Have you seen someone in excruciating pain for a long time without hope for improvement or experienced it yourself? It's really easy to talk tough while you are healthy but your opinion may change once you are in that situation.

From what I have seen I would prefer to go out in dignity at my own will instead of being an experiment of the medical machine. Others may feel different and I think both paths should be available.

Yes. And no, my opinion hasn't changed.

What does dignity buy you if you're dead? Nothing. You can have yours, I'll spend mine to stay alive as long as possible.

That's your choice. As I said both options should be available.

In the end you will only know how you will really feel once you are in such a situation.

such absolutist statements make me think you are relatively young and likely have not experienced any form of chronic pain, mind you not momentary pain that you 'rise above' but constant, unwavering, always-on pain. that changes perspectives, especially when you are old and don't have much to look forward to.

These kind of ageist arguments are pretty annoying. Some people have chronic pain and still want to live as long as they possibly can.

There’s a significant difference between chronic pain and crippling state of existence that requires your ribs to be broken to sustain life.

From my understanding: any CPR done properly has a risk of breaking people's ribs. You've got to push quite strongly to resuscitate the heart.

If you're not coming back, the doctor performing CPR will push harder and harder to try to get you to breath again. And yes, that means broken ribs.

Medicine is ugly. We rip out veins in the legs and attach them to the heart to "cure" blocked arteries and prevent heart attacks. We pull tendons out of corpses, drill screws into bones, and re-attach the knee bones... to provide additional support to torn tendons.

And in some cases: doctors tell the patient to live with the condition (ex: some peculiar shoulder bone breaks), because the treatment is sometimes worse than the ailment.

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I don't know all treatments or all ailments... and even doctors won't know all the possibilities. But, the overwhelming expert opinion of the health care industry seems to be against full code. (and btw: they make money when they drag lives out... they have a financial incentive against this recommendation. The longer they drag out your life, the more money that they make.)

You don't feel the same way about the """nothingness""" before you were born as you do after you die. You're just weirdly flexing your ego in the most pompous way possible in this thread.

That's a crazy argument, of course I don't feel the same about something now that I have it...

Mark Twain was quipping, not building a life philosophy.

You dont seem to understand. There will be no you to have lost it. There was no you to gain it.

What you don't understand is there is a me now, currently, so this comment/argument is completely pointless and generally wrong.

> there is a me now

Like I said, your ego-- the sense of self-- is doing a weird flex. But ok.

Not weird, and not a flex, I'm simply acknowledging it's existence, unlike apparently everyone else here.

Is there?

Seems unlikely.

Pretty much every healthcare worker I know, religious or non-religious, leans towards DNR over "Full Code" on themselves. To the people who have watched others die on the operating table, they do not believe that the final moments in a hospital is worth it.

Death is inevitable. You can either have it with dignity, perhaps a week or month earlier than usual. Or, you can drag it out for weeks or months in a hospital (possibly bankrupting your family). Regardless, you'll die eventually.

There are plenty of stories about brain-dead patients staying in a hospital for years (!!) while their bodies atrophy and inevitable brain damage prevents any hope for a reasonable life afterwards. Modern science can keep someone technically alive, but at an unfortunate cost.

Its far luckier to die peacefully (and suddenly) in your sleep... without dragging out your life. Doctors for the most part know this, but they don't want to change American culture or trample on people's right to choose how they die. But its pretty clear what option is preferable.

It's not only likely, it's certain. Death is nothingness, not peace, and pretending like it's preferable is basically acquiescing that infinite nothingness is preferable to nothingness, which is definitionally false.

There is literally no such thing as a peaceful death. It may sound poetic, and it may be comforting, but it's not true or real in any sense to the people actually dying.

The reality is, it's peaceful to the living, and so we falsely optimize for that.

> Death is nothingness, not peace, and pretending like it's preferable is basically acquiescing that infinite nothingness is preferable to nothingness, which is definitionally false.

This seems to be in the realm of philosophy, meta-science and religion. I don't really want to bring the discussion there, but I simply need to point out that many, many religions (and atheists) have different opinions on this matter. For example, a dignified death may bring you closer to the creator (emphasis on "dignified", because suicide doesn't count for some religions).

And I don't believe there's any way to properly gather evidence about what happens to someone after they die. And without establishing our religious ideals as ground rules, I don't think we can really have a good discussion on the matter.

I suppose I might choose the excruciating pain if I were alone on a desert island with nobody watching. But if my wife and children were sitting round my death bed I think I'd prefer, for their benefit, to die in a dignified way. And in a timely manner so as not to keep them waiting. Death is not eternal nothingness. Life goes on.

Death absolutely is an eternal nothingness, don't fool yourself. Your kids, your wife, none of that matters after you're dead. It's literally irrelevant at that point.

My kids and my wife absolutely matter after I'm dead. I'm not so self-centered as to believe that they exist solely to give me pleasure.

To you? Nope. Nothing does, you're dead.

Death is not eternal nothingness. Eternal implies that something "is". Death "IS NOT".