I’ve been aware for some time that there was a Romanian-Parisian existentialist philosopher named Emil Cioran who wrote On the Heights of Despair and The Trouble With Being Born. The other day when mentioning him I pulled up a copy of Trouble for the first time and everyone present found it all hilarious. It’s all unconnected aphorisms:
Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
“Ever since I was born”—that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need await it, it is present.
My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.
Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas . . .
I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
The real, the unique misfortune: To see the light of day.
When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.
If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, “What good did it do the occupant to be born?”, I now put the same question about anyone alive.
If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.
It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
An ancient cleaning woman, in answer to my “How’s everything doing?” answers without looking up: “Taking its course.” This ultra-banal answer nearly brings me to tears.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.
Not all of the aphorisms were like this. In fact I liked reading the book. It’s interesting to compare aphorism books to tweets.
Adding in a bit of my own worldview, I find this topic interesting, because I think people often conflate the “trouble” with being born and the “trouble” with being self-aware. As I see it, there’s no suffering from just existing. It’s only when you know you exist and can see yourself in pain that suffering is arises, and from that the aspect of pain is not existence, but a particular kind of self-awareness that’s focused on suffering and the way in which each moment is being assessed to be net negative rather than neutral or net positive.
I used to be in a deep depression for many years, so I take this sort of existential quandary seriously and have independently had many similar thoughts. I used to say that I didn’t ask to be born, and that consciousness was the cruelest trick the universe ever played.
Depression can cause extreme anguish, and can narrow the sufferer’s focus such that they are forced to reflect on themselves (or the whole world) only through a lens of suffering. If the depressed person still reflexively self-preserves, they might wish for death without pursuing it, or they might wish for their non-existence without actually connoting death. Either way, any chronically depressed person might consistently and truly wish that they were never born, and for some people this is a more palatable thing to wish for than death.
I eventually recovered from my depression, and my current life is deeply wonderful in many ways. But the horror of having once sincerely pled not to have been has stuck with me.
That’s something I’ll have to work through if I ever choose to have children. It’s difficult to consider bringing new life into the world when it’s possible that the predominant thing I would actually be bringing into the world is suffering. I expect that I will work through this successfully, since recovery is also part of my experience, and I have adopted the axiom (at least intellectually) that being is better than non-being.