New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

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.

> 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.

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!

Maybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…

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.

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.

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

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.

Your never done raising your kids regardless of how old they are.

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.

> 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-...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...

>Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.

I hear this claim often, but I never hear any particular reason for why it's so important compared to e.g. letting Alpha Centauri colonize where the lightcones overlap.

Immortality is a long time to waste on shit that don't matters.

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

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.

Enlightenment is cope. It's literally coping so hard you enjoy the cope itself.

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.

so if i had kids that would mean planning to maintain a decades old Minecraft server to play with them?

There no one on Alpha Centauri

If it's nihilism, it's not enlightenment! There is still/more meaning in impermanence.

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.

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.

"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.

That's the logic of a cancer cell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

If cancer cells can pull it off, then why not humans? Clearly, there are no "laws of biology" that would forbid it.

You are not alone in this. Though I would say it is absolute horror, not just suboptimal one.

Practically speaking, I have no idea what I _personally_ can do except of accepting the inevitable.

If you're very fortunate, yes.

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.

You're never "done" but at some point you have to stop. For your sake and theirs.

There's no reason to be terrified of death.

And? How does that apply in any way, fashion or form to making humans biologically immortal?

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.

Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't. Life isn't fair, and you can get all downsides with no upsides, or the other way around.

There is no Authority on Biology that says "if you want good X, you'll have to take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". It's just hard to get "good X, good Y, good Z" at once, and nature never really tried. That's up to us then.

That little "cancer" metaphor of yours is a worthless fluff piece meant to make you feel better about dying a protracted, miserable death before you hit the age of 100.

Personally, I think we should be coping less, and doing more about the problems we're facing - of which aging is one.

> Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...

So… You're just approaching this with, like, zero reference to actual science at all? "My mind imagines I can have eternal life, and therefore I can, and anybody pointing out flaws with my position is worthless miserable fluff"?

Look, I don't like the limits of thermodynamics more than anyone does. But I think it says a lot that there are, you know, actual real diseases that people suffer from and we can make a cost-effective amelioration of with focused effort. And instead you're here raging that we as a society aren't spending billions of dollars trying to make you immortal.

Evolution doesn't care. It's a greedy optimizer that loves its local minima. If it happens to optimize for things like quality of life, it's incidental. Humans can do better than that.

I'm baffled by your desire to defend the status quo that involves you and everyone you love dying a long and miserable death before the age of 100. Even more so with the amount of "actual real diseases" that loop back around to aging.