[n4r9]

I don't know about "relief" or "escape" but I'm comfortable with the idea of eventually having "had enough" of life.

Kind of tangential: the human-style characters in Iain M Banks' fantastic and thoughtful Culture series of novels tend to come to this decision after a couple or a few hundred years. Some times they go into deep sleep to be awoken based on some external criteria (for example, when the war that they conduct with another ~~species~~ (edit: society) is proven to be morally justified).

[lmm]

What today's fiction authors write, with no access to life extension technology, doesn't really tell us anything about what the reality would be like.

It's very rare to find a healthy person - even in their '90s or '100s - who actually wants to die. Many more younger people imagine they would want to die at such an age. I suspect the same will be true for 200 or 400 year olds.

[n4r9]

You raise a very good point. I hadn't thought of looking up research on attitudes towards death in actual elderly people.

It's an unusual one because I'm specifically thinking about people who might want to die simply because they've seen and gotten from life all that they want, not people who are fed up with the (present-day) privations of old age. I suspect you're right that only a very small proportion of today's elderly match this

The closest thing I found after a little looking around is a recent initiative in the Netherlands called "Completed Life" - which seeks to extend the option of euthanasia to relatively healthy elderly people who have decided that their life is complete - and some associated research [0][1].

Lastly, on a slightly pedantic note, I think it's valid to invoke fictional worlds in response to someone who says that it's "insane" to feel a certain way.

[0] http://www.elsvanwijngaarden.com/

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361...

[Nasrudith]

One account I have heard from nurses in Geritology is the apparent importance of "will to live" - they have witnessed many times death following them psychologically giving up.

There could be some chicken vs egg factor (do they lose the will from health being hopeless or does their health decline with their psychological state influencing immune system, and to what extent?). That or spurious human pattern recognition (superstition) but it is possible that there is some literal survivalship bias.