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Am I the only one who thinks immortality is a nightmare? I don't understand people who want to live forever.
by throwaway742 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks immortality is a nightmare? I don't understand people who want to live forever.
- karmakurtisaani 4y agoYou might change your mind when you're older. And wealthier.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- celim307 4y agoIf my quality of life remains high and I can still choose to end things when I want, I don’t see an issue. Then again there’s probably psychological cost and I may end up a sociopath
- bowsamic 4y agoHN is the only place where I’ve seen people purpose immortality as a legit goal. I think it’s because of lack of religion. If you are existentially scared of death and you are a techie, it makes sense
- veltas 4y agoNot to self-own or anything but I'm religious and lots of religions have a message of immortality for the virtuous, e.g. Christianity, Islam. But our method of achieving it is spiritual, not technical. I think pretty much every normal person fears death right up to the end, unless they're seriously suffering in their body.
- bowsamic 4y agoI’m a Buddhist and fear of death is one of the first things we work to get rid of
- inkblotuniverse 4y agoI'm just not interesting in brainwashing myself to be suicidal
- bowsamic 4y agoSpiritually suicidal maybe, but not physical suicide
- pawelmurias 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu - never underestimate how stupid some people are
- bowsamic 4y agoWhy is that stupid? Someone who is enlightened can no longer create karma, so it isn't really suicide
- DeWilde 4y agoWhy do you think fear of death is the only thing that motivates them? Have you considered other motives, like joy of live?
- inkblotuniverse 4y agoIsn't the joy of life what makes its end scary?
- krageon 4y agoI enjoy candy but that doesn't mean I want the taste to last forever.
- bawolff 4y agoImmortality is literally the carrot that religion holds in front of its followers.
- bowsamic 4y agoI’m talking about the physical life, not the spiritual one
- bawolff 4y agoSounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
- bowsamic 4y agoWhy? They seem quite distinct to me
- bawolff 4y agoI mean, i have no idea about what religion you follow or what its views on the afterlife are, but generally speaking, having some sort of spiritual/soul afterlife usually means having the good parts of physical life without the bad parts. Nobody wants immortality because they miss being constipated.
- formerkrogemp 4y agoI think that the commenter is saying they're both unobtainable in today's terms.
- steeleyespan 4y agoThat's "opiate of the masses" claim, but rather its removal of suffering and imbuing life with permanent meaning and purpose which isn't lost at the point of death (theosis). What is the point and purpose of life, beyond avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure? Even the ancient pursuit of honor and memory is rather ephemeral and lame.
- desertraven 4y agoI tend to agree with you. In saying that, I wouldn't mind an extra 100 years. If we could invent a mechanism to avoid concentrated power/resources [1], I think humanity would be better off; for if we can mostly agree that "with age comes wisdom", we would surely be collectively wiser. [1] - The mechanism to avoid concentrated power is a drop in for many other things. For example, I believe if societal structures could effectively optimise for ethical behaviour, individuals would be less likely to crave for power lust and greed.
- lottin 4y agoGetting old is a nightmare. You must be very young if you don't understand that.
- refurb 4y agoWhen the supply of something is unlimited, it's value tends to approach zero.
- throwaway2a02 4y agoSince there are people who end their own lives early, i.e. suicides, that position is clearly not unique. But I think it boils down to where you are in life. No-one would like endless suffering. As for my own stance on this, i wouldn't want this to happen simply because it will greatly exacerbate the gap between the haves and have-nots, the poor and the well-off. It will completely throw the current social equilibrium out of the window. And I'm mainly talking about life extension, since i find immortality a foolish/impossible goal.
- jeppester 4y agoOne thing I rarely see mentioned in regards to living forever is that during a life you will accumulate mental scars. My wife has lost a sister, and she's witnessed a murder. Neither she nor I are the same after those experiences. I don't think we will ever be. If we lived forever I think we would all become more and more anxious and excentric as time progressed and our souls inevitably became more "scarred". Maybe it's a "challenge" that will also be solved - with memory erasure or what not - but it seems like an overlooked issue to me.
- krageon 4y ago> eccentric This is good. I always say rich people can't be weird, only eccentric. And chances are if you live for a long time, you have more money :)
- swader999 4y agoOr the difference between genius and insanity is the amount in your account.
- ekianjo 4y ago> If we lived forever I think we would all become more and more anxious and excentric as time progressed and our souls inevitably became more "scarred". Not sure, you could apply the same reasoning to people who go thru active wars: the first time they see someone die, they care, but by the time they see hundreds of people dead it does not matter to them anymore.
- goldenkey 4y agoIt matters to them but they tuck it beneath the surface.
- derbOac 4y agoI agree. I am starting to think we might reverse biological aging before we resolve psychosocial crises associated with it. It wouldn't be the first time humanity has introduced physical tools they weren't ready for.
- ben_w 4y agoThis is at best eternal youth, not resistance to all injuries and illnesses. We’d all still die at some point — at current rates, even without ageing, 0.1% would die in any given year, though it isn’t clear how that would change long term — we just wouldn’t get age-associated degeneration such as Alzheimer’s and forget the concept of left and how to count past four like my mum did: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/alzheimers/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/alzheimers/ I don’t know what you’re imagining that makes you see a nightmare.
- ekianjo 4y ago> Am I the only one who thinks immortality is a nightmare? Who's talking about immortality anywhere? It would be already great if you could die in great shape, not stuck on a wheelchair for years.
- philjohn 4y agoAltered Carbon, and to a lesser extend Upload! touch on this dystopian part - the great leveller is that every billionaire will one day die - imagine if that wasn't the case, and they could keep hoarding wealth and having undue political influence.
- ALittleLight 4y agoWould you really want your parents to die, your loved ones, your family, your children, and yourself, all so you could have the satisfaction that at least rich people, and their loved ones, would suffer and die too?
- ben_w 4y agoMany people are fundamentally motivated by fairness, and knowing someone else is getting more than they seem to deserve can violate that. Schadenfreude is a thing. Myself, I think that longevity treatments are unlikely to remain unaffordable to the poor for very long after they are invented — even in a cynical world where the rich are greedy enough to try and keep it for themselves, old-age healthcare is really expensive, so societies which cause this to be cheap will outperform those that keep it for just the powerful.
- fleetwoodsnack 4y agoThe individual rich are irrelevant, and this is a mischaracterization of the sentiment. Elite capture under the parameter of current human lifespans is extant and difficult to counteract. It stands to reason those negative consequences associated with elite capture would only be exacerbated under longer lifespans. It’s simply an acknowledgment of a likely negative consequence.
- bawolff 4y agoI can't help but feel there is an element of self-justification in that sort of view. We can't stop death, therefore we tell ourselves its ok and something that we actually want, in order to cope with the terror of death.
- WHA8m 4y agoDepends on how you'd define 'immortality' in your though experiment. I'd actually disagree with you - under the premise, you'd be able to end your life as you will. In that case, hell yes, I'm in for that. I'm in my mid 20s and the past years have been filled with burn-out, depression and literal still stand career-/ education- wise. I can now really grasp how short life actually is. It's so easy (I did it!) to actually waste a notable portion of your life span.We're talking more than half a decade. It gives me shivers. I have so many interests and I'm never bored. I can find interesting topics in any domain and if I could, I'd stay in university my whole life. So, to make this short, I'd be the ultimate dream of mine to not have to care about what to fill my life with. It steamrolls me and I get a lot of fear out of it. But not the fear that drives you, the fear that paralyzes.
- krageon 4y agoI like to look at it holistically. If you don't want to live forever, your life is a rounding error anyway. May as well die today. Don't want to do that? Why do you imagine you want to do that in ten years?
- swader999 4y agoIncreasing functional span is compelling.
- LinuxBender 4y agoI do not believe it is always a nightmare. If one plans for a long health/life span and is always adding forms of diversified income then it is just a matter of hobbies. One of my personal goals is to tell the great grandchildren of people my age what their great grandparents were like since most of them won't write down the interesting bits of their lives and instagram/snapchat/facebook leaves a distorted image and may not even exist in the future.
- pawelmurias 4y agoI don't understand fearing immortality and wanting to actually get old. It's a common theme in silly trite science fiction but never seen a good argument for why it's something to fear.
- jallen_dot_dev 4y agoI don't understand people who don't want to at least have the option. I mean, if it turns out you don't like living longer you could just opt out? As far as I can tell, "I don't want to live forever anyway" is just cope.
- the__alchemist 4y agoYou say this now. How will you feel as your body gradually breaks down, and you stare into the void?