What It's Like to Not Exist

It's Actually Not Bad

You are not here.

For an infinite amount of time before your life began (or, at least, for 13.7 billion years, if time concurrently arose with the creation of the universe), you did not exist, which means, from your standpoint, nothing existed. What, if anything, can be said about this incomprehensively vast period that dwarfs the brief interval of being alive?

01 Unlike existence, nonexistence, by definition, cannot be experienced, and thus cannot be evaluated or assessed. Indeed, from a subjective viewpoint, nonexistence is literally impossible to conceptualize. You could imagine, perhaps, being sealed inside a sensory deprivation chamber, in total darkness and silence; but even under that kind of extreme isolation from the outside world, you would still possess a functioning brain capable of forming mental impressions, something you’d lack if you didn’t exist.

02 Nonexistence simply isn’t “like” anything; and given its preclusion of bio-neurological systems, it doesn’t feel like anything, either. Even to describe it as utter nothingness would be inadequate, since this implies a situation — the complete absence of external phenomena — that is capable of being perceived, without an object of perception or a subject to perceive it. Logically, one cannot be in a state of nonexistence, for to “be” is to exist. One who doesn’t exist cannot be in any state at all (see Article 2).

03 It follows that the assertion “I was born” is nonsensical, since it presupposes the existence of an “I” as a subject at a time before any such “I”, in fact, existed. It would be more accurate to say something like, “A reproductive event occurred that caused what I now know as ‘me’ to exist.” That would likely get you a few strange looks.

04 Most people consciously or subconsciously believe themselves and others to have had a kind of proto-existence, or retro-identity, before they were born. It is as if there was a premonition or an idea of you — the you that presently exists — before your parents actually “had” you. You may not have yet come into being, the argument goes, but you (the prospective you) had the potential to do so, which gave you an interest in existence — or, more pointedly, it is assumed, a desire to exist.

05 Hence, a disrespected parent might admonishingly “remind” their child, “I brought you into this world,” as if the ungrateful offspring previously resided in some kind of etheric phantom zone, desperately pining to enter their mother’s womb; as if they, specifically, had been selected from among other potential (and possibly better behaved) children for the beneficent privilege of being alive. The reality, of course, is quite different. There is no celestial waiting room of hopeful spirit babies. Parents don’t choose their biological children — often, due to accidental pregnancies, they don’t even deliberately choose to have children at all.

06 The only material sense in which a person exists before they’re born is as a scattered collection of atomic particles that originated during the formation of the universe. Every such particle that presently makes up your physical body has existed for billions of years before you did, continuously combining and recombining into other living and non-living things. But that hardly justifies a conclusion that there was a “you” all along. We don’t say that a chair existed before it was built because the wood with which it was constructed came from a pine tree that sprouted up in some distant forest decades ago, or that a sand castle existed before an idle vacationer made it because every grain of sand utilized for the project was already there on the beach. What makes you you is the accretion of nondescript matter into a specific human organism with a conscious mind that conceptualizes itself as a unique, independent actor distinct from surrounding space and everything else in it. That entity — that person you know as you — is simply not there prior to its biological creation.

07 So why doesn’t prenatal nonexistence, once we truly face up to it, fill us with abject terror, or at least considerable unease, analogous to how we feel about the prospect of ceasing to exist after we die? Why don’t we lie awake at night ruminating about the eons we “missed”; about the frightening strangeness of not being alive — not existing at all — in prior ages when (we are told) other people lived and interesting things happened? Why are we so untroubled by the vast experiential void of all the time that transpired before our arrival on the scene? There are at least three reasons.

08 First, we know that we exist now, so why dwell on the seemingly inconsequential abstraction of our nonexistence in the past? History is like hearing about a party that you weren’t invited to — maybe you wish you’d been there, but it doesn’t matter; the party’s over. And given the common (though in many respects refutable) belief that the general human condition has steadily improved over time, not existing in earlier, less “advanced” eras may be seen as a blessing. Either way, what’s done is done.

09 Second, our present existence, from our own viewpoint, is spatially confined to our immediate vicinity, so we’re already used to not existing elsewhere. As I write this, I exist in a specific place – the small den of my home in Upstate New York. When it’s quiet, as it is now, the scope of my existence occupies a perceptional sphere with a radius of perhaps no more than a few feet from where I sit, representing the outer limit of my senses. Although I believe that Tokyo exists and that various things happen there, at this particular moment, I do not exist in Tokyo. I don’t even exist in the next room. While objectively it might be postulated that I exist in some categorical respect, irrespective of where I am, subjectively, I only exist right here.

10 Third, we routinely undergo periods of unconsciousness, primarily during sleep, that create partial or total gaps in our mental experience of the world around us. These blank spaces, comprising roughly a third of our lives, are akin, if not equivalent, to nonexistence. While our brains and bodies continue to function, we have no firsthand knowledge of anything that happens while we’re unconscious, no memories when we awake or “come to.” It is no different than prenatality. I have as much direct personal knowledge of what transpired while I was asleep last night as I do about the War of 1812, which is to say, none at all. As far as my internal reality is concerned, I didn’t exist while I slept any more than I existed when the British burned Washington. This is a bizarre state of affairs; yet because sleep is biologically essential and occurs so naturally, most of us go about our waking hours without thinking anything of it.

11 Even if we are unfazed by our prior nonexistence, it is critical to gaining an accurate perspective on the ephemeral and transitory nature of our present lives, and to understanding the unenviable situation we find ourselves in, once we’re able to be in any situation at all.