7 ms·

I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. We’re built not to be I realize, and we should never be for those that are young but I fee

I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. We’re built not to be I realize, and we should never be for those that are young but I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. That being said, I’m not cool with the idea of dying when good, but when I’m in a major depressive episode, the idea of immortality is terrifying.

wetpaws 1y ago
[dead]
KronisLV 1y ago
> I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.
- bigmattystyles 1y ago
  Maybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…
  - KronisLV 1y ago
    Perhaps! Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them. Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
  - kiba 1y ago
    That's just terror management of death.[1] That's why we say things like "death gives life meaning". Utter bollocks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
    - nradov 1y ago
      There's no reason to be terrified of death.
jebarker 1y ago
For me, the sad part about dying isn’t the loss of agency in the world as much as missing the rest of the movie. At 43 I already feel like I’ve mostly realized my potential and I’m just here to raise my kids and then I become a burden. But I really want to know what happens next!
- sixtyj 1y ago
  In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone? Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer… After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often. So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - kiba 1y ago
    Immortality is a long time to waste on shit that don't matters.
- gscott 1y ago
  Your never done raising your kids regardless of how old they are.
  - luqtas 1y ago
    so if i had kids that would mean planning to maintain a decades old Minecraft server to play with them?
    - quesera 1y ago
      If you're very fortunate, yes.
  - nradov 1y ago
    You're never "done" but at some point you have to stop. For your sake and theirs.
echelon 1y ago
You're not dreaming big enough. "Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror. I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero. I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics. It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking. And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.
- saulpw 1y ago
  Consider that some people have gotten past it, and that it's not a "cope". Enlightenment is real even if it horrifies you because you aren't there yet.
  - kiba 1y ago
    Sure if it helps you sleep at night, but it also leads to a lot of unhealthy behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and not taking care of yourself.
  - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
    Enlightenment is cope. It's literally coping so hard you enjoy the cope itself.
  - username135 1y ago
    I've visited that space before. Its greatest tragedy isn't the ideas it births, but how seductive the nihilism becomes. You recognize its smallness once you've outgrown it.
chillingeffect 1y ago
It's not our species, it's our culture. Anxiety over death leads to consumption, so it's a consumer society's virtue.
latexr 1y ago
> I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. Psychedelics for everyone! https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-patients-face-death https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-... https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-people-face-mortality-like-a-near-death-experience-study-finds/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...
paganel 1y ago
We did that, it’s only the Western consumerist society that started getting scared to the Moon and back when it comes to dying, you can see it in one of the comments above where another commenter sees life as a movie that needs to be consumed as long as possible. Really bleak.
georgemcbay 1y ago
In my experience (with both my age peers and people a generation older) as a 52 year old most people who aren't sociopathic narcissists just naturally get more comfortable with the idea of their own death with age. Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.
ACCount37 1y ago
"Get comfortable with death" is the mortal cope. We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.
- Intralexical 1y ago
  That's the logic of a cancer cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    If cancer cells can pull it off, then why not humans? Clearly, there are no "laws of biology" that would forbid it.
    - Intralexical 1y ago
      Because a cancer cell pulls it off by sacrificing all of the cell's useful functions, resulting in the destruction of the host organism as well as the death of the cell itself.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        And? How does that apply in any way, fashion or form to making humans biologically immortal?
        Intralexical 1y ago
        The "law of biology" at play here is tradeoffs. Aging is not single disease, but an accumulation of error states and maladaptations which arise in a thermodynamically unstable system of high complexity, existing in an even more dynamic environment, likely due to the inescapable mathematics of chaotic systems. In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enough that it is not statistically feasible for there to be local minima. Only saddles, in one dimension or another other. Cells from cancerous tumors do not prove biological immortality is technologically viable for humans, nor do hydras nor Greenland sharks, because the tradeoffs they have to make in order to obtain "immortality" (in only a very technical sense) would be wholly unworkable for the complexity and the experience of a human, as well as extremely destructive to human society. Just think about this for a moment. "Cells from deadly tumors full of mutant hair and teeth refuse to die (until they kill their entire environment), therefore humans can be immortal?" Really? That's the argument you're going with? People have been trying to explain this to you through this entire thread. But despite leaving 22 comments, you seem impervious to it. Personally, I think we should strive to be less like cancers, not more.

wetpaws 1y ago

[dead]

KronisLV 1y ago

> I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.

bigmattystyles 1y ago
Maybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…
- KronisLV 1y ago
  Perhaps! Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them. Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
- kiba 1y ago
  That's just terror management of death.[1] That's why we say things like "death gives life meaning". Utter bollocks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
  - nradov 1y ago
    There's no reason to be terrified of death.

jebarker 1y ago

For me, the sad part about dying isn’t the loss of agency in the world as much as missing the rest of the movie. At 43 I already feel like I’ve mostly realized my potential and I’m just here to raise my kids and then I become a burden. But I really want to know what happens next!

sixtyj 1y ago
In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone? Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer… After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often. So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kiba 1y ago
  Immortality is a long time to waste on shit that don't matters.
gscott 1y ago
Your never done raising your kids regardless of how old they are.
- luqtas 1y ago
  so if i had kids that would mean planning to maintain a decades old Minecraft server to play with them?
  - quesera 1y ago
    If you're very fortunate, yes.
- nradov 1y ago
  You're never "done" but at some point you have to stop. For your sake and theirs.

echelon 1y ago

You're not dreaming big enough. "Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror. I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero. I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics. It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking. And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.

saulpw 1y ago
Consider that some people have gotten past it, and that it's not a "cope". Enlightenment is real even if it horrifies you because you aren't there yet.
- kiba 1y ago
  Sure if it helps you sleep at night, but it also leads to a lot of unhealthy behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and not taking care of yourself.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  Enlightenment is cope. It's literally coping so hard you enjoy the cope itself.
- username135 1y ago
  I've visited that space before. Its greatest tragedy isn't the ideas it births, but how seductive the nihilism becomes. You recognize its smallness once you've outgrown it.

chillingeffect 1y ago

It's not our species, it's our culture. Anxiety over death leads to consumption, so it's a consumer society's virtue.

latexr 1y ago

> I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. Psychedelics for everyone! https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-patients-face-death https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-... https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-people-face-mortality-like-a-near-death-experience-study-finds/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...

paganel 1y ago

We did that, it’s only the Western consumerist society that started getting scared to the Moon and back when it comes to dying, you can see it in one of the comments above where another commenter sees life as a movie that needs to be consumed as long as possible. Really bleak.

georgemcbay 1y ago

In my experience (with both my age peers and people a generation older) as a 52 year old most people who aren't sociopathic narcissists just naturally get more comfortable with the idea of their own death with age. Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.

ACCount37 1y ago

"Get comfortable with death" is the mortal cope. We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.

Intralexical 1y ago
That's the logic of a cancer cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
- ACCount37 1y ago
  If cancer cells can pull it off, then why not humans? Clearly, there are no "laws of biology" that would forbid it.
  - Intralexical 1y ago
    Because a cancer cell pulls it off by sacrificing all of the cell's useful functions, resulting in the destruction of the host organism as well as the death of the cell itself.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      And? How does that apply in any way, fashion or form to making humans biologically immortal?
      - Intralexical 1y ago
        The "law of biology" at play here is tradeoffs. Aging is not single disease, but an accumulation of error states and maladaptations which arise in a thermodynamically unstable system of high complexity, existing in an even more dynamic environment, likely due to the inescapable mathematics of chaotic systems. In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enough that it is not statistically feasible for there to be local minima. Only saddles, in one dimension or another other. Cells from cancerous tumors do not prove biological immortality is technologically viable for humans, nor do hydras nor Greenland sharks, because the tradeoffs they have to make in order to obtain "immortality" (in only a very technical sense) would be wholly unworkable for the complexity and the experience of a human, as well as extremely destructive to human society. Just think about this for a moment. "Cells from deadly tumors full of mutant hair and teeth refuse to die (until they kill their entire environment), therefore humans can be immortal?" Really? That's the argument you're going with? People have been trying to explain this to you through this entire thread. But despite leaving 22 comments, you seem impervious to it. Personally, I think we should strive to be less like cancers, not more.