This line of reasoning has always felt incredibly bleak. There's an implied lack of preference for continued experience which can be repurposed to regard suicide indifferently.

It's difficult to take a consistent position that holds both "I don't want to die early" and "I don't care if I die". It requires an arbitrary judgment on what constitutes 'enough' life.

Imagine a pill that gives you 10 years of good health and freedom from aging. No tricks, no evil genies, no monkey paws. It's completely free and universally available. It's not a one time offer. You can change your mind later as many times as you want. How many people would actually refuse that pill and choose to die at a 'natural' time?

Based on how much we spend on medicine, I'd guess very few, and that seems like a clear preference for being alive.

Sure the experience of being dead isn't too bad, because there is no such experience, but consider this: Thanks to the arrow of time, you can know what happened in the past, even if you weren't personally there. Many details are forgotten, but important events are typically recorded in historical documents, or fossils. The same is not true of the future. If I died tomorrow, I would die not knowing the answer to P vs. NP, not knowing whether humanity would last another hundred years, or another million, not knowing if we were alone in the universe. Wouldn't you be disturbed if you had to live in a world where all of human history before 1977 was forgotten? If people knew that there had been such a history, but had no memories or records of it?

I'm not as afraid of being dead as I am about the process of getting sick and dying.

> Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born

Completely untrue. Maybe as an individual, but your impact on other humans is the biggest difference. Particularly if you have children, there is no equivalence.

So to follow your argument to its logical conclusion.

Are you fine with dying today?

We want to live when life is good, because life is good. If you are enjoying your life today, and want to keep living because of it, then you are going to want to keep living when you are in your 70's.

But you don't worry about it now, because you are young.

That seems orthogonal to his question.

I would miss my children, and I believe they would miss me.