Name: Trouble with Being Born
ISBN: 9781628722444

What Hacker News says

netfortiusDec 2025

To me the "revelation" came via Emil Cioran's book "The inconvenience of being born" (the actual book's title in English is "The Trouble with Being Born", but I like better the term that's closer to the French original). Excellent justification.

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DyslexicAtheistFeb 2019

  - Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society"
  - N.N.Taleb "The Black Swan"
  - Danny Kahneman "Thinking Fast & Slow" (also his papers with Amos Tversky)
  - Thomas Ligotti "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"
  - Peter Wessel Zapffe "On the Tragic" & "The Last Messiah"
  - Sokal, Alan D "Intellectual Impostures"
  - Simon Herbert "A The Sciences of the Artificial"
  - Herbert Marcuse "One-Dimensional Man"
  - Schopenhauer "Parerga and Paralipomena"
  - Lewis Mumford "The Story of Utopias"
  - Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish"
  - Edward S. Herman "Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
  - Franklin Foer "World Without Mind The Existential Threat of Big Tech"
  - Ben Goldacre "Bad science"
  - Emil Cioran "The Book of Delusions"
  - Gracian "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"
  - Heidegger Martin "The Question Concerning Technology"
  - Jacques Ellul "Propaganda The Formation of Mens Attitudes"
  - Mumford Lewis "The Culture of Cities"
  - Orwell "1984", "Down and Out in Paris and London", "Animal Farm"
  - Huxley "Brave New World", "The Doors Of Perception"
  - Michael Pollan "How to change your mind"
  - Jeff Hawkins "On Intelligence"
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "Notes from the Underground", "The Brothers Kasamarov", "The Gambler", "The Idiot", "Crime & Punishment"
  - Peter Smith "Teach Yourself Logic"
  - Thomas More "Utopia"
  - Emil Cioran "The Trouble With Being Born"
  - Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago"
  - Nietzsche "Complete works"
  - Bulgakov "Master and Margarita"
  - Gerald M. Weinberg "The Secrets of Consulting"

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DyslexicAtheistJan 2019

nihilism and existentialism helped me overcome quite a lot. things like Thomas Ligotti's "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race", and Emil Cioran's "The trouble with being born" have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking that doesn't revolve around societies fetishism of positivity & optimism.

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DyslexicAtheistDec 2018

my reading has taken a dark turn this year. I blame it on Thomas Ligotti (first book on my list) ;)

- The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Thomas Ligotti) ... fun fact: S01 of 'True Detectives' has ripped part of the dialogue straight from this book without giving credit

- The Trouble with being born (Emil Cioran)

- The Industrial Society and its Future (Ted Kaczynski)

- The Technological Society (Jaques Ellul)

- Propaganda (Jaques Ellul)

- McMafia - A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (Misha Glenny)

- The Doors Of Perception (Aldous Huxley)

- The Manipulation of Human Behavior (Albert D. Biderman)

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igraviousJul 2010

It is with joy that I answer your question. And if I may be allowed to answer it philosophically. The books you find incredibly interesting may be the books the validate your worldview. There are many of these. The book you find eye-opening may be the books that open the door into the world of philosophy proper for you. There are not many of these because you only need to go through that door once I feel.

Also, I would observe that besides Ayn Rand (who for many is not a philosopher) not a single female philosopher has been mentioned here which I find is a damning indictment on the state of affairs of the world of ideas. To remedy that I would recommend to you read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft or anything by De Beauvoir (and do ignore her contemporary Sartre for he was nothing but a windbag).

I am delighted that you singled out Thomas Paine (who again is not a philosopher as such; must be something in the air in the States) and Arthur Schopenhauer. They are both tremendous stylists. I've said this many times before - I don't care how great a philosopher's ideas are, if they can't write well I don't want to know. Thus we have people here recommending Kripke or Frege or heck knows who like that who bludgeon you to death with their tedious logic. Avoid them I say.

Finally I would like to be clichéd and recommend anything by Nietzsche except for Thus Spake Zarathustra even though he himself considered it his best work and I would especially recommend Ecce Homo by him because it is a summation of his previous works by his own hand. Nietzsche was the supreme stylist and ruthlessly honest and fearless. Also I'd recommend A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues by a contemporary philosopher André Comte-Sponville. This is a remarkable book on virtue theory that takes in Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Woody Allen among others and is divided up by virtue which is extremely novel. It is fantastically written. Anything by Cioran as well such as The Trouble with Being Born. I'm trying not to typecast myself here! :)

And finally finally Sophie's World and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while nice cute books are not true philosophy books. This is also why I wouldn't recommend Camus' The Outsider though someone did mention The Myth of Sisyphus. Borges falls into this category. Sophie's world is really a kid's book as well and one that I would perhaps recommend to children though I'd recommend Borges or Camus or Kafka first.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vindication-Rights-Woman-Penguin-Cla...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Second-Sex-Vintage-classics/dp/00997...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-Great-Ideas-Suffering-World/...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ecce-Homo-Becomes-Penguin-Classics/d...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Treatise-Great-Virtues-Philoso...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trouble-Being-Born-E-M-Cioran/dp/155...

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50Nov 2021

Connected maybe to the excerpt you mentioned, here is this excerpt (hopefully not too nihilistic or pessimistic) from E.M. Cioran - who seems to have become so apparent to me this past year - and his aphorism-filled, philosophical book titled The Trouble With Being Born:

"A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."

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