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Comment by notliketherest | Hacker News Reader

I just think that death gives life meaning and knowing/accepting that we will die is a part of growing more self aware and focusing on the good things in life like family and love rather than the wasteful things. Maybe that's an unpopular viewpoint in the age of technology but I also think a lot of people are scared to death that they spent decades of their life in a rat race and are desperate to get those years back. All the money in the world can't save you from death and time is our most precious resource.

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Everyone devotes resources to saving themselves from death each and every day. Every time they go to the grocery store, in fact. If you are willing to undertake that action, you should be equally willing to to visit a physician to push back your day of death by a day, each and every day.

There is something about considering alterations in the current trajectory of aging that makes people say strange things. People who exercise to improve their health span, people who visit doctors to prolong their health span, people who put off death in hundreds of small ways, constantly, all the time. But suggest that perhaps aging should be modified, and people who are 100% supportive of ending heart disease and Alzheimer's suddenly develop a deep philosophical attachment to inevitable death on exactly the current schedule for inevitable death. Seems a little suspect.

Eating is pleasurable and I have a biological drive to do it.

I have no such drive, nor pleasure association, with visiting a physician.

I remember discussing this topic with elderly relatives, still fairly capable people who weren't terminally ill and mentally quite with it. They would often tell me they want to die, simply because they've had enough.

From what I could gather it was coming from more of a reflective, happy space, not a negative space, because they would often say things like, "I've had a great life, but I want to go now".

It's hard to imagine what it feels like to be that satisfied.

That doesn't sound satisfied. That sounds exhausted. I sympathize, despite being relatively young.

Nature has programmed us to die. When we reach old age, it's not scary anymore.

It hasn't programmed us to die at all, and death is scary for plenty of people. If we're going with anecdote, my grandmother told me in her 90s she didn't want to die because she wanted to see how things turned out.

I would happily spend a thousand years contemplating whether or not you're right.

and knowing/accepting that we will die is a part of growing more self aware and focusing on the good things in life like family and love rather than the wasteful things.

you say, deciding what's good in life and what isn't, what's wasteful and what isn't, and saying that death is a 'part' of growing more aware but implying it's a necessary or specially good part.

I also think a lot of people are scared to death that they spent decades of their life in a rat race and are desperate to get those years back. All the money in the world can't save you from death

You say, deciding that people who wasted their lives in a rat race focusing on your chosen 'wasteful' things do not deserve any chance to focus on the 'good things' and should not be allowed to even try for one, because ... unspecified reasons.

"Lol at all the desperate people who wasted their lives" - that's your argument in favour of their death?

Death comes for all, and I agree the finite span helps to give meaning, but maybe the 'when' doesn't have to be correlated to biology

You say you want people to enjoy the good things in life, but then criticise people who now desperately want to but don't have time left to do so?

We only call time precious because it is so terribly scarce. If we can make more of it, why shouldn't we?

>All the money in the world can't save you from death and time is our most precious resource.

Now, yes. But the question is whether it should be like that or not, rather than whether it is so.

How long would you personally like to live if you could be healthy the entire time and not age any more or any faster than you'd like to? 50 years? 150? 1000?

80. Seems about right.

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