[scholia]

It depends how old you are. If you're 25, that's a horror show. If you're 85, it's pretty normal.

By a certain age, most of the people you have known or even met will already be dead. Calculating that age is left as an exercise for the reader....

[JoshTriplett]

> If you're 85, it's pretty normal.

It's a horrifying tragedy no matter how old you are.

Don't ever let it become "normal". It's a problem we'll fix someday. Do what you can to make "someday" come sooner rather than later.

[uiri]

Why do you think that immortality is not just desirable but also inevitable?

Death is part of life. The older you get, the more people whom you have met are dead. I don't think that viewing it as a horrifying tragedy is particularly healthy.

[JoshTriplett]

> Why do you think that immortality is not just desirable but also inevitable?

Regarding "inevitable": There's a huge amount of uncertainty about when we'll manage to cure mortality: many people alive today would hope that it'll happen during their lifetimes, but I honestly don't know if it'll happen 20, 50, 100, 150, or 300 years from now. But I would argue that there's far less uncertainty about if we'll manage it, and I don't see any reasonable support for the idea of the problem being entirely and eternally intractable. Assuming humanity itself manages to survive, it'd be shocking if thousands of years from now we hadn't fixed it.

There's no obvious reason why any particular problem of biology would be somehow completely intractable, to the point that no amount of time could ever produce a solution. There's no obvious reason to believe that there's an unbounded set of such problems. And there's no obvious reason to believe, as a matter of physics, that it's somehow impossible to run a human mind on anything other than fragile biology, given enough computing power.

Regarding "desirable": for exactly the same reason we seek cures for every other affliction that plagues humanity. Do you consider cancer a good thing? Heart attacks? Strokes? Alzheimer's and other degenerative diseases? Would any reasonable person look at one of those and say "that's fine, let's keep it, we should force people to keep experiencing that"? The general consensus seems to be that we should fix all of those. So what reasonable person would look at the whole set of all possible causes and say "at least one of those should keep existing, people should keep dying"?

Minds are incredibly precious, and it's always a tragedy to have one less, no matter how many more we have.

> I don't think that viewing it as a horrifying tragedy is particularly healthy.

If one of your foremost goals is to fix it, accepting it is counterproductive.

[JabavuAdams]

I agree with everything you've written, but from a personal mental health perspective, it makes sense for most of the population to accept it. That is, until it's certain to be fixed in their lifetime.

[JoshTriplett]

That's a self-defeating proposition; the more people accept it, the less likely it is to get fixed within their lifetime. The more people object to it (and do something about that), and the more broad cultural acceptance exists for a solution, the more likely it is to get fixed. Imagine a world where all the memes, mindsets, and casual empty aphorisms about death didn't exist; how much more urgently might people treat the problem in that world?

That said, it's also the kind of concept that needs some amount of introduction and background, to avoid "future shock".

[sk5t]

To quote Kate Tempest, "We die so that others can be born, we age so that others can be young."

[naasking]

That which is natural is not necessarily good.

It also seems like special pleading to suggest that it's a tragedy a young person to die but not an old person. Just because we're desensitised to it doesn't make it ok.