You probably don’t often say “I didn’t ask to be born.” As a self-respecting adult, the phrase sounds petulant, something you left behind with teenage slammed doors or dramatic diary entries. But it’s a true statement. That we stop saying it might be one of the distinctions between being a child and being an adult.
Kids do say it, and it’s legitimate. They’ve landed in a world they never agreed to, with parents they didn’t choose, and circumstances outside their control. It sounds like a tantrum, but it’s factually correct. What changes as we age isn’t the underlying truth, but our relationship to it.
Heidegger called it “thrownness.” The idea that each of us is thrown into the world at a particular moment in time, into a particular body, a particular family, a particular culture. Not invited or consulted. Just suddenly here. It’s an experience of existence, not a complaint about it.
A complaint lingers on though, consciously or not. When the world feels insufferable, or your situation feels like something you never signed up for, the childhood lament can echo back. You might not say it aloud, but you might think it, if only implicitly.
Maybe growing up is the process of moving through that sentiment, to the other side of it. Not by pretending your throwness isn’t real, but by owning the fact that you’re here anyway. That no one is coming, to validate your non-consent to this existence. That this specific, unrepeatable, unchosen life is yours to do something with.
It’s a paradox. The statement is both completely true, and beside the point. You didn’t ask to be born. Yet here you are. Both things can stand, and the task seems to be holding them together, honoring the strangeness of existence without letting it become an excuse to opt out of it.
Image credit: Mel Lituañas
