I recently got married for the first time in my life, in the same year that I had my 59th birthday. For many years, even for decades, I wondered if I would be alone my whole life, and I wondered how I would work out my happiness even while being alone. The best practice I could find to try to work out a life alone was meditation.  Meditation is a technique that helps quiet the mind. It can even lead to a "born again" experience people call enlightenment, or some people call it satori. But that is a very rare occurrence, and it can't be something anyone can achieve by an act of their own will. Instead, it seems to be a sort of accident.

Aside from this accident, I think the norm for the majority of humanity is a lifetime of suffering, with occasional enjoyable moments, and a very difficult old age. Oh, the enlightened ones, they'll say the suffering is really just an illusion. It's like waking up from a bad dream. It was never really suffering at all! Haha! But I am not willing to gamble on an accident, hoping that everyone will see this. They seem quite happy to point out that it's not suffering, even though nobody else on the planet can see that, and they cannot guarantee that everyone will eventually see it too.

Another thing I wondered about, aside from whether I would be alone my whole life, was why I was born. It was like a standing question for me for many years: "why was I born?" It wasn't until my wife and I were talking about birthdays and she said something along the lines of "I'm not so sure being born is something to celebrate" that I suddenly realized why I had been born. I was born because of the ignorance of my parents, and my grandparents, and every person who had come before them who decided they wanted to have children. All the suffering I have experienced in my life, I can say very confidently, is a direct result of the ignorance of my parents' decision to have children. If they had just thought it through a little, they would have seen that their children, or their children's children, or their great-great grandchildren sooner or later would have some progeny who suffer a lot. It's not the kid's fault.

I have decided I will never have kids. I don't find myself thinking "if those kids had been born, it would be on them to solve all their problems and learn to be happy." Nope. It's on me. I've solved all my kid's problems, the hell they would go through and the misery and disappointment and mental anguish they would face. I have solved all that by saying "I'm just not going to have any kids. There are thousands of generations of human suffering that I'm responsible for not bringing into the world. No god or idol needs to save or damn them to hell for eternity. I have saved them all myself by just not bringing them here in the first place."

I have absolutely no envy of people who do have kids. If anything, I feel sorry that their children are continuing in this chain reaction of ignorance that perpetuates human suffering indefinitely. There's no end in sight, and very little hope that people will figure out what's right in front of their face and learn that they don't need to have kids. The world will go on just fine without us around. All I can do is try to explain how I see the direct link between human suffering and people having children, and hope a few people might come to the same answer themselves and avoid bringing another person into the world for no good reason.

You might say "but my kid is going to be the savior of the world! They are going to figure out how to cure cancer and depression and world hunger and everything else and the world will continue forever in an eternal heaven!" Here's some news: the world and the universe will eventually end in evaporating black holes - eventually everything we do is going to pass. It is really all for nothing. All the suffering in the world is not worth those few moments you got to play with your kid and eat some ice cream and laugh. Yes you can enjoy the moment, but not at the expense of others who are bound to suffer without any hope. It might not be your kids. It might be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren, or your great-great-grandchildren. Sooner or later they will suffer very deeply. It's simply not worth the gamble you are taking that they'll save everyone. That's just wishful thinking.

Please consider this: nobody misses never being born in the first place, but many do truly regret having been born.