Life is basically a pursuit, often unconscious, after the fulfillment of needs. This pursuit has no purpose. It’s its own cause. The pursuit of fulfillment exists simply because it is necessary to address needs, ignoring them is accompanied by some negative experience. Prolonged disregard of the need to eat, for example, will be accompanied by the unpleasant feeling of hunger, and continued disregard will lead to pain, exhaustion and damage to bodily systems. A similar case is ignoring the need to drink or sleep. You can’t simply ignore these needs, because complete disregard is fatal. This may sound obvious, but at a deeper level, the idea is that if a person does nothing, in a literal sense, that is, lie down in a certain spot without moving at all except to prevent falling asleep (since the idea is not to respond to any need), very quickly a host of discomforts, physical and mental restlessness and at some point also pain, will follow. The point is that if life was basically good, or even neutral, when a person chose to do nothing s/he should have positive experiences, or at least not experience anything, but not suffer. Yet that’s what will happen, and pretty quickly. Add to all this that a person who does nothing will get bored very quickly and feel lonely and probably pointless and useless, and this is evidence that life is not good in itself. You have to do a lot of things, and some require a lot of effort in order for life to be good. On the other hand, if you do nothing, life becomes pretty bad pretty quickly. So it is much more plausible that life is bad in itself. It is not possible to do nothing and be fine. A host of attacks from unfulfilled built-in needs will come very quickly.
What makes matters even worse, at least in the eyes of some anti-natalists, is the claim that actually underlying every positive experience is a need. That is, every positive experience is actually the realization of a need and what we experience as a positive feeling is the realization of a need. The meaning of this is that behind and prior to every positive experience there is a negative one. After all, if every positive experience is the fulfillment of a need, and without a need there is no fulfillment, then without a negative experience there is no positive experience. Behind every positive thing is necessarily something negative that preceded it, which was its substrate. So by definition the best state that can be reached in terms of well-being is a balance between needs and fulfillments. And this situation is almost unattainable in real life, because who manages to realize their every need? Nobody. Theoretically, the best state that can be reached is equilibrium, but in practice, the well-being of all people is “in the red”.
Even if you don’t agree that all the positive experiences in life are actually fulfillment of needs, you have to agree that not fulfilling needs leads to negative experiences. One can insist that what a person must do in order to avoid unfulfillment of needs is to work in order to fulfill them. But that’s exactly the deeper point here. If you have to work all the time in order for life to be good and if you don’t work then it is not neutral but bad, this means that life is basically bad.
It seems obvious to us that you have to work, invest, study, compete, improve, etc., in order to live a good life (or of course just be lucky) because that’s what modern life looks like, but this only indicates what life is like at its core. Something is essentially good when you don’t have to make an effort for it to be good.
On the other hand, our intuition is that we need to do things in order to make life worse, but this is also only because we are so used to thinking that we need to work, invest, study, compete, improve, etc. If we break away from these modern concepts and try to think about life in a much simpler manner, like what would happen if we just did nothing, we would clear away all the distractions of the present moment, and distill life itself. And as said before, in that situation pretty quickly it would get pretty bad.
According to this approach, even parents who will make every possible effort in order for their children to be well, all they can achieve, and of course no one succeeds in achieving such a situation, is that all the needs of their children will be met. Beyond the fact that it is impossible, certainly not exactly at the time and exactly to the extent that the children needed, it is actually creating a being full of needs only to fulfill them later. It is like creating a problem and solving it and feeling that we have done something good. But it is clear that creating someone full of problems, even if it were really possible to solve all of them, to a sufficient extent and in time, is not good in itself.
According to this approach there is no advantage to a satisfied need over a situation where there are no needs at all. And moreover, the maximum that can be theoretically achieved is that all needs are met, and this is still not better than zero needs, because it is actually also a type of zero well-being.
All that a satisfied need can achieve, and even that is at best case scenario, is a return to the state before it existed. That is, the need has brought me below zero, and all that a satisfaction of this need can do is return me to zero well-being. Therefore, existence cannot be good, but in the best case, existence can be neutral. When all of someone’s needs are met it brings their level of well-being back to where it was before the needs arose. And this situation has no advantage over the situation where there are no needs at all. Therefore existence has no advantage over non-existence since the optimal state of existence is that there will be no unsatisfied needs, and this is also the case with non-existence. Although in non-existence there are no unsatisfied needs because there are no needs at all, still, since in existence the maximum that can be reached is that there will be no unsatisfied needs, and in practice there is no chance that anyone will succeed in reaching a state where all their needs are satisfied, existence has no advantage. When the ideal is a neutral situation, in practice you can only lose.
So, according to this argument, reproduction is not just taking a risk that the balance between the negative and positive experiences will be negative, but a decision that it will be negative, and that the theoretical maximum (which is practically zero) will be zero. Therefore life is at best a zero sum game and in practice always in deficit.
Many oppose the claim that the maximum well-being in people’s lives is zero, for example because according to them the pleasures from satisfying needs can be greater than the suffering from a need that has not yet been met or will never even be met, which according to them is not that great either. However, even if for the sake of the matter we ignore the grim conclusion that the maximum well-being in people’s lives is zero (and even that is only in the best case and completely improbable), it is impossible to ignore the grim conclusion that is casually stated here regarding life itself. If you refer to the claim that life is not good in itself, because if you do nothing the feeling is not good or even neutral, but rather quickly you suffer from it, not as one of the premises of the argument about a zero sum game but as a counter argument to the claim that life is good, it should at least provoke thought, if not neutralize, or at least weaken the all too prevalent myth that life is good in itself. Even if not a zero sum game, life is definitely not good in itself, and it is very bad for very many.