This book is a book in which Japanese philosopher Masahiro Morioka confronts head-on the fundamental questions of human existence: "Why was I born? And wouldn't it have been better not to have been born?"
The author traces the lineage of the idea of ​​'birth denial' from Oedipus in ancient Greece to Buddha, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the modern anti-natalist philosopher Benedict.
Why do humans deny their own existence, and how can they overcome that denial? Morioka argues that we must somehow escape the darkness of "I wish I had never been born" and move toward the light of "I'm so glad I was born."
He calls this 'birth affirmation'.
It is not a forced belief that one must live since one is born, but a philosophical decision to affirm life even in the midst of pain and contradiction.
"Would It Have Been Better Never to Have Been Born?" is a book that crosses the boundaries of the West and the East, literature and philosophy, and asks again the meaning of "being alive."
It is a new starting point for modern philosophy of life, bringing a ray of hope from the abyss of despair.

But there is no doubt that one day, the final destination called death will await us.
It's like trying to "inflate a soap bubble as long and as big as possible, knowing full well that it will eventually burst."
And if we look at the path of life toward death, we find ourselves constantly struggling in pain until we reach our goal, and then we are overcome by emptiness and boredom.
So life is nothing more than “a pendulum swinging between pain and boredom.”

--- p.76

Schopenhauer quotes Francesco Petrarch, who said, “A thousand pleasures cannot be compared with one pain,” and says, “Though thousands of people lived happily and joyfully, it would be impossible for them to relieve the agonizing anxiety and pain of death suffered by a single person.”

--- p.78

The Upanishads tell us that there is a way to escape the endless cycle of reincarnation and enter the immortal world.
It is said that when we properly recognize what Atman is, we shed our body like a snake shedding its skin and attain liberation.
So why did philosophers want to escape reincarnation? Because this world is filled with suffering and sorrow.

--- p.116

Primitive Buddhism believed that everything humans experience is suffering.
At that time, Indian society believed in reincarnation, so it was thought that one could not escape suffering even in the world of rebirth after death.
Furthermore, those who left home practiced with the hope that after death they would never be born again.

--- p.136

In the realm of Nirvana there is no fear of death.
It means not being obsessed with life, nor obsessed with death, but just calmly waiting for death to come.
Nirvana is a state where you no longer want to live, but at the same time, you no longer want to die.
It is truly the annihilation of desire and attachment to life.

--- p.149

Nietzsche believes that one cannot extract only pleasure from the world and affirm it.
This is because the pleasures we obtain in this world are always connected to the pain that prepared the pleasure, like an underground rhizome. When we draw out the pleasure, the pain that is connected to it is also drawn out.
This is a completely different way of thinking from Beneath, who thought that human pleasure and pain could be separated and their value compared.

--- p.179

For those who, having taken the ultimate fulfillment and happiness they feel in the prime of their old age as food and went down the steep slope of life's final slope thinking, "This is enough," even if a state of rottenness and evil is destined for them, it cannot necessarily be called evil.
Clearly, the steep downhill slope is a state of evil that has rotted and collapsed, but for me, who has the thought that 'this is enough,' the creation of a state of evil is also 'this is enough,' and is by no means a state of evil.

--- p.220

But I, who exist here now, cannot counterfactually imagine what it would be like if I had not been born.
Because in order to properly complete the counterfactual imagination of 'what if I had never been born', I would also have to erase my existence here and now, trying to perform that imagination.

--- p.224