Hacker News Reader

Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

I also don’t want to pay taxes but here I am, grudgingly paying them for the benefit of our societal structure.

Would I want to live in a world where people don’t have kids, where people can take as much time as they want because time is infinite, a world where you wouldn’t even go out on the street for the chance something would happen to you and deprive you of eternal existence? I’m not sure, and in any case, it will be a vastly different future.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg running his empire for 900 years straight.

View on HN

You do you.

I want to live 900 years and explore every discipline under the sun. I want to travel the world twenty times, read every book, see a hundred thousand sunsets.

Don't tell me I or anyone else doesn't deserve that. Evolution left us with bodies that don't permit it, but we'll escape that limit someday.

Do you have kids? I think my view on this radically changed as a father. I feel like my generation sticking around forever would come at the expense of our children (or their children, which by proxy is the same thing).

With kids around, there’s just something biologically soothing that tells you “you’ve done your part. You can leave this world at peace”.

I know it’s not the same for everyone but on a humankind level, that’s exactly how it works.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”

Those are beliefs from the past. Given time it will change. What human kind is biologically hardwired for is personal survival ability, not leaving the world for youngsters as soon as possible, and those two precepts are mutually exclusive.

Humans have individually weak survival instincts, which is why soldiers were running into machine gun fire on the beaches of Normandy (or why others ride motorcycles). Some of that is surely the denial of our own mortality.

Humans excel at surviving as a group, which is a very different - sometimes contrasting - thing.

Nobody's telling you you're not allowed to die, and I'll always be on the libertarian end of that equation. Just please don't stop people from trying to live.

Not meaning this in an derogatory manner but this sounds to me something like what Peter Pan wanted. He didn't want to leave neverland and he wanted to be everything (pan). This is also well studied in the Jungian psychology under the term puer aeternus, the infinite child.

The problem with this is, personal harm it causes aside, if all adults wanted to be infinite children, it wouldn't leave space to (at least compete with) the incoming, actual children. It would cause great intergenerational conflict. Not leaving resources for the next generation also means endangering the continuity of species altogether.

If we take a step back, one might even argue that this is already what is going on today.

I do want to live in a world where people can take as much time as they want! I'm 20 years old, and there already isn't enough time to do everything I want to do. I also disagree that increased longevity will lead to a stagnant society. Just as we don't expect a 30 year old to be the same person when they're aged to 40 or 50, I don't expect a 100 year old to be the same person when they're 300. Neurons are replaced, old memories are forgotten, old habits are redefined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com