Suffering is the main focus of antinatalists, and rightly so. Suffering is terrible and completely unnecessary, and antinatalism is the only way to prevent this suffering. But here’s another interesting reason to support human extinction: aesthetics.

When most people think about having children, they think about cute babies. They think about kids laughing and playing. They think about nice homes with manicured lawns in safe, clean suburbs. They think about an idyllic family life – beautiful and perfect in every way.

Picture these things in your mind. Try to develop detailed, vivid images. Now, consider this question: Are these images aesthetically pleasing? Most likely, the answer is yes.

Here’s what comes to mind when most people think about having children:

While the images commonly evoked by natalism are aesthetically pleasing, this isn’t the full story. Natalism, in reality, is downright ugly. Slums, trash-filled oceans, war zones, and smog covered cities are all consequences of human reproduction. Our species has destroyed Earth and turned it into a polluted, dangerous, nauseating cesspool.

This is what natalism really looks like:

Clearly, the planet would be much prettier without humans fucking up the place.

Now, compared to the asymmetry argument and the consent argument, this justification for antinatalism may seem rather silly. However, I think it’s more powerful and profound than it appears at first glance.

The decision to have children is (almost always) influenced more by emotion than by reason. Natalists and natalist arguments are emotional, not logical. So, the asymmetry argument and the consent argument are rarely effective when debating natalists.

An argument from aesthetics, on the other hand, might be more successful. Why? Because it’s an argument that elicits an emotional reaction. Just imagine if everyone in the world associated the disgusting images in the second collage, rather than the pleasant images in the first collage, with childbirth. Millions of natalists would opt to remain childfree. These new image associations would cause natalists to feel that having children is wrong – something that traditional AN arguments aren’t capable of doing.

Natalists are irrational. We need to appeal to their irrationality.