Of course, there’s a difference between a few lifetimes and thousands of years or immortality.
A lot of cultural baggage and shame in it, most people just end up stressed out and depressed.
> who is going to want to hire you when you haven't had a job in six months or a year?
I’m lucky enough that in our industry, this hasn’t affected me. Tech companies seem pretty open to the idea that people take sabbaticals and such. Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no illusion that this isn’t a problem for other people and other industries, it absolutely is, unfortunately.
[1] Assuming they could financially afford it
Not everyone, of course.
That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Cannot remember that last time being bored. You always have the option to spam your unqualified opinion on HN or something, there is so much potential stuff to do that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough.
Suburban kids in the 70's. Checks out!
One of the really serious problems is that your brain generalizes, so once you get sick and tired of one thing, it's easier to get sick and tired of the next thing because your brain says, "Oh, this is kinda similar to this other thing that I already got sick and tired of."
Managing all this can be a real challenge. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, it's an incredibly nice problem to have, and I wouldn't trade it for the world (literally!) But even nice problems to have can still be real problems.
I was bored after about 4 months.
I suppose everybody is different though and what works for me, might not work for you.
Well, the bikeshedding part of the topic.
For some reason, any time we discuss extending human life, it quickly degenerates into an ethical question.
First, I wouldn’t worry about it because we spend more effort discussing ethics than actually trying to solve the problem. Basically, because the problem is so hard we bikeshed on ethics.
Second, it’s a very hard problem. It’s unlikely with the actual amount of effort, that we’ll be able to do much to extend life in the foreseeable future. We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.
No, we really don't. Heart disease is mostly caused by lifestyle. And cancer and the aging process are two sides of the same coin: solve aging and you'll figure out cancer too. Alzheimer's is now appearing to be caused by a virus, so we'll probably have a vaccine for that before long.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4
Plenty of young people get cancer. We also have childhood cancers.
Maybe you should include some references? We haven’t had one effective treatment for alzheimer’s in the past 20 years
So when you tell somebody that life isn't short, suddenly they are confronted with the fact that maybe they could be those things, and now they have to justify why they haven't been working at it all along. "Well, I wouldn't want it anyway."
The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart.
More: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction.
In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.
However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.
>It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point.
Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home?
There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'
"In medical jargon, healthy people are “alert and oriented x 3”, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on."
It doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen enough that people who work in health care, or have had to help elderly relatives, or anyone closer to the end of their life needs to think about what to do about it, and set up things like advance directives and medical power of attorney.
There is also the POLST, which is a pink sheet with doctor's orders that terminally ill people put on their refrigerator that tell paramedics not to do CPR (for example). https://polst.org/polst-and-advance-directives/
Although the health care system is usually about extending people's lives, this is not always appropriate. Acknowledging that is just being real about what goes on as people get close to death.
This is a really silly and non-sensical line of reasoning. We're talking here about achieving biological immortality: stopping the aging process. This would necessarily require understanding human biology and cellular processes at an extremely detailed level, in order to modify them artificially to stop aging altogether. (Most likely, this will require periodic treatments, much like we currently go to the dentist every 6 months for a cleaning.) If we have the technology to do this, people aren't going to be in poor health with "no prospects for improvement": the anti-aging technology or treatments are going to change that.
I think it's more likely that the first ones could add years or decades of life without being nearly that good, and perhaps still having significant side effects or just not affecting some aspects of aging. If so, difficult decisions about what to do when closer to death won't go away.
If life doesn't really go on forever and people still eventually die of some disease or other, that's a lot of old people who are on life support at some point in their lives, right? Just like today.
On top of that, now with people delaying parenthood so much, or not even having kids, we're facing demographic problems (too many old people being supported by too few young workers). If people have significantly longer adult lives, this could very well make it more feasible and desirable to have kids at older ages, which could stabilize the population problem. (People could have two kids at 40, and two more at 60, and two more at 80, for instance.)
I'm not sure I buy your arguments, though. For people who earn enough to retire and live off investments, this could mean more time in retirement, rather than more time working. (Still good, but not a productivity boost.)
Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
Who cares? As long as they're not a drain on the system (compared to today), what's the problem? That sounds like a big plus actually: people getting to enjoy more time in their lives. Why would anyone not want that, unless they're some kind of religious nut who thinks this isn't "god's will" or something?
>Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
I don't think they'd be entirely separate. We can already freeze eggs, and women are able to carry children at older ages (sometimes not even their own children) thanks to IVF now. Anti-aging treatments should make this even better; women may routinely get their eggs frozen at 25, and then use them to make children at 75.
Note that extending lifespan does not mean overpopulation necessarily nor lack of jobs.
I suspect you have not spent much time around eg people with dementia, who are well within their “natural longevity” but for some have not “reasonably enjoyed” anything in many years, sometimes decades.
Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already.
For many entering old age, the concern is not about how many years they have left, but if they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs during them.
Instead of that, try visiting some universities where there's still some elderly people working as academics. Or try going to a classic rock concert where guys in their 70s are still playing on stage, sounding just about as good as they did decades before. Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older, and keep doing the things they enjoy.
... you understand that declining mental health is not the result of "giving up", right? And that the celebrity academics/rockstars still active at 85 often are 1) reasonably wealthy and 2) lucky.
I've TA'd for 70+ years old professors with declining health who were still teaching because they didn't have a choice and had bills to pay, and it was just sad. Complete waste of time for the students (and tragic for the professors to find themselves in that situation).
Your messages give the sense that you have a very naive/idealistic view of aging.
People really underestimate of how much o their life they forget as the decades pass.
I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ...
First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health.
However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society.
That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.
To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.
So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil.
So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that.
...
Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species.
Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
Arguably, for example in science, advancing it "one funeral at a time" is too slow even at current life expectancy. So one way of speeding it up is killing any prominent scientists over 30. Lots of benefits, right? We would have moon bases in early hundreds BC if humanity adopted that approach!
Advancing societal progress one generation worth of funerals at a time doesn't sound like a good strategy either. I propose reeducations camps instead. Similarly to how slavery during the time of its invention was a great humanitarian advance (alternative was literally death), imperative to keep up with times would be a good alternative to death as well.
Seriously though, changing society to value rationality, (in lesswrong kind of sense, with obligatory Crisis Of Faith exercises, etc) might be not much harder than extending life expectancy to 1k years.
Re: cancer -- society is not an organism, there is no inherent worth of society separate from what benefits it conveys to individual members. In other words, maybe that's my individual organismic bias showing, but individual cells live for the benefit of the host organism, while society exists for the benefit of individual members. Cancer cells are freedom loving cells!
I knew a young woman in college who was extremely homophobic. I witnessed her bonding with a gay activist over soap operas and changing her mind. People change and adapt. Also, if you look back at history, you'll find people more "woke" than you.
if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years
Human history doesn't really work like that. We may be going beyond human history with AI, and it would work quite like that either.
Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
A single alien AI that controls the resources of an entire solar system would likely see our civilization in these terms.
But back to topic... even without, I have a hard time accepting that you can simply extrapolate the current "old people behavior" happening for a few hundred years longer. A lot of issues would suddenly affect them. They'd have already lived though multiple revolutions (e.g. new tech, maybe like not paying with hard cash anymore) and internalize this as a part of life. Actually, we're close to having to learn this right now, with how fast progress has accelerated.
But yeah, making it work with stuff like actively seeking peers across a diverse spectrum would probably require drastic effort with a significant burden placed on the individual.
Why the assumption that Past = Right/Conservative and Future = Left/Progressive? I grew up with about this view of politics, but I don't think it's accurate. It seems like a nice simplification, but it's a gross oversimplification that paints anything right of center as being obviously backwards.
No, that's not really what I am saying ... and you are correct, that would be a very blunt oversimplification (or just plain wrong).
What I am saying is that in an unbroken thread of society (that is, absent disaster or revolution or other "resets") views and mores become viewed as more and more conservative by each successive generation that succeeds them.
As I wrote, "progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time." I don't mean that those people become conservatives, I mean that successive generations view them as more and more conservative.
I don't think that implies that conservative views are backwards - unless you start with an assumption that "new is always better". I don't assume that.
I think the underlying thought experiment "would I want to be immortal" is plagued by these and other unspoken assumptions. We simply don't know what it would mean to have a lifespan decoupled from our evolutionary experience. Clearly, we have psychological and emotional development coupled to our physical development and our functional roles within human society.
What does it mean to freeze our physical health at our "prime" of 20s-30s? Would it also freeze our cognition and emotion? Or would an accumulation of experience still shift our minds into very different modes incongruent with what we assume of young adults? Think of idioms like "young at heart", "wise for her age", or "has an old soul". Will people freeze with one personality, or all trend towards some world-weary and sage disposition as they witness more and more of life and loss?
And what of pathologies and maladaption? When would people reproduce, if they are immortal? Where does evolutionary pressure provide feedback, if traits can erupt with arbitrarily inter-generational delay?
Can an economic and social system develop to handle immortal participants? The worst aspects of primacy could emerge, if actual individuals can take the place of dynasties and corporations as permanent centers of wealth and power. Conversely, would any potentially immortal individual want to take on great personal risk for the betterment of a larger group? How does this change with time? Would centuries of experience lead one to sacrifice for the young, or would the absence of decrepitude encourage selfish delusions of grandeur, thinking that an accumulation of vast experience should be preserved by spilling blood of relatively empty youth...?
With respect, we're talking past one another.
I am not talking about the persons whose lives are extended.
I am talking about their new contemporaries - their "younger peers" who, in the past, would have never found themselves cohabitating with people who had lived 1xx or 2xx years ago.
It is those future young people who I think will have a very hard time accepting any views of any kind coming from any "great old ones" - no matter how plastic or malleable or open-minded those old people might be.
Their sin is simply being old and youth defines itself by breaking with the old. Right now there's a throttle on that struggle because people die. Without that throttle, the young will, I fear, kill the "vampires".
Playing devil's advocate: If one had the permanent physical and cognitive characteristics of someone in their 20s-30s, might they not continue to pass as a young person? Unless you look up their identity in some registry, you wouldn't necessarily be able to identify a cohort. Here is urban Southern California, I see plenty of "old" people in their 50s-60s who are trying to pass as young people all the time. What if they don't have to mask fading hair and eyes, sagging or blotchy skin, aching joints, gravely voices, or personality changes?
You describe a person from 200 years ago existing today, as if they step out of a time machine. But, if they have had 200 years to absorb pop culture, mannerisms, dialect, etc. then how would you know? They won't be repelled by garlic nor invisible in mirrors. They won't even be afraid of sunlight (no skin aging!) and their blood-sucking may not be distinguishable from any young go-getter's.
No, not at all.
I am saying that one should be wary of living much longer than a typical lifespan because when people see vampires, they hunt them down and kill them.
People change over time. My mother is over 80 now, and happily buys all kinds of stuff on Amazon with her laptop or smartphone, even though she said decades ago she didn't see the need for a computer. Her politics are also quite liberal, a lot more so than a lot of 20-somethings I talk to these days who seem to be a bunch of MAGA fans.
Also, how do you know that progressive people from the 18th century would have a problem talking to a divorced woman or women wearing pants? Just because that was the standard of the day doesn't mean that everyone from those times agreed with that.
>progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.
This simply isn't true at all. Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old. One of the most liberal SCOTUS justices is on her deathbed now, while the youngest one is a Trump appointee.
I'm sorry - that line makes it sound like I am saying those people who were progressive become, themselves, reactionary conservatives.
What I am trying to say is that viewed by successive, future generations those people become reactionary conservatives. That is, simply the passage of time changes the view, from outside, of those people.
"Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old."
Agreed. What I am saying is that, absent a revolution or other reset of our current society, both of those groups will be considered, 200 years from now, quite conservative.
An example looking backward:
Find me the most liberal and the most conservative participants at the signing of the US Declaration of Independence - now let's sign them up to speak at Berkeley tomorrow and see how that goes. See what I'm saying ?
I can easily find examples of people in my own social circles (mainly through family contacts) where there's young people who are die-hard conservatives, MAGA fans, Christian zealots, etc., and older and elderly people who are staunch defenders of Roe v. Wade.
The things you identify as "liberal" vs. "conservative" simply do not correlate very well with age or generation at all.
I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors seems like a collective agreement among people to throw their hands up and go "well, fine! I don't even _want_ to live longer, who'd like that?"
All of this, of course, doesn't touch on the moral, economic, environmental, etc. problems that crop up with greatly extended longevity, for which there are a number of altogether more palatable arguments that would need to be engaged with more fully. Still, it's an odd piece of ideology that makes people feel like they don't need to deploy any of these in the conversation - why would they, when they _totally_ don't even want to live much longer than 100 anyways?