China supposedly has the artificial womb robot, but who knows if that’s real or just Cold War style propaganda where both sides lie about how close they are to the moon. Still, if anyone was gonna do it first it’d be China, cause they don’t give a fuck. Rocking CRISPR all day. Medical ethics btfo. As it should be. You can pirate every movie too, no intellectual property enforcement. And honestly, good for them. Fuck intellectual property. Oh you had a thought? Lol. Shut the fuck up, it was in the zeitgeist, fuck off.

But then, predictably, someone chimes in with the question: would robot wombs make us less human because we no longer “sacrifice” for it?

There is value to be had in suffering, but it’s not a prerequisite for value or investment. The “suffering makes us human” people are boring, recycling the same old religious tropes with no evidence to back them up beyond sour grapes and slave morality.

Bertrand Russell nailed this in In Praise of Idleness: technological progress should liberate us from drudgery, because glorifying labor and suffering is a moral mistake inherited from puritanism. Leisure is what allows culture, science, and philosophy to flourish. Lots of transhumanist thinkers have to fight against this silly antiquated way of thinking all the time and they make lots of compelling arguments. Reducing suffering through tech doesn’t make us less human, it opens new dimensions of experience. Anesthesia didn’t make us less human, vaccines haven’t robbed us of character. These things freed us from pointless misery so we could do more, not less.

The truth is, people who romanticize suffering are deluded about the past, clinging to hardship like it’s proof of authenticity. But philosophy almost requires being freed from survival mode. To insist on suffering as a condition for meaning is just an inability to imagine meaning without it. Aristotle’s whole concept of scholē (leisure) is that philosophy and culture require freedom from toil. Nobody writes tragedies or develops metaphysics while starving in a field.

Getting back to pregnancy specifically, I had my first child vaginally, then all my subsequent kids by cesarian. One could argue, and many people do, that c section is “less than.” And they will come up with all sorts of justifications as to why it’s worse for mom and baby. Some marginally true, some complete pseudoscience. But they aren’t arguing it because it’s better or worse but because they also just feel like the suffering is an important part of the process. But I can assure you I don’t love my younger children any less because I didn’t have to be in pain for hours and hours and instead got to just enjoy a calm, scheduled slicing open of the bowels. Women used to die in childbirth much more frequently, do we love our kids less now that modern medicine has reduced that risk significantly?

I’m also going to get another IUD shoved up there after my daughter is born so I don’t have to have a period every month. Actually, on the subject, there’s no reason “the pill” has a week of sugar pills to ensure women still have a period while on it besides, again, the idea that we’re just supposed to suffer every month because it’s NaTuRaL.

You don’t have to take it as far as I do, I’m a transhumanist who is perfectly fine with rejecting the corporeal existence altogether, but to argue that shackling women with pregnancy somehow makes motherhood more meaningful is some weird and easily dispelled bs. I mean, do dads not love their kids? This rhetoric disproportionately lands on women. Pregnancy, menstruation, childbirth pain, all framed as “sacred suffering.” Meanwhile men aren’t lining up to demand more kidney stones for meaning.

Anyway, I just want to upload my consciousness to the cloud and become a body without organs.

And, taking this in a different but related direction. People will ignore all that context and then say stupid shit like, “why are there so many fewer historical female philosophers??” Ignoring not only the material conditions of suffering and lack of leisure inherent in the female condition, but of course also the coordinated suppression through lack of education, the appropriation of female thinkers by their male relatives, and the complete disregard for all the philosophy women did do and are still doing that relates specifically to “women’s issues” (liberation, suffrage, rape culture, patriarchy, basically anything that falls under the feminist umbrella). You might disagree with a lot of what they are saying, and some of it might actually be retarded, but that’s just philosophy—half the canon is people saying retarded shit with conviction. The difference is men get to argue about Being and Nothingness while women were forced to argue about whether they were even people. Context matters.

And surprise surprise, with some modern medicine and birth control and a bit of separation for women from the corporeal suffering inherent in the human condition (as well as removal of some of those other barriers mentioned) women are entering into previously male dominated fields of scientific and existential exploration in droves. And for me personally, I’m still doing it while being pregnant, dealing with all the health issues that stem from that (many that don’t ever go away after having kids), raising kids, working full time, and doing school full time. Imagine how much more I could do if I wasn’t so exhausted from pregnancy right now that I’m having trouble focusing on simple statistics homework. I try to keep up with writing too but imagine how much more time I could devote to ThInKiNg if I had a China robot doing my corporeal bidding rn. Would be pretty neat is all I’m saying.

There’s plenty of suffering out there to be had without holding back progress through some misguided ludditeesque puritanical fetish for the past. Nietzsche understood that suffering can be a forge for strength, but he never treated it like a sacrament. He praised those who could take unavoidable hardship and transmute it into power, art, or insight, but he also sneered at the idea of seeking out suffering as if misery were a virtue in itself. That’s just asceticism dressed up as depth. The point isn’t to worship pain, but even if it was there’s no lack of existential suffering inherent in the human condition, we don’t need to add more by purposely crippling ourselves for some masochistic kink.