On a long enough timescale, things with a small chance of occurring become a virtual certainty. This includes the best of the human experience and the worst, which can get pretty dark.
Why do people want to live forever?
Why do people want to live forever?
Stuff accretes over time. One shoulder, the opposite arm due to compensation, both big toes, etc. But take away all of that and there are still accretions: I’ve started to track the point where I know more dead people than live ones. Of course you can compensate for this and my wife and I have a wide social circle that we tend like good gardeners, but that feels like a delaying action. At some point I’m going to hit, “Hey, fellow kids!” if I haven’t already. Put more simply, will there come a time when the idea of falling in love with one more dog just to lose them will feel like a bad bet?
On one hand, death is the single most terrifying concept imaginable. In lieu of faith that explains it away, consider being conscious one moment, having been conscious most of your waking like and then it just ending. It being categorically different to the time before you existed, because you now exist. After passing away, never perceiving time, never having a thought, never experiencing anything, not even being aware of that and just being... gone. Forever.
It doesn't sound peaceful to me, or like sleeping, or resting in any way. Instead, that's insanely fucked up, it being common or "inevitable" doesn't make it any less so.
Like when my dad passed away, obviously I was sad about it happening and grieved it, at the same time I can acknwoledge that it was a small mercy that he wouldn't end up bedridden or trapped in a decaying body, and he didn't seem to fear it as much after having lived a long and fulfilling life and being religion-adjacent, but at the same time I very clearly don't like the idea of dying myself some day.
So as far as I know, the only reasons for people to accept the concept of death and permanent nothingness is somewhere between either believing an "after" (and rejecting the possibility of it being a permanent end), being ignorant or indifferent about what it means (the non-solution of "Oh I'll just live on in the memories of other people" which completely doesn't concern your actual consciousness), or simply being more busy with their present lives and such, since it's generally far away.
It rubs me the wrong way, that alongside with research towards more graceful aging (if not to say reversing it, curing cancer etc.) should be way more of a priority for all of humanity, instead of the current realpolitik bullshit. I don't lose much sleep over it, but a feeling of dread, it does evoke. Maybe I'll become even more ignorant with age, but I don't think that'd exactly be a conscious choice.
I think that's what religion gives, and it doesn't have to be organized religion. I'm not proselytizing, I'm just pointing out why across so many human cultures people always come up with stories and thoughts about the afterlife. The cold unknown means basically nothing and the fear I think comes from the nothingness -- imagine a life full of the sorrow and joys, and then it just vanishes. And worse of all, if nobody even remembers much it of it, it literally vanishes. For example if a war veteran never tells his experiences to anyone, he basically just vanished from earth and one can ask so did the things he went through happen? If a tree falls and nobody hears it and all that.
I'm probably expressing it poorly but I've been thinking about it too after experiencing some loss too. In my case the person just graduated college. I think the dead have it easy, the suffering lies with the living…
I think if humans didn't age past 20, we'd still eventually get tired of life and want to die on our own terms instead of on a timer. We wouldn't stick around until the sun exploded.