Awful idea #2: Just listen to your grandmother when you are young. She will tell you how brutal is to be old. Read the science, not just biology but all the connected sciences, specially mathematics. And then listen to the priests (critically!), and read the writers, and peruse the written record of the human civilization, which almost begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh. It will reveal shadows you didn’t know were in your mind. None of it, of course, prevents you from becoming old, but it puts most things into perspective, and it digs out a certain light that we have lost and which we very much need if we are ever going to do anything about the suffering that aging brings.
Awful idea #3: Take a shortcut and paste everything I wrote before this paragraph into an LLM. Any LLM which is reasonably state of the art. Prompt with “what’s the meaning of this?” It will significantly change the intended meaning of what I said in “awful idea #2”. That’s the bias/zeitgeist in our vast cultural recent corpus, that the LLMs swallowed for training, being regurgitated at you in condensed form. And they said that LLMs aren’t useful! Repeat the experiment, but this time use Simplified Chinese to prompt. Observe the very slight cultural drift. Meditate. Now abandon this shortcut and execute awful idea #2. Borrow somebody else’s grandmother if you must.