In my opinion it's not only not a gift, it's a curse. To know I exist because of a chemical cocktail that went through my parents brains, that the subconscious narcissistic ego of having created a life that never had a choice to be born and was always done so for a selfish reason. Either 1) To create a life is egotistical as you have full control over it and it looks to you as God. 2)To save a failing marriage 3) By accident but then compelled to keep it due to religious beliefs 4) To fill a void in the life of two people.
I was born with a broken clavicle. Most men are also circumcised at birth. We suffer male gentile mutilation and neurologists have now proven with dozens of studies, that a baby which feels pain it should not feel, such as being slapped, yelled at, born with broken bones, shaken, develop differently. A babies brain is a genius. The IQ of babies and children are much higher than adults. This is why children when taught from the moment they have awareness of self vs other around age 3, they can learn 3 languages at once, their neurons are growing and connecting much faster so the greatest pianists, violinists and other orchestra based musicians started when they were 3 or 4 and from 4-10 their minds absorbed a lifetime of musical practice by someone who never played an instrument just starting at 24.
The 24 year old will never be as good as the 3-4 year old if both practiced equally or even if the 24 year old practiced harder.
The point that I'm trying to make is, most of this kind of stuff has been known for decades, but little has focused on those born who suffer pain more than anything else. Their neurological connections are wired differently.
Instead of growing up normal and well adjusted, a baby who was emotionally and physically abused is guaranteed to have some form of mental health issues for life. Their brains were wired for defense instead of curiosity and love.
Imagine the following analogy applies to our lives. Represented in a walk through the field the first step represents our birth and every mile represents 5 years of our life.
You're born, you begin walking a straight line through the field, this is the normal path for a decent life. At 1 years old, you father or mother shakes you because you won't stop crying or hits you, constantly yells at you, pays little attention to you. Walking in the field, you must now divert from the straight path by 3 degrees. At first the changes appear small. A few hundred steps and your a few dozen feet off the path but it's still in view.
Now you're 10, you witness and experience your parents fight every day, you walk on eggshells, your father is always drunk, comes home at 2am drunk waking you up yelling at your mother, you go downstairs and spend an hour breaking up their fight and sleep at school the next day getting sent to the principles office.
Divert that straight path another 3 degrees. You walked a mile now, the path you began on is really far and can't been seen at night anymore, only during cloudy, rainy and sunny days.
You walk another mile, you're 15, you've witnessed violence, aggression, adult roles like worrying about the rent, drop out of high school and get a job.
Until the age of 24, the brain does not stop developing in the Frontal Cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for everything that makes us intelligent and self- aware. Our self-awareness is directly tied to our brain chemistry, our minds, our subconscious and many other things we cannot control.
When that child reaches 24, they will be so far off the path of a diseased free brain, they won't be able to see it in the day, the night, with binoculars or anything. It's gone, forever, and they are lost on a path that contains mental health issues.
Their path is filled with rocks, and holes, dangerous bugs and animals, yet they must continue to walk it day and night. They were not given the choice to stay on the straight path which remains lit with spotlights and protected with fences on both sides.
So from the very start many of us are born having to do everything the person on the straight path does, but we twist our ankles, break our legs, fall down and get cuts, are attacked by poisonous insects and animals and while their road is flat, ours is a never ending steep incline where at any moment we could grab the wrong branch and it snaps (betrayal in life from friends, family, relationship partner, behind our peers in where we think we should be etc) and roll all the way down to the very beginning breaking bones, and getting bruised all along the way down to the start again.
None of us chose to be born, we exist in an endless loop outside of evolution. It was a tragic mistake by evolution to create a species that was forever separated from it.
We have anxiety over the future, depression over the past, the present is a never ending hell that seems absolutely designed to convince us that when we are happy or experiencing pleasure time feels as though it exceeds the speed of light, but when we are suffering, when the pain doesn't stop, physical, emotional, mental it doesn't matter, time slows to a crawl.
This is the kind of creation that exists in a dead end. Nietzsche warned us that sometime in the 21st century when science destroys organized religion that mankind will go through a trial that to this day not a single human has managed to finish.
In order to be capable of any kind of joy or happiness, we would have to forget everything we have been taught by everyone, our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders, our friends, we must start fresh and let go of it all. We must ignore society and create a universe inside ourselves. The rules, the morality, the concepts that exist in all cultures must be erased forever and reformed in our own image by each of us to create an existence where we bring fourth our own meaning and purpose individually and derive happiness from it.
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche
It was either that or he predicted the slow decay of society, filled with violence and rage, as the masses unable to find purpose in their culture or beliefs which they were raised on anymore, cause a soft extinction and put our species down permanently.
Based on what is happening today, it's clear mankind chose the second choice and our suffering is a ratio much higher than our joy. An honest estimate if I had to weight the world's total suffering and pain vs its happiness and joy, my honest ratio would 100:1. 100 painful experiences for every 1 genuinely good experience.
With that kind of world, I believe mankind should be self-sterilized. Only 100 years ago there were less than 2 billion people on this Earth. We're closing in on 7 Billion now. That's 5 Billion lives created to fight 100s of global conflicts, WW1, WW2, Vietnam, North Korea, all the people who died under Stalin 50 million, Mao's Great Purge in China 100 million, Hitler's Germany 20 million.
In Russia, a political prisoner which is just soft speak for anyone who didn't support a government that viewed its people as objects to be used to grow an empire, the prisons has massive vents with fans that stretched over 100 miles north into the Siberian winter where temperatures were regularly -100F and wind chills -180F. This air was blown into the prisons so that each prisoner was always freezing and slowly they would lose fingers and toes to the cold.
In the 20th century alone, over 200 million people died by democide (death by government). There is no amount of joy or happiness that could ever counter the barbarism of our species.
For every person who died, there was on average 6 people that truly loved that person making 1.2 Billion people suffer their entire lives over the slaughter of 200 million people.
My short answer is, not only is life not a gift, no matter how much philosophical thinking I do on the subject, I cannot logically come to any other conclusion than the fact that we are here because Earth itself is a prison in the 3rd dimension and our souls which science has practically proven exist with all the evidence compiled thanks to quantum mechanics and microtubules which are infinite and exist within our brains but leave our bodies upon death only to store all the information we experienced in them and come right back into our brain if we are brought back to life, in a way similar to Schrodinger's Cat. Until you open the box there are 2 suppositional states occurring simultaneously.
It's the same thing with our brains. Our brains also contain two suppositional states. A brain with the microtubules that contain all the information that makes us who we are and is infinite, leaving the body but maintaining cohesion upon death, and returning back to the body as if they never left when we are back alive again by medical science. 2 states at the same time.
So my philosophical theory on life has always been that we are not 3rd dimensional beings, we are much higher, existing in pure energy states and we either chose a baby knowing it's full life before entering it and forgetting once inside the babies brain in order to live a bias free life OR we are higher dimensional beings who have been forced into these 3rd dimensional bodies as a punishment for something we did in our higher forms and the cost of those crimes is a lifetime in a lesser form. I've always felt like I was trapped in this body, like the real me could stretch from one side of the universe to the other, that I am energy incarnated into a prison of matter which prevents me from existing in my true form.
Life is either a test or a punishment in my opinion, either way to me it's hell and I would support everyone choosing to stop having children so we could end this cycle of being born without a choice, suffering, bringing another life into this world that didn't have choice which then suffers and repeats this endless nonsensical circle of pain.