this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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i think most people don't really want to die. and they like living for all sorts of reasons. i hope you can think of at least a few reasons you'd like to go on living as well.
I don't want to die, but living forever sounds exhausting.
if you don't want to die now, and you don't want to live forever, is there some specific age/time you would like to die, if you didn't have to?
It's an interesting question.
After thinking over it briefly, I believe I'd like to die when I'm ready to die. I can't declare in advance when that would be age- or time-wise and I can't even necessarily define the conditions that would make me feel ready, as I've never yet felt ready to die.
Right now, I have a little kid and a decent quality of life. I don't want to die until my kid can be on their own and I don't think I'd want to live after my quality of life declined past a certain point though, again, I can't say yet what that point would be.
I'm sorry, I know this is an unsatisfactory answer, but it's the best I have at the moment. I'll try to pontificate on the matter and get back to you if I come up with anything better.
do you want your kid to die someday as well? what if your quality of life didn't have to become bad? immortalists such as myself (that is, people who don't want people to have to die, and support scientific efforts to make that a reality) don't want people to just, like, persist in a state of unending geriatric decrepitude, we want folks to be able to live as long and healthy lives as possible.
I've been ruminating on this comment for many of the last 21 hours, in part because I want to give a good answer and in part because I suspect I see the direction of the conversation.
I think the answer is, of course I don't want my kid to die, but I want them to be able to without suffering when and if they're ready to and mature enough to make such a decision.
QoL not declining kind of seems like a fantasy to me. Taken literally, living "forever" means that you'd outlive the planet, the sun, ultimately the universe. Sounds like a lonely and eventually boring life though, yes, you'd likely experience a lot of thrills before that point. IIRC, among other media, there's a section of H2G2 that briefly addresses this.
Taken less literally, there are mornings during which I wake up and think "I have to go through with this for how much longer?" If I could spend the rest of time without physical or mental health once dipping, I might feel differently, but especially the latter seems unlikely to me (even if it is a laudable goal).
For anyone reading this with concern, I'm happy with my life, I'm not depressed and I'm not at risk. If you were going to say something about that, thank you for caring, but it's not necessary.
edit: Added detail.
I don't wanna live forever. But the act of dying is usually pretty horrible, so I wanna push that off as long as possible.
pushing off dying as long as possible, if done successfully, is living forever though? do you not see the contradiction in what you wrote?
No. Humans aren't psychically able to be immortal without genetic engineering, which as far as the public knows, we don't have yet. Certain death is currently hard codded into our genes. Since I wasn't genetically modified as an embryo, I cannot live forever.
i feel like you've shifted the goalposts, here. previously, you said you didn't want to live forever, now you're just saying you can't live forever.
also, we absolutely do have genetic engineering. it's been a thing since the 70s. the covid-19 vaccine, for instance, was a feat of genetic engineering. furthermore, techniques such as gene therapy can indeed modify the genetic information of adults.
P.S. i assumed you meant physically, rather than psychically, but if you did mean the latter, then i have no idea what you're talking about.
I can’t live forever. But I also don’t want to. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. And yes, we have genetic engineering, but nothing so far that would make humans immortal.
i know they aren't mutually exclusive claims, they just seem unrelated, which is why your shift in topic seemed unexpected to me. maybe they're not for you? do you want to die eventually because you think you have to anyway? is this a general policy of not wanting things that seem difficult to get? personally, there's loads of things i'd like that are currently anywhere from difficult to impossible to achieve.
i just can't bring myself to see the prospect of everyone i know and love withering away and ceasing to exist within a century as anything other than a horrible tragedy. maybe it's unavoidable (though i have some hope that it isn't), but that doesn't mean i have to like it.
I don’t want to live forever, because at some point you’re going to have done literally everything and seen everything, and I don’t want to live in a world where all wonder has turned into banality, and existence is nothing more than another in a count of days that just ticks endlessly upwards. At some point, even the warmth of love you have towards your family will disappear into the eons of your history, because you’ll have forgotten the things that created those feelings in the first place.