I don’t know if what follows counts as much of a post, but I felt like I ought to do something for Arthur Schopenhauer’s birthday, so in that spirit here are some Negations.

1. The world is not beautiful.
2. Life is not a gift.
3. Nature is not good.
4. Natural selection is not your friend.
5. It would have been better for me never to have been.
6. Come to think of it, it would have been better for everyone never to have been.
7. “What if your mother had decided to abort you?” It’s a pity she didn’t, really.
8. “If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.” (Happy 227th, Arthur!)
9. Less grandly, life is on balance suffering.
10. No, we didn’t do anything to deserve (9).
11. No, (9) is not on balance somehow a good thing on other grounds. While the presence of suffering might engender things that give us a nice warm feeling (e.g. encouraging us us to cultivate the virtue of compassion, perhaps), it is by no means on balance justified.
12. A decent society will let competent adults who judge their future prospects to be sufficiently poor to end their lives, and permit them access to painless, efficient means for doing so.
13. There is even remotely nothing special about the length of “natural life,” and the optimal length of life might easily be something longer or shorter than this.
14. We crave intimate relationships and the long-term experience of not having one is the emotional equivalent of starvation, but all the same is is simply not the case that there is someone out there for everyone. And no, this can’t be fixed.
15. Romantic relationships produce an overbalance of misery so great for me that I’d rather just spend my time with amazing porn. No, this can’t be fixed either.
16. Apropos of (14), I wish sex work were legal and non-stigmatized so that it would be easier to rely on the services of a caring and competent professional in meeting my erotic needs.
17. If there were something like Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine (though perhaps not configured exactly as Nozick described it) I would plug into it, probably for life.
18. Even though I am not suicidal now in middle age, I often regret not having killed myself in early adulthood.
19. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” That was your first big mistake, asshole.

The Negations are things that I accept. Or mostly so. Sometimes I think some of them are too harsh, sometimes I think some of them not harsh enough. From as far back as I can remember thinking about anything philosophical (1-4) were propositions I accepted. The other accreted as I went through life and accumulated knowledge and experience. I could probably come up with more with only minimal effort.

One of the graces of pseudonymous blogging is that you can actually write up and publish lists like this one of Negations. In my “real” life I would not and do not utter Negations in public. Indeed, I wouldn’t utter them in private except to a few very old and intimate friends. Utter them elsewhere and you will attract all sorts of hate, much of it masquerading as concern. The sort of people who will take it upon themselves to attack you for uttering Negations — for want of a better name let’s call them Refuters — will not listen to anything you have to say in support of your position. Listening is an activity premised upon the possibility that you have something to learn from the person speaking to you, and that’s a possibility the Refuters have ruled out a priori (some form of religion is often involved, although with this as with so many other evils in life there are secular variants as well). Refuters might in some sense process the words you utter, but that process is a combing-through in search of psychological weak points of yours the better to be able to bully or manipulate you into recantation of your Negations or at least into silence. (To be sure, even though none of them listen some of them might “play listener,” feigning sympathy and making encouraging conversational noises, but these gestures are flummery analogous to that used by professional confidence men to gain the trust of their marks.) Needless to say, it is highly unpleasant to on the receiving end of the Refuter treatment. A pointless waste of time, also.

Those who are not Refuters are Shunners and Shamers. All do their part in making life even more of a burden than it would otherwise be.

If you accept any Negations, you’re well advised to go through life silent. Of course, silence about subject matters as personally pressing as those covered by the Negations is also highly uncomfortable…