Fear of death is a misunderstanding of what life is.
Not that I agree with the "infinite life destroys all meaning". Just nitpicking.
One, we don't get an eternity. It's thermodynamically impossible.
Two, we're mortal beings with mortal minds. Our trying to comprehend--let alone judge--what an immortal being would consider meaningful is hubris.
Three, how does this scale? Is a child's life more meaningfully if it ends early? Why is our present life and healthspan the sole optimum?
The philosophical argument for a truly-immortal being being indifferent is that they would, over an infinite timeline, experience every possible experience an infinite number of times. In that frame, preference loses meaning. A being that has no preference is indifferent to what happens around or to them. That, one could argue, is an existence without meaning.
That's so splendidly separate from biological immortality as to be a straw man. (The argument also suffers from failing to appreciate that there are many types of infinity.)
Mind you it's no accident that the one meaningful thing most people still have, which is having kids, is precisely given meaning by our own mortality, it's the one transcendent thing that only exists because our lives are finite.
People have always been complaining about this, I think Socrates and Cicero griped about it in their times.
The problem isn’t distance from death but monotony. The philosophised immortal being has monotony forced upon them. Many people today and in the past self-impose it.
A mere challenge to overcome.
That may make all your breaths meaningless. But when I'm meditating, or bicycling up a hill, or face-to-face with my lover, or watching the sunrise on a cold morning, my breath has plenty of meaning to me. Limiting the amount of oxygen I was allowed to use would not lend those more meaning; scarcity is not the same as meaning.
Respectfully: You do. You must. Or if you don't, then life misunderstands itself. For life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche. Further, any hypothesised lifeform that has discovered death as unnecessary, they curiously have not arrived here for us to interrogate. The significance of that seems vaguely familiar, but perhaps just Fermi ;)
You don't know me, but I usually air toward speaking humbly about things I suspect I know. Readers are free to decide which perspective is true hubris: my hubris that aligns with all known living systems and their failed aspirations of immortality, or the other hubris that stands alone with cancers and brainless jellies, where death is a failure of all historical life to discover otherwise... that the cleverness of life we laud so much praise on -- the same life which has invented every enchanted bit of protein machinery that runs this whole beautiful mess -- that it has somehow had a blind spot all these millennia, that we humans have seen clear-eyed.
Death is hegemonic for a reason. It's the Chesterton's fence around the whole damn bustling city, that we've never seen what comes from the other side of, if we finally remove it.
Much love here. I don't mean to be dismissive, this is just something I care about deeply and wish to speak firmly on.
Biological immortality exists [1].
More pointedly, life hasn't "adopted" death, it's a consequence of thermodynamics. Where it can escape it, however, it has tried. From a "Selfish Gene" perspective, our genes aim--to the degree they have aims--to be immortal. Our multicellular bodies are simply easier to replace than repair.
Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say evolution "chose" an advantageous trait, when in reality it's just a consequence of dead stuff not passing on traits and specimens with those traits having more success at living, and neutral traits surviving just by not immediately killing or ahem rooster-blocking.
Old-age death is merely a mechanical limitation of biological processes (and possibly matter in general if you subscribe to the heat death of the universe.) It enabled rapid evolution, which allowed MUCH more complex life to come about after billions of years, but the fact that life retains death is merely a consequence of how it came about. Probably life that never died would only evolve in response to environmental disasters or predation, slowing changes significantly.
Don't take this to mean there aren't problems with humanity's search for extending life well past our natural biology. There are. But all those problems revolve around society needing death to not stagnate to hell due to evolutionary circumstances shaping our mentality, not the universe demanding it for some grand philosophical reason.
If you see death as something the universe "wants", great! I merely see death as a limitation and a mechanical process for exacting change.
To posit another philosophical quandry: if life can reproduce, can it ever really "die" of old age? We're one branch on a massive chain of reproduction stretching over literally billions of years, so are we really a "different" life-form from the first one? One enormous organism, split up into quintillions of different parts. If you have a child, where do you stop and they begin? Where do your parents stop and you begin? They/you literally came in part from their/your own cells!