Transcript of The Desire Never to Have Been Born - Jacques Lacan

Some of us weren't meant to be here. We were just left here. There are moments in life that don't feel like life. Moments that feel like a glitch. Like something went wrong, cosmically wrong. You're standing in a room full of people and you feel like a ghost. You're laughing at a joke you didn't find funny. You're alive, but it feels like your presence is a mistake someone forgot to correct. This isn't about wanting to die. It's something colder, quieter, older. A whisper that says, "I shouldn't have been born." That thought lives somewhere deep inside people who still show up to work every day, who post selfies, who smile at their kids. They function, they survive. But inside, something's missing. Not broken, just absent. It's not depression. It's not drama. It's a subtle, persistent desire for non-being. A wish to unbe. And here's the truth no one wants to say out loud. You can have a stable job, a family, a decent life, and still feel this. still feel like your very existence is a kind of violation, like the world called your number by accident. The philosopher David Benitar calls it the harm of coming into existence. He argues that to be born is to be exposed without consent to pain, failure, shame, and loss. That non-existence paradoxically is the only state without harm. And maybe you hear that and think it sounds dramatic, philosophical, detached. But let's make it real. Ask the child born into a war zone if they ever wanted to be here. Ask the girl raped at 11 if existence is a blessing. Ask the man who wakes up every day in a body he never chose. Their silence is the answer. This video isn't about glorifying despair. It's about facing something raw, something ancient. the buried knowledge that being alive is not a simple good. We're going to break this down from five different angles. Psychological, philosophical, scientific, and human with the help of Lakan, Benitar, Evangelion, and the brutal clarity of real life. But first, one more truth. You're not crazy for thinking this. You're not alone, and you're not wrong to wonder. Let's go. You can want nothing without wanting death. Some people stay alive out of inertia. They don't want to end their lives, but they also don't want to be here. It's not suicide they think about. It's erasure, not death, but absence. This distinction is everything. And most people get it wrong. Wanting not to exist is not a cry for help. It's a philosophical position. It's a recognition not of despair but of structure. David Benitar calls life a risk of harm we never consented to. In his words, "Coming into existence is always a serious harm. Not coming into existence is not a harm." This isn't nihilism. It's arithmetic. If being alive means exposure to pain, regret, shame, and entropy, then non-existence is the only state in which none of these are possible. Here's where people stumble. They confuse this desire with depression. But the wish to never have been doesn't come from illness. It often comes from lucidity, from seeing the world too clearly. You don't need to be suffering to feel this way. You just need to see what existence costs. Every moment of joy carries its shadow. Aging, loss, decay. Even your best memories rot over time. Your greatest love ends in death. Yours or theirs. So what are we defending when we defend life? A fragile story we're forced to tell ourselves to justify the chaos we were born into. There's a deeper point here. Suicidal thinking is about escape. The desire not to exist is about prevention. Suicide is action. Non-existence is absence. Suicide requires agency. Non-existence is passive. It's the wish that this had never been started. As Lan puts it, man's desire is the desire of the other. We didn't choose to want. We didn't choose to exist. We were pulled into being by language, by biology, by others, and now we're expected to justify that presence every day. But what if some people simply don't consent to being? What if the most rational response to life isn't celebration, but refusal, not as an act of violence, but as an act of integrity? To say, "This was not my choice, and I owe it nothing." There's no comeback to that because it's not an argument. It's a withdrawal. You were pushed through blood and screaming into a world that never asked what you wanted. And from that moment on, everything was taken personally. We speak of birth as if it were a miracle. But for the one being born, it is the first violence. You are expelled from warmth, into light, into noise, into pain. You are born crying, not because something is wrong, but because everything is wrong. You are born without consent. You are born into a body you did not choose, into a history you did not write. And that alone, that fact already fractures everything. Jacqu Lang called it the trauma of being. For him the subject is not a whole being but a split, a lack. The moment you enter language, the moment you say I, you are already misaligned with yourself. The subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier. What does that mean? It means that the moment we are named, boy, girl, son, gift, burden, we are no longer ourselves. We are a symbol in someone else's story, a placeholder for their desire. And we carry that displacement forever. When a child is born unwanted, the damage is visible. But even when a child is loved, adored, celebrated, they still inherit the full weight of their parents' neurosis, expectations, and projections. You are born into someone else's fantasy, and one day you are punished for not fulfilling it. People think trauma is something that happens to you, but in Lon's world, trauma is you. Your very structure is built around something missing, a hole in being. That's why no amount of therapy or success or affirmation can fully heal you. Because what you're trying to fix is not a scar. It's your architecture. The moment you are born, the wound is set. The rest of life is a negotiation with that damage. And this raises a brutal question. If existence begins in rupture, why should it be sacred? Why defend the sanctity of life? If life begins by ripping you away from wholeness, if birth is not a beginning but a break, then wanting not to have been born isn't pathology, it's coherence. It's a rational refusal to participate in a system that offers pain first and meaning, maybe. And that's the point. Even those who thrive are only managing their fracture better. They're not whole. No one is. To be born is to be wounded. The rest is bandaging. [Music] If I disappear, no one has to be disappointed anymore. That isn't a suicidal thought. It's something deeper. It's the inner monologue of someone who understands their existence only as a burden to others. This isn't a death wish. This is Shinji Akari. And Evangelion is not an anime about robots or saving the world. It's about the slow psychological suffocation of a boy who was never supposed to carry the weight of being but was forced to. You'll notice this if you're really watching. Shinji doesn't want to die. He just doesn't want to be responsible for existing. He doesn't want to be seen, touched, needed, or known. He wants to vanish. Not into death, but into one being. The philosopher Emil Kioran wrote, "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself since you always kill yourself too late." That's the exact feeling Evangelion weaponizes. It's not that suicide is off the table. It's that by the time you consider it, you've already endured more pain than you should have. So instead, you fold inward. You vanish emotionally. You become absent in human form. Shinji's refusal to pilot the EVA is not cowardice. It's metaphysical rebellion. Every adult around him demands he serve a cause, a system, a trauma larger than himself. But he is a child who never asked to exist and now must bear the symbolic weight of humanity's survival. What do you do when the world won't let you leave but punishes you for being there? You don't kill yourself. You unbecome. You shut down. And here's the painful brilliance of it all. Evangelion doesn't solve that conflict. There is no redemption arc, no clean healing. Because the problem is existence itself. Every angel that appears is not a villain. It's a mirror. Each one forces the characters to confront some unbearable truth about themselves. The enemy is not the external. It's the unbearable intimacy of being seen, being known, being real. And that brings us here. Shinji's apathy, Asuka's rage, Ray's emptiness. They're not dramatic character flaws. They are onlogical positions. They are the responses of different psyches to the same unbearable fact that to exist is to be misaligned. And the only peace is to dissolve. Evangelion ends and doesn't end with this ambiguity intact. Not because it failed to resolve the plot, but because there is no resolution for this structure of pain. To live is to betray yourself in slow motion. And evangelian like life doesn't offer a way out. It just exposes the wound and walks away. Your brain is not trying to make you happy. It's trying to keep you afraid enough to survive. We were not designed for peace. We were not built to thrive. The human brain, your most intimate organ, is optimized for survival, not satisfaction. Happiness, that's a chemical illusion. A rare neurochemical spike in a system hardwired to detect threat, failure, and loss. This isn't poetic. It's anatomical. The amygdala, the fear center, is hyperreactive. It stores trauma faster than pleasure. It remembers insults longer than praise. It reacts to imagined dangers as if they were real. And the preffrontal cortex, the rational part, it's constantly overridden by emotional memory, evolutionary paranoia, and social anxiety. We call it mental illness. But maybe it's just mental function in an environment we were never meant to endure. This is what makes the desire not to exist so compelling because it's not irrational. It's a biological consequence of being born into a system designed for survival at the cost of sanity. Your body keeps the score as Bessel Vanderolulk wrote, but it never forgets to punish you. Pain leaves a deeper trace than pleasure because pain might kill you. And so your mind becomes a theater of constant rehearsals for threats that may never come. But the stress is real. The cortisol is real. The inflammation is real. You don't need trauma to suffer. You just need a brain. We've known for decades that loneliness activates the same pain circuits as physical injury. Rejection lights up the same parts of the brain as a burn. And yet, we treat emotional pain like it's less real, as if a broken heart were more manageable than a broken leg. But one heals, the other repeats. You lose a parent at 9. Your body locks in a pattern of panic and abandonment for the next 40 years. You grow up in chaos. Your nervous system burns at baseline. You get humiliated once and every future moment becomes a potential echo of that failure. The result, a species that can walk, talk, build empires, and still wake up at 3:00 a.m. shaking over something that happened 10 years ago. So, what are we defending exactly? A consciousness that is in constant war with itself? An organism that can solve quantum equations but can't stop replaying a breakup? Lan said, "The human being is an error of nature, aware and yet condemned to lack. Our intelligence is the very thing that makes us suffer more. We don't just feel, we analyze the feeling, we don't just hurt, we make meaning out of the hurt. And sometimes we wish we didn't. Not because we are broken, but because we see clearly. Existence is not a gift. It is a sentence carried out by flesh. The most persistent human instinct is not survival, it's justification. We don't stay because life is beautiful. We stay because we need it to mean something. Because walking away would make it all feel like a bad joke. And we can't afford that. People endure unimaginable pain, hunger, war, rape, humiliation, grief. so deep it shatters the nervous system. And yet they go on not because they love life, but because they're terrified of conceding that none of it had to happen. Kimu said the only serious philosophical question is whether to kill yourself. But maybe the deeper question is why don't we? Why do mothers who lose children keep breathing? Why do men disfigured by bombs keep blinking at the sun? Why do survivors crawl out of the wreckage and go back to brushing their teeth? The answer isn't hope. Hope is a story you tell children. The answer is inertia. The machinery of biology. The grotesque persistence of the body. We eat, [ __ ] sleep, wake. Not because we want to, but because the body moves forward even when the soul has vacated the premises. There's no glory in this. There's no triumph in resilience. We glorify it because the alternative that we are stuck in an engine that can't turn itself off is too bleak to face directly. Shuran wrote, "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself since you always kill yourself too late. We stay because leaving requires a kind of metaphysical punctuation most people never learn to write. So we cope. We invent gods. We make art. We write songs about heartbreak and then stream them on repeat. We scream into therapy rooms and laugh at memes about our own trauma. We mask the horror with rituals. But here's the paradox. Even knowing all this, we still go on not because life is precious, but because the self, once in motion, is almost impossible to dissolve. We are not free. We are not rational. We are not alive because we chose to be. We are here because matter moves and neurons fire and trauma imprints itself too deep to undo. I don't want to die. I just don't want to be here. That sentence has no cure. Only recognition. And maybe that's what this was all for. Not to fix the feeling, but to see it, to name it, to say without shame, without performance. I did not ask for this, but I'm still here. And that in itself is the strangest truth of all. There's a certain kind of silence that follows a truth too heavy to hold. If you felt that silence, if this video touched something buried, something wordless, then you already understand what this channel is about. This space isn't here to entertain. It's here to say what most people are too afraid to admit, to give language to the thoughts that keep you up at 3:00 a.m. to remind you that you're not broken. You're awake. If you stayed through the entire video, you've already supported this work in a way that matters. Your presence here is not taken for granted. But if you want to go a step further, if you believe this kind of content should exist in a world drowning in noise, consider becoming a channel member. Members get access to behindthe-scenes posts, exclusive content, deeper dives, and direct influence on upcoming topics. It's not just perks. It's a way to help this project stay honest, raw, and free from algorithm chasing nonsense. You can also leave a super thanks, a one-time gesture that says, "This hit me. This meant something." But truly, even if you never spend a scent watching, commenting, sharing, that already makes you part of something real. You're not just a viewer. You're part of this strange, quiet rebellion. And I'm glad you're here. Stay human. Stay awake. And if you can help keep this message alive. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]