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When I see people talk about living indefinitely around here in threads that come up occasionally, it does make me wonder if they are on the other side of some

When I see people talk about living indefinitely around here in threads that come up occasionally, it does make me wonder if they are on the other side of some selfishness cutoff. It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die and day by day sees horrific injustice. It's almost solipsistic. The same dynamic exists with those hundred millionaire preppers. It's very peculiar to actively prepare for a world in which hundreds of millions are dead and you are surviving in a mansion in the boonies somewhere. That must signal something, some kind of disconnect between your plight and the plight of others. Though the people discussing that aren't usually obviously "selfish" so it does seem that the people who are directing the controls (or have a shot at them) usually are lacking some kind of empathy. The lack of it is probably useful if not necessary to get ahead because if you do stop to consider the world, it's hard not to find it very depressing.

icebraining 9y ago
It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die and day by day sees horrific injustice. This seems a weird argument to me, because it works just as well if you replace "years" (or even months) for "centuries".
- ams6110 9y ago
  Not really. I can see wanting to live an extra 20-30 years if you're 60. Less so if you're 80. Starts to get weird if you're over 100. I'll be happy if I make 75 and I'll view every day after that as a gift and not something I deserve.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I can understand personally not waiting to live over an arbitrary age, since that's a subjective feeling. It just seems weird to consider it an universal point and deem everyone who doesn't to be morally defective. What's the objective basis for that?
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      I'm sorry, "weird" in this context just means "whoa dude, that's weird to consider". It's not an argument of morality. You can lack empathy and still be fairly moral. But these are just thoughts, happy to be wrong.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Fair enough, although doesn't seem much better for the people in question. My puzzle is more over the line. Seems to me that if empathetic person can wish to live an extra year starting from their 50th anniversary, why not on their 100th or 250th?
sigstoat 9y ago
> It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die and day by day sees horrific injustice. how long should you want to live in such a world? one or two centuries ok; one or two millennia not ok?
tunisiamike 9y ago
I can't imagine being so empathic that you wouldn't want to live a long time. Since there's horrific injustice going on this very moment are you just biding your time hoping for death?
Retric 9y ago
Like most people, I don't control the world and my actions have minuscule impacts on the global scale. As such I find caring about things outside of my control a rather egotistical standpoint. There is nothing selfish about focusing on things that I can impact, and recognizing your a tiny fish in the vastness of space.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  The main issue with that stance is that a lot of human suffering happens because others claim it is "out of their control" to do anything. Dividing things into the two buckets "in my control" and "out if my control" allows a lot of leeway for us to excuse selfish behavior. I think it's prudent to make it out business to get control over and fix things that are actively causing harm. Or as Raymond Chen might say, "Be somebody": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110118-00/?p=11733/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110118-00/?p=...
  - roenxi 9y ago
    From a super-simple perspective, a community that grows exponentially _will_ eventually have very few resources per head. If, as a starting point, someone believes the population is growing exponentially then they likely also believe it doesn't matter if they try to be selfish or not. There will be a lot of people with limited resources and that is probably going to reduce their quality of life. Now there are a lot of issues with this view and the actual reality might favour anything, but I don't think the average selfish or selfless person has thought about them. So I'm pretty happy to excuse both until I see arguments with more facts than 'I think' or implicit 'selfishness is bad it sounds unfriendly'.
    - xelxebar 9y ago
      > So I'm pretty happy to excuse [selfishness] until I see arguments with more facts than 'I think' or implicit 'selfishness is bad it sounds unfriendly'. This is a really good point. To remove the moral overtones, I like to think of selfishness as local vs global optimization. The prisoner's dilemma is a great (abstract) example where "locally optimal" or "selfish" behaviour creates a situation where everyone is individually worse off than they need to be. In the real world, this kind of situation is especially visible in urban planning and traffic control. Things like lane widening or adding a new road can famously worsen traffic congestion. Lane mergers is another. The "zipper merge" is known to produce shorter queues and fewer accidents, but individuals have motive to "cheat" and merge earlier in these cases, which ends up causing worse traffic for everyone. Personally, I find this game theoretic view point of "selfishness" to generate more precise and relevant questions than the more morally-tinted stances. Maybe that kind of thing is up your alley.
grandalf 9y ago
Is a first world person who purchases long-term-care insurance or health insurance infinitely more selfish than a third-world person who has no insurance of any kind? The things you describe are just forms of insurance that are not considered must-haves by most people, but are sometimes chosen by super wealthy people for the same reason anyone chooses to insure anything.
smokeyj 9y ago
> It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die When you consider that humans are just primates that evolved from a process known as "survival of the fittest" - it's really not that weird at all. Thinking of people in terms of wild animals makes our actions much more explainable. But I think this is a good example of "perceived" injustice. The idea that someone may live indefinitely - at zero expense to you - makes you feel depressed. It reminds me of the iconic kindergarten rule "if you can't bring enough for the whole class, don't bring it". Because there's always that one kid that will put up a tantrum if he can't also have a snack. I think this is why many socialists identify with this article and also have depression. Like a kindergartener, they see what other people have and they want it. They think it's unfair that someone is wealthy while not everyone is. Then they "unselfishly" want to take and redistribute what wasn't theirs. Hence the "oh I'm so unselfish and depressed because I'm such a good person" type posts.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  You've got me wrong. If life-extension works and becomes widely available, I too could live, forever*. It's just I'm not sure that I'd want to, even if I could. Wouldn't it be incredibly depressing to watch something like WWI and then live to see humans doing the same dumb stuff 100 years later? Would you really want to see Twitter when you had lived through Twain? Wouldn't it be really depressing to be a thousand years old and to have every person you ever knew dead? It's not someone having 1000 years and someone having 100 that depresses me; it surprises me that someone would want to live for 1000 years when some people don't get 1. I can't imagine living for decades having experienced stuff like Vegas multiple times. It seems crushing. Then again, I'm not 130, so who knows.
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    > it surprises me that someone would want to live for 1000 years when some people don't get 1 Yeah I get that. Crossing the border into Mexico is an experience. On one side of the line you have prosperity, on the other side you have soul crushing poverty. Then you go and enjoy some tacos.
  - 9y ago
drngdds 9y ago
Sure, I'd have it much better than all the people who had to die. But I already have it much better than all the people who are killed or crippled by preventable illnesses because they were unlucky enough to be born into poverty. But that doesn't really factor into my moral reasoning. My living forever wouldn't necessarily make things worse for people who don't get to do that. So, as a consequentialist, I don't think it would be wrong. Making things better for some people without making them better for other people is better than not making things better for anyone.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  That's not my point. My point is why do you want to live forever? Is anyone on this forum so important that they deserve to live for 10,000 years, when the entirety of human civilization which made that possible is now dead? Nobody is that important or has that much to offer to the world. It's purely an ego driven thing based on us as individuals. I'm not assigning moral right and wrong to it, I'm just saying it's irrationally ego driven and it can't be fully embraced without a lack of empathy. If you can live for 150 years and not get worn down by the things people do to each other, more power to you.
  - NhanH 9y ago
    Is there a threshold of years when the wish to live for X years change from normal to irrationally ego driven? Or are you asserting that any wish to live is irrationally ego driven? Is there a quanlitative or kind difference, under your view, for someone wishing to live 50, 500 or 5000 years? Or to put it in plain words and as I can't find a way to make it less confusing: why isn't your position equivalent to advocating for everyone to kill themselves (or at the least, not caring at all whether they live or die)
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Humans have natural lifespans. We've had very few people live to be older than 120. There's no reason to not naturally extend your life if you can, but I'm not sure we'll find that experience all that enjoyable as individuals (or it will require a disconnect to do so) and it isn't obvious there is any benefit to society from it (imagine Howard Hughes still directing his empire from his hotel penthouse today). It's a natural ego driven thing to want to survive, but it is still driven by ego.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Interesting points but I'm not sure you can easily correlate survival instinct with selfishness. I suffer from chronic depression, but I also have strong survival instincts. I don't feel bad about being alive just because other people have died, as such. Indeed, death bothers me less than ongoing suffering: I was surprised to note that while I feel a bit sad for the people who died the other day in Las Vegas, and very sad for their grieving relatives, I am much more troubled by the ~500 people who were wounded - they're 'lucky' insofar as they're alive and not dead, but the wounds they suffered are likely to impact them for a lifetime, the more so for being unexpected (vs. the sort of trauma you see coming or volunteer and prepare for, as military people do).
sol_remmy 9y ago
With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving?
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Because HN is a good distraction from that. Maybe I'm working on making it better and I haven't told you, or maybe I'm just a bum. Does it matter? It's a damn forum, we're all wasting time, that's the point? I'm surprised how strongly people feel about that post.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    You just said a whole bunch of people are lacking in empathy, and you're surprised people are reacting strongly? Seems ironic.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      I'm just surprised there is such a large contingent of hundred millionaire preppers and/or people who think they are going to live forever and don't see how that could be interpreted as lacking empathy, when there are (as the previous poster pointed out), people dying of starvation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving? Indeed. I tell people all the time that poor/starving people should stop having children so that poverty or having to starve "dies out". I post here so that this message gets a much larger audience.
  - tehramz 9y ago
    Yeah, that’s gonna work. If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
My theory is that some/many prepers are either in denial, or haven't take the time (and/or lack the capacity) to imagine the true state of the world they're prepping for. And certainlybsome do it for a sense of security, as false as it might be. Moi? If I knew there was going to be a nuclear explosion I'd likely drive into the mushroom cloud. Perhaps in this case my imagination has gotten the better of me?
newscracker 9y ago
I don’t see much of a disconnect with the idea of living much longer, though if that were really possible, I understand that it would have repercussions on everyone else on a larger scale. I work in areas that look at suffering and alleviating that (in ways most people on the planet don’t) but I also wonder and wish if I could live much longer than currently possible (longer life without tackling aging is pointless, IMO). The main reason for me is that I’m so utterly fascinated and awed by everything humans have accomplished and continue to accomplish (even though there are vast areas of improvement), and I really, really want to see humans going to another planet, setting up a colony, etc., among many other things. Life itself is such a wonder and seemingly miraculous (without assigning any supernatural motives).

icebraining 9y ago

It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die and day by day sees horrific injustice. This seems a weird argument to me, because it works just as well if you replace "years" (or even months) for "centuries".

ams6110 9y ago
Not really. I can see wanting to live an extra 20-30 years if you're 60. Less so if you're 80. Starts to get weird if you're over 100. I'll be happy if I make 75 and I'll view every day after that as a gift and not something I deserve.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I can understand personally not waiting to live over an arbitrary age, since that's a subjective feeling. It just seems weird to consider it an universal point and deem everyone who doesn't to be morally defective. What's the objective basis for that?
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I'm sorry, "weird" in this context just means "whoa dude, that's weird to consider". It's not an argument of morality. You can lack empathy and still be fairly moral. But these are just thoughts, happy to be wrong.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Fair enough, although doesn't seem much better for the people in question. My puzzle is more over the line. Seems to me that if empathetic person can wish to live an extra year starting from their 50th anniversary, why not on their 100th or 250th?

sigstoat 9y ago

> It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die and day by day sees horrific injustice. how long should you want to live in such a world? one or two centuries ok; one or two millennia not ok?

tunisiamike 9y ago

I can't imagine being so empathic that you wouldn't want to live a long time. Since there's horrific injustice going on this very moment are you just biding your time hoping for death?

Retric 9y ago

Like most people, I don't control the world and my actions have minuscule impacts on the global scale. As such I find caring about things outside of my control a rather egotistical standpoint. There is nothing selfish about focusing on things that I can impact, and recognizing your a tiny fish in the vastness of space.

xelxebar 9y ago
The main issue with that stance is that a lot of human suffering happens because others claim it is "out of their control" to do anything. Dividing things into the two buckets "in my control" and "out if my control" allows a lot of leeway for us to excuse selfish behavior. I think it's prudent to make it out business to get control over and fix things that are actively causing harm. Or as Raymond Chen might say, "Be somebody": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110118-00/?p=11733/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110118-00/?p=...
- roenxi 9y ago
  From a super-simple perspective, a community that grows exponentially _will_ eventually have very few resources per head. If, as a starting point, someone believes the population is growing exponentially then they likely also believe it doesn't matter if they try to be selfish or not. There will be a lot of people with limited resources and that is probably going to reduce their quality of life. Now there are a lot of issues with this view and the actual reality might favour anything, but I don't think the average selfish or selfless person has thought about them. So I'm pretty happy to excuse both until I see arguments with more facts than 'I think' or implicit 'selfishness is bad it sounds unfriendly'.
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    > So I'm pretty happy to excuse [selfishness] until I see arguments with more facts than 'I think' or implicit 'selfishness is bad it sounds unfriendly'. This is a really good point. To remove the moral overtones, I like to think of selfishness as local vs global optimization. The prisoner's dilemma is a great (abstract) example where "locally optimal" or "selfish" behaviour creates a situation where everyone is individually worse off than they need to be. In the real world, this kind of situation is especially visible in urban planning and traffic control. Things like lane widening or adding a new road can famously worsen traffic congestion. Lane mergers is another. The "zipper merge" is known to produce shorter queues and fewer accidents, but individuals have motive to "cheat" and merge earlier in these cases, which ends up causing worse traffic for everyone. Personally, I find this game theoretic view point of "selfishness" to generate more precise and relevant questions than the more morally-tinted stances. Maybe that kind of thing is up your alley.

grandalf 9y ago

Is a first world person who purchases long-term-care insurance or health insurance infinitely more selfish than a third-world person who has no insurance of any kind? The things you describe are just forms of insurance that are not considered must-haves by most people, but are sometimes chosen by super wealthy people for the same reason anyone chooses to insure anything.

smokeyj 9y ago

> It's weird to think that you'd be interested in living for centuries or longer in a world that has seen everyone before you die When you consider that humans are just primates that evolved from a process known as "survival of the fittest" - it's really not that weird at all. Thinking of people in terms of wild animals makes our actions much more explainable. But I think this is a good example of "perceived" injustice. The idea that someone may live indefinitely - at zero expense to you - makes you feel depressed. It reminds me of the iconic kindergarten rule "if you can't bring enough for the whole class, don't bring it". Because there's always that one kid that will put up a tantrum if he can't also have a snack. I think this is why many socialists identify with this article and also have depression. Like a kindergartener, they see what other people have and they want it. They think it's unfair that someone is wealthy while not everyone is. Then they "unselfishly" want to take and redistribute what wasn't theirs. Hence the "oh I'm so unselfish and depressed because I'm such a good person" type posts.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
You've got me wrong. If life-extension works and becomes widely available, I too could live, forever*. It's just I'm not sure that I'd want to, even if I could. Wouldn't it be incredibly depressing to watch something like WWI and then live to see humans doing the same dumb stuff 100 years later? Would you really want to see Twitter when you had lived through Twain? Wouldn't it be really depressing to be a thousand years old and to have every person you ever knew dead? It's not someone having 1000 years and someone having 100 that depresses me; it surprises me that someone would want to live for 1000 years when some people don't get 1. I can't imagine living for decades having experienced stuff like Vegas multiple times. It seems crushing. Then again, I'm not 130, so who knows.
- smokeyj 9y ago
  > it surprises me that someone would want to live for 1000 years when some people don't get 1 Yeah I get that. Crossing the border into Mexico is an experience. On one side of the line you have prosperity, on the other side you have soul crushing poverty. Then you go and enjoy some tacos.
- 9y ago

drngdds 9y ago

Sure, I'd have it much better than all the people who had to die. But I already have it much better than all the people who are killed or crippled by preventable illnesses because they were unlucky enough to be born into poverty. But that doesn't really factor into my moral reasoning. My living forever wouldn't necessarily make things worse for people who don't get to do that. So, as a consequentialist, I don't think it would be wrong. Making things better for some people without making them better for other people is better than not making things better for anyone.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
That's not my point. My point is why do you want to live forever? Is anyone on this forum so important that they deserve to live for 10,000 years, when the entirety of human civilization which made that possible is now dead? Nobody is that important or has that much to offer to the world. It's purely an ego driven thing based on us as individuals. I'm not assigning moral right and wrong to it, I'm just saying it's irrationally ego driven and it can't be fully embraced without a lack of empathy. If you can live for 150 years and not get worn down by the things people do to each other, more power to you.
- NhanH 9y ago
  Is there a threshold of years when the wish to live for X years change from normal to irrationally ego driven? Or are you asserting that any wish to live is irrationally ego driven? Is there a quanlitative or kind difference, under your view, for someone wishing to live 50, 500 or 5000 years? Or to put it in plain words and as I can't find a way to make it less confusing: why isn't your position equivalent to advocating for everyone to kill themselves (or at the least, not caring at all whether they live or die)
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Humans have natural lifespans. We've had very few people live to be older than 120. There's no reason to not naturally extend your life if you can, but I'm not sure we'll find that experience all that enjoyable as individuals (or it will require a disconnect to do so) and it isn't obvious there is any benefit to society from it (imagine Howard Hughes still directing his empire from his hotel penthouse today). It's a natural ego driven thing to want to survive, but it is still driven by ego.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Interesting points but I'm not sure you can easily correlate survival instinct with selfishness. I suffer from chronic depression, but I also have strong survival instincts. I don't feel bad about being alive just because other people have died, as such. Indeed, death bothers me less than ongoing suffering: I was surprised to note that while I feel a bit sad for the people who died the other day in Las Vegas, and very sad for their grieving relatives, I am much more troubled by the ~500 people who were wounded - they're 'lucky' insofar as they're alive and not dead, but the wounds they suffered are likely to impact them for a lifetime, the more so for being unexpected (vs. the sort of trauma you see coming or volunteer and prepare for, as military people do).

sol_remmy 9y ago

With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving?

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Because HN is a good distraction from that. Maybe I'm working on making it better and I haven't told you, or maybe I'm just a bum. Does it matter? It's a damn forum, we're all wasting time, that's the point? I'm surprised how strongly people feel about that post.
- icebraining 9y ago
  You just said a whole bunch of people are lacking in empathy, and you're surprised people are reacting strongly? Seems ironic.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I'm just surprised there is such a large contingent of hundred millionaire preppers and/or people who think they are going to live forever and don't see how that could be interpreted as lacking empathy, when there are (as the previous poster pointed out), people dying of starvation.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wolfgke 9y ago
> With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving? Indeed. I tell people all the time that poor/starving people should stop having children so that poverty or having to starve "dies out". I post here so that this message gets a much larger audience.
- tehramz 9y ago
  Yeah, that’s gonna work. If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

My theory is that some/many prepers are either in denial, or haven't take the time (and/or lack the capacity) to imagine the true state of the world they're prepping for. And certainlybsome do it for a sense of security, as false as it might be. Moi? If I knew there was going to be a nuclear explosion I'd likely drive into the mushroom cloud. Perhaps in this case my imagination has gotten the better of me?

newscracker 9y ago

I don’t see much of a disconnect with the idea of living much longer, though if that were really possible, I understand that it would have repercussions on everyone else on a larger scale. I work in areas that look at suffering and alleviating that (in ways most people on the planet don’t) but I also wonder and wish if I could live much longer than currently possible (longer life without tackling aging is pointless, IMO). The main reason for me is that I’m so utterly fascinated and awed by everything humans have accomplished and continue to accomplish (even though there are vast areas of improvement), and I really, really want to see humans going to another planet, setting up a colony, etc., among many other things. Life itself is such a wonder and seemingly miraculous (without assigning any supernatural motives).