Grifith Draycott

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
― Emil Cioran

“In all our actions, including those that appear selfless, we are in search of some kind of pleasure, even if it is only the pleasure of self-esteem. But while our desire for pleasure is infinite, our mental and physical organs are capable only of limited and temporary pleasures; and this mismatch between desire and capacity dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction. There is no pleasure big or total enough to quench, even momentarily, our thirst for pleasure. But since the absence of pleasure is pain, it follows that we are always in pain, even when we might believe otherwise. And if life is nothing but an unbroken experience of pain, it would be better for every human being never to have been born.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

“A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun—aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Everyone dies of something. And we can't bury ourselves. This means that for every human being who has ever lived, someone must discover and dispose of the body. It is mistaken to attribute this harm only to suicides. It is part of our humanity that we - suicides and non-suicides alike - must inflict this harm on others. Once we have been given the dubious gift of life, we are destined to burden someone with the disposal of our dead body.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide