely who seemed to possess all the joie de vivre of a 68-year-old battered, chain-smoking housewife.
After multiple more Blue Aftershocks, though, she confesses to me that without vast quantities of “Mother’s Little Helper,” she could not cope with the daily stresses and strains of parenthood.
“The pro-natal bias manifests itself in many ways[…]the assumption that one should (get married or simply cohabit in order to) produce children, and that, infertility aside, one is either backward or selfish if one does not.’ The assumption of `backwardness’ draws on an ontogenetic or individual developmental paradigm-children do not have children, but adults do. Thus, if one has not (yet) started breeding, one is not fully adult.[…]First, knowing when not to have a baby and having the self-control to follow through with this is a sign of maturity not immaturity.”
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, David Benatar
