mechap
Yes, I kind of retranscribed some ideas from the the book on my last post.
That's what I get for skimming the thread, I see it now durr.
I think I lean towards the "simply have an interest in not being created", or perhaps "have no interest in being created". I recognise it's a paradoxical stance, since obviously if you weren't created you can't really have a preference, and it's all post-hoc reasoning/justification/evaluation. Existence is something that can only be judged by those who have existed, or something to that effect. But humans have no real problem with holding contradictory stances.
Ego-death... I find that as terrifying and as equal to regular old death. It's not a solution for me, since I don't really see it as being meaningfully different from regular death. It sort of has been an approach by some religions, hasn't it? The annihilation of earthly desires is not so far off from self-annihilation. And attempting to become One with a higher being (whether that is a Godhead, the Universe or a vast sea of consciousness) is ego-death by sublimation.
But to a lesser degree, a regular form of ego-death that humans undertake does provide sufficient purpose to counter or mask the pain of conscious existence. I'm referring to when humans shed individual identity for group identity, or adopting a tribalistic mentality such as nationalism. To be clear, I'm not saying 'tribalistic' in a pejorative way, I mean it in the literal sense of thinking in terms of in-groups and out-groups. These kinds of communal approaches are usually fantastic for coping with consciousness, right? To subsume yourself within the nation, or to consider yourself as part of XYZ economic class, or to think of yourself as one of this race (and to elevate your in-group) – these provide a mental balm that uplifts people. And by subordinating yourself under these broader communal identities, you temporarily become 'avatars' of your group. A mild, temporary and reversible form of ego-death. Hm, I've never really thought of it in such terms, so my ideas here might be a little rough. Ego-baptism (since it is a temporary drowning of the self and its subsequent rebirth) as one of our major coping mechanisms does make sense to me. That's kinda neat.
The follow-up to that would be: for how long? How deeply? And we might attribute some of the wilder aspects of society to people having overly subsumed themselves within their group (eg, X supremacy, identity politics in general), or people who have gone too far in the other direction and rejected the group identities wholly (though by our nature as social animals, I don't think even hyper-individualists can escape taking on group identities wholly or for more than a brief period).