Comment on Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 1 year agoI will never get this attitude. If you were born in the 1800s would you call today boring? There is just so much to experience and we always have new things being invented. If I had infinite time I would still never run out of things I want to do.
That talk that “death is what makes life worth living” feels like a coping mechanism people invented to make peace with mortality. Everything that makes life worth living only happens while we are alive. The only thing that makes long lives so tragic is death itself.
Funny, what you wrote sounds to me like a coping mechanism in itself haha.
Which is cool, like 90% of what we humans do is in some way a coping mechanism for our own mortality. We are all still going to die though, accept it or rage against it, it makes no difference in the end.
In what way? I don’t deny that I’m going to die, I don’t think this kind of life extension medical technology will become widely available quick enough and affordably enough to help me. But I also don’t romanticize the prospect. It’s one of those common mundane tragedies that happen every day.
Frankly, sounds like you are trying to Uno Reverse Card me but I don’t even get what point you are trying to make. What, is just cherishing life a coping mechanism now?
Can a common mundane thing not still possess some beauty? And even in having beauty or not, must we judge it to be good or bad?
I’m not trying to do anything except talk shit on the internet. But yes, absolutely! It can be a coping mechanism, and there are definitely people who try to live to the fullest in the hopes that if they do it enough they’ll be able to forget their own impermanence.
I mean, I spent most of my life trying not to die so it seems pretty bad to me. I can’t exactly contemplate it like the falling leaf. I can see what you mean by how momentous it is but even if you can find beauty in it… it’s in someone else’s. You cannot really witness your own death to regard it as beautiful or horrible or anything.
Yeah there are people who fill their lives with noise not to think about their own mortality but I don’t think that’s my case. We are talking about it right now. I don’t seek all my experiences as a checklist for death either. I won’t be the one keeping track. I won’t be the one remembering.
Death is the cessation of self, and as much as I don’t fool myself into thinking I’d be immortal, I’d like to have as lengthy a self as I am afforded. Everything I cherish, I can only do so because I am. I can’t see death as bringing meaning to anything. More like the ultimate meaninglessness. How could people define themselves by something which, as far as we understand, they won’t even get to experience themselves?
I suppose there is spiritual belief, but even then it’s ultimately unknown. However people believe they may exist past their deaths, it won’t be like this.
But really, I feel really skeptical when people talk about the beauty and meaning of death because, if they truly believed that, wouldn’t they be more proactive about it? Though that’s pretty unhealthy to consider. Far from me to convince anyone they really truly see death as so wondrous.
Apollo@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Also to respond to your example - yeah, I reckon seeing civilization repeating the same dumb patterns every hundred years would get boring fast. “Oh, facism is on the rise again, better grab the popcorn”.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In my country there are people who are still alive who lived during a military dictatorship and I cannot imagine of all things that they would be bored by its resurgence. The ones I hear speaking in the media seem livid if anything.
I could see someone ending their immortal life out of desperation, but boredom? Only if they completely give up on themselves and the world. Even that sounds like a treatable form of depression.
And that’s not even bringing up all the technology and arts that advance every day. In the most mundane sense I could think of several franchises I’m constantly waiting on the next entries, without mentioning all that I haven’t yet tried and ones that haven’t even been invented that I might like.