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Somewhat off-topic, but I always thought the most prominent real-life reenactment of The Fox and the Grapes was all of the media and thinkpieces that people hav

Somewhat off-topic, but I always thought the most prominent real-life reenactment of The Fox and the Grapes was all of the media and thinkpieces that people have written about how living for an extended period of time would be just _awful_. You wouldn't find many people who think that 40 years would be an acceptable lifespan, and most people would probably like to live to 100 if they got there in good health, but as soon as the idea of living potential centuries is floated, it's all "it would drive you crazy with boredom!" It seems like a good-sized contingent of people believe that extending the human lifespan wouldn't be impossible or immoral so much as it would be _undesirable_. Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh? I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors seems like a collective agreement among people to throw their hands up and go "well, fine! I don't even _want_ to live longer, who'd like that?" All of this, of course, doesn't touch on the moral, economic, environmental, etc. problems that crop up with greatly extended longevity, for which there are a number of altogether more palatable arguments that would need to be engaged with more fully. Still, it's an odd piece of ideology that makes people feel like they don't need to deploy any of these in the conversation - why would they, when they _totally_ don't even want to live much longer than 100 anyways?

vict00ms 7y ago
I think the rapid mental and physical decline in your twilight years dissuades most people from wanting to live much longer than that, not some inane moral compulsion to live within our "rightful" lifespan.
- Retra 7y ago
  That decline is what kills you. If you live longer, it is necessary that this decline be inhibited. Saying you don't want to live longer is basically the same as saying you want to be less healthy.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    That's too simple. Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement... well, when's the last time you've visited a nursing home? The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart. More: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
    - Retra 7y ago
      Ok then. Let's just take this broad conversation about "most people" and distort it with wildly pessimistic and self-contradictory assumptions. I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction. In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.
      - skybrian 7y ago
        I agree that it's very useful to prolong the amount of time spent in earlier, healthier stages of life. The treatments described in the New Yorker article sound quite promising. However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.
        Retra 7y ago
        Look, you're the one saying that elderly people are so miserable that we should not prolong their lives. >It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home? There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  Everyone advocating and working towards increasing lifespan wants to eliminate that mental and physical decline. The goal is to give you more years feeling 30-40, not just more years feeling 90-110.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Exactly; no one wants to live as a decrepit elderly person for centuries. The whole idea is to stop aging altogether so you're always 25-30.
Retra 7y ago
I feel like we might be habituated to justifying our own failures in terms of the restrictions life makes for us. I'm not a billionaire because I couldn't be. I'm not a world-class piano player because I couldn't be. And I can't be because life is too short for all that. So when you tell somebody that life isn't short, suddenly they are confronted with the fact that maybe they could be those things, and now they have to justify why they haven't been working at it all along. "Well, I wouldn't want it anyway."
scotty79 7y ago
> it's all "it would drive you crazy with boredom!" People really underestimate of how much o their life they forget as the decades pass.
melling 7y ago
You are actually on topic! Well, the bikeshedding part of the topic. For some reason, any time we discuss extending human life, it quickly degenerates into an ethical question. First, I wouldn’t worry about it because we spend more effort discussing ethics than actually trying to solve the problem. Basically, because the problem is so hard we bikeshed on ethics. Second, it’s a very hard problem. It’s unlikely with the actual amount of effort, that we’ll be able to do much to extend life in the foreseeable future. We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.
- D-Coder 7y ago
  Most of these are mostly age-related. Reducing your body's age may reduce these problems a lot. So a completely different issue than you are addressing.
- magduf 7y ago
  >We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc. No, we really don't. Heart disease is mostly caused by lifestyle. And cancer and the aging process are two sides of the same coin: solve aging and you'll figure out cancer too. Alzheimer's is now appearing to be caused by a virus, so we'll probably have a vaccine for that before long.
  - melling 7y ago
    What about the people who seem to inherit Alzheimer’s? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4 Plenty of young people get cancer. We also have childhood cancers. Maybe you should include some references? We haven’t had one effective treatment for alzheimer’s in the past 20 years
dkersten 7y ago
These are the same people who complain that they would be bored if out of work for too long. I personally have so many personal or passion projects that I would like to undertake, but don’t have the time for, that I’d happily fill a few lifetimes with interesting things to do. Of course, there’s a difference between a few lifetimes and thousands of years or immortality.
- lisper 7y ago
  As someone who has been incredibly fortunate to be able to do pretty much whatever I want for the last 15 years I can tell you from personal experience: you can get sick and tired of pretty much anything and everything, and it happens a lot faster than you would expect (or at least a lot faster than I expected). One of the really serious problems is that your brain generalizes, so once you get sick and tired of one thing, it's easier to get sick and tired of the next thing because your brain says, "Oh, this is kinda similar to this other thing that I already got sick and tired of." Managing all this can be a real challenge. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, it's an incredibly nice problem to have, and I wouldn't trade it for the world (literally!) But even nice problems to have can still be real problems.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Seriously, I think this is actually a severe case of self-deception to cope with the realities of having to work in a modern environment. Or, for the other example, dying. That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Cannot remember that last time being bored. You always have the option to spam your unqualified opinion on HN or something, there is so much potential stuff to do that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Suburban kids in the 70's. Checks out!
- oblio 7y ago
  I took a long sabbatical (6+ months). All my friends were working. My own projects didn't seem that fulfilling. I was bored after about 4 months.
rsync 7y ago
"I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors ..." I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ... First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health. However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society. That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now. To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time. So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil. So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that. ... Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species. Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
- Faark 7y ago
GuiA 7y ago
Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh? I suspect you have not spent much time around eg people with dementia, who are well within their “natural longevity” but for some have not “reasonably enjoyed” anything in many years, sometimes decades. Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already. For many entering old age, the concern is not about how many years they have left, but if they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs during them.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already. Instead of that, try visiting some universities where there's still some elderly people working as academics. Or try going to a classic rock concert where guys in their 70s are still playing on stage, sounding just about as good as they did decades before. Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older, and keep doing the things they enjoy.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    > Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older ... you understand that declining mental health is not the result of "giving up", right? And that the celebrity academics/rockstars still active at 85 often are 1) reasonably wealthy and 2) lucky. I've TA'd for 70+ years old professors with declining health who were still teaching because they didn't have a choice and had bills to pay, and it was just sad. Complete waste of time for the students (and tragic for the professors to find themselves in that situation). Your messages give the sense that you have a very naive/idealistic view of aging.
D-Coder 7y ago
I am willing to struggle with the problem of boredom for as many centuries as it takes to solve it!

vict00ms 7y ago

I think the rapid mental and physical decline in your twilight years dissuades most people from wanting to live much longer than that, not some inane moral compulsion to live within our "rightful" lifespan.

Retra 7y ago
That decline is what kills you. If you live longer, it is necessary that this decline be inhibited. Saying you don't want to live longer is basically the same as saying you want to be less healthy.
- skybrian 7y ago
  That's too simple. Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement... well, when's the last time you've visited a nursing home? The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart. More: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
  - Retra 7y ago
    Ok then. Let's just take this broad conversation about "most people" and distort it with wildly pessimistic and self-contradictory assumptions. I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction. In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.
    - skybrian 7y ago
      I agree that it's very useful to prolong the amount of time spent in earlier, healthier stages of life. The treatments described in the New Yorker article sound quite promising. However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.
      - Retra 7y ago
        Look, you're the one saying that elderly people are so miserable that we should not prolong their lives. >It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home? There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'
JoshTriplett 7y ago
Everyone advocating and working towards increasing lifespan wants to eliminate that mental and physical decline. The goal is to give you more years feeling 30-40, not just more years feeling 90-110.
- magduf 7y ago
  Exactly; no one wants to live as a decrepit elderly person for centuries. The whole idea is to stop aging altogether so you're always 25-30.

Retra 7y ago

I feel like we might be habituated to justifying our own failures in terms of the restrictions life makes for us. I'm not a billionaire because I couldn't be. I'm not a world-class piano player because I couldn't be. And I can't be because life is too short for all that. So when you tell somebody that life isn't short, suddenly they are confronted with the fact that maybe they could be those things, and now they have to justify why they haven't been working at it all along. "Well, I wouldn't want it anyway."

scotty79 7y ago

> it's all "it would drive you crazy with boredom!" People really underestimate of how much o their life they forget as the decades pass.

melling 7y ago

You are actually on topic! Well, the bikeshedding part of the topic. For some reason, any time we discuss extending human life, it quickly degenerates into an ethical question. First, I wouldn’t worry about it because we spend more effort discussing ethics than actually trying to solve the problem. Basically, because the problem is so hard we bikeshed on ethics. Second, it’s a very hard problem. It’s unlikely with the actual amount of effort, that we’ll be able to do much to extend life in the foreseeable future. We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.

D-Coder 7y ago
Most of these are mostly age-related. Reducing your body's age may reduce these problems a lot. So a completely different issue than you are addressing.
magduf 7y ago
>We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc. No, we really don't. Heart disease is mostly caused by lifestyle. And cancer and the aging process are two sides of the same coin: solve aging and you'll figure out cancer too. Alzheimer's is now appearing to be caused by a virus, so we'll probably have a vaccine for that before long.
- melling 7y ago
  What about the people who seem to inherit Alzheimer’s? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4 Plenty of young people get cancer. We also have childhood cancers. Maybe you should include some references? We haven’t had one effective treatment for alzheimer’s in the past 20 years

dkersten 7y ago

These are the same people who complain that they would be bored if out of work for too long. I personally have so many personal or passion projects that I would like to undertake, but don’t have the time for, that I’d happily fill a few lifetimes with interesting things to do. Of course, there’s a difference between a few lifetimes and thousands of years or immortality.

lisper 7y ago
As someone who has been incredibly fortunate to be able to do pretty much whatever I want for the last 15 years I can tell you from personal experience: you can get sick and tired of pretty much anything and everything, and it happens a lot faster than you would expect (or at least a lot faster than I expected). One of the really serious problems is that your brain generalizes, so once you get sick and tired of one thing, it's easier to get sick and tired of the next thing because your brain says, "Oh, this is kinda similar to this other thing that I already got sick and tired of." Managing all this can be a real challenge. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, it's an incredibly nice problem to have, and I wouldn't trade it for the world (literally!) But even nice problems to have can still be real problems.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Seriously, I think this is actually a severe case of self-deception to cope with the realities of having to work in a modern environment. Or, for the other example, dying. That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Cannot remember that last time being bored. You always have the option to spam your unqualified opinion on HN or something, there is so much potential stuff to do that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Suburban kids in the 70's. Checks out!
oblio 7y ago
I took a long sabbatical (6+ months). All my friends were working. My own projects didn't seem that fulfilling. I was bored after about 4 months.

rsync 7y ago

"I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors ..." I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ... First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health. However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society. That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now. To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time. So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil. So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that. ... Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species. Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.

Faark 7y ago

GuiA 7y ago

Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh? I suspect you have not spent much time around eg people with dementia, who are well within their “natural longevity” but for some have not “reasonably enjoyed” anything in many years, sometimes decades. Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already. For many entering old age, the concern is not about how many years they have left, but if they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs during them.

magduf 7y ago
>Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already. Instead of that, try visiting some universities where there's still some elderly people working as academics. Or try going to a classic rock concert where guys in their 70s are still playing on stage, sounding just about as good as they did decades before. Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older, and keep doing the things they enjoy.
- GuiA 7y ago
  > Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older ... you understand that declining mental health is not the result of "giving up", right? And that the celebrity academics/rockstars still active at 85 often are 1) reasonably wealthy and 2) lucky. I've TA'd for 70+ years old professors with declining health who were still teaching because they didn't have a choice and had bills to pay, and it was just sad. Complete waste of time for the students (and tragic for the professors to find themselves in that situation). Your messages give the sense that you have a very naive/idealistic view of aging.

D-Coder 7y ago

I am willing to struggle with the problem of boredom for as many centuries as it takes to solve it!