It’s the realization that when you’re gone, after a few years, decades - maybe even centuries, if you’re really lucky - all evidence that you ever existed will be gone. Not fear, exactly, because you won’t be around to experience it; just . . . discomfort.
I guess I shouldn’t make joking titles. I didn’t think anyone would take that literally, but only that it would arouse curiosity.
There is a Scottish study indicating that people with Type 2 diabetes treated with metformin lived longer than people without diabetes. That disease doesn’t usually develop until middle age.
So it raises the question of what would happen if millions of normal healthy people started taking it at age 20?
I do think living forever or nearly so would get to be a bore. But I do not consider 300 years to be unreasonable. It might be useful socially and for the state of the planet. If people did not have children until their 40s or 50s but still had the vigor of their late 20s they might do a far better job of raising children and the effect of that would echo down the centuries.
But that makes you just like me, and just like (fake rhetorical statistic) 99% of all humans ever. Why do most people feel such a need to be one percenters, in this matter, at least?
There are many things that I’d like to see how they came out. For me, the outcomes of some mathematical questions (Riemann hypothesis, P vs. NP,…). Also I would like to see what becomes of my grandchildren? I assume there will be great grandchildren, what will they be like? Will Israel ever find a modus vivendi with its neighbors?
I suppose I would get bored eventually, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.
I want to agree with you, but the question remains - how do you know? Or, more precisely, given the probable nature of non-existence - how could you know?
There’s a lot I would like to do that I know I will never even start. I would like more time for that reason alone. There is much more than one lifetime’s worth of (albeit quite trivial) intent in me.
Assuming I had reasonable healthy, fitness, and mental abilities I’d very much like more than my current half century and change, and more than 100 years, and more still… I think it would take a very long time for me to become bored with more existence.
Living forever in a coma would be pointless. Living a very long time as a mobile, thinking, experiencing person has a great deal of appeal for me.
That’s a good and simple question, and the answer is equally simple: I don’t care to. I love my wife. I love my daughter. I love my dogs. Most days, I don’t even mind my job, so much. I believe that “the Universe” “knows” what “it” is “doing.” I believe in the Way (as the early Christians referred to their movement) - I believe in the Tao.
What I can’t seem to grasp is what relevance any of that has to the question of why existence - o.k., continued existence - is to be preferred to non-existence. How can we obtain empirical evidence (yes, it’s a silly question)?
It seems to me like you have contradicted yourself in these two paragraphs. In the first, you acknowledge that you have every reason to live one more day; in the second, you’ve apparently forgotten.
There doesn’t need to be any profound reason for wanting to continue beyond the simple desire not to stop.
I’m just saying you prefer continued existence today – and preferred it last month, and preferred it a year ago. Me, too – and I expect to keep preferring it next month, and a year from now. If we both don’t care to die today, why would we care to die later?