As I've gotten older, and by no means do I consider myself old, I'm growing more content that I will die. My children are growing. Watching them age and mature, and tackle new things brings me the most joy in the world.
It is right that my life will end. It is right that the old must clear the way for the young and the new. It is the way of things.
The probability of my death is 1. Fighting it is useless -- living what I have is not.
Best of luck. I hope you come to terms with it in whatever way makes sense for you.
> It is right that my life will end. It is right that the old must clear the way for the young and the new. It is the way of things.
Lots of people say that but it's because we are resigned to it. We don't have a choice about growing old and dying.
Just imagine for a minute though that some life extension technology began to really work and could dramatically extend lifespan or prevent aging. Almost everyone who was resigned to aging and death would have a change of heart and would be demanding arbitrarily long lifespans and freedom from aging.
Does even radical life extension technology "fix" this? If I live a year longer or until the heat-death of the universe, I still face the same existential questions... and I'll still feel like it flew by and wonder where it all went.
I existed. Compared to that fact, the duration is nearly meaningless.
> > It is right that my life will end. It is right that the old must clear the way for the young and the new. It is the way of things.
> Lots of people say that but it's because we are resigned to it. We don't have a choice about growing old and dying.
hm, maybe, but that doesn't explain the steep and quick change in my attitude towards the perspective of my own death after my first child was born. i realized how much of the feeling is "the other side" of my sex drive: our primary purpose in life is to procreate so our genes can carry on. once that's fulfilled, the fretting washes away very quickly.
When I had children I experienced a significant drop in fear of death. Now if, say, someone were pointing a gun at me, my greatest emotion would be fear for how it would hurt them.
Fear of death is just a piece of hard coded programming to make sure we successfully reproduce and raise healthy offspring. It's not an intrinsic part of being sentient or conscious. It's possible that intelligences that reproduced in some other way would lack it entirely, e.g. AIs that explicitly create their offspring or hive like aliens. For ants only the queen might fear death, and we indeed see ants behaving this way.
I think this explains why radical life extension tech is underfunded. Even being a billionaire doesn't change this. Bill Gates has kids.
I remember being very young and starting to think about death, and thinking it the most horrible thing imaginable. That the beautiful experience of life as a human should end in annihilation. That we would just stop existing at some point.
Now I'm watching my oldest daughter suffer the same realization. I tell her that there are a few people who are working on solving the problem, that I hope they can figure it out fast enough, that I understand and share the same fears she does. I tell her to live each day to the fullest anyway, and to enjoy life and not dwell on death too much. I don't know what else to say.
I've been in extreme pain, and I've been pumped full of enough morphine that I've been pretty incompetent. At least I still existed! And even in all the pain and incompetence I still found my own existence precious and worth hanging on to. Assuming we don't solve death in time for me, I have an eternity to not exist. Why would I be in a hurry to get started?
(Still, I found the article interesting and respect the decision of anyone who decides they actually prefer annihilation to pain and incompetence, even if I don't understand them).
I don't have kids, but I find it curious when parents have that mentality. If you're kids feel the same about their kids, and so on, then we're not much different than apples, existing only to spread our seed.
We are sentient but we emerged from a system that works exactly that way. I do think we will eventually transcend the limits of our origins, but I was speaking to the reality of what we still very much are.
