First of all, very good post, and timely. Thank you.

Second of all: this may surprise (perhaps even disappoint) people, but I do not actually want to live forever. I think it’s a reasonable goal, but not one that I’m personally motivated by.

I focused a lot on death in the ritual sequence because I want to establish that this is the bar I'm ultimately setting for humanity. I disagreed with anti-deathism when I first read Eliezer’s take on it, but I was still completely floored by the notion that I’m allowed to look at something as fundamental as death and say “yeah, that’s a problem, we’ll need to fix that eventually.” I love being a 21st century human. There’s loads of amazing things to do that I haven’t even begun to get bored of yet. I care about futurism because I know eventually I’ll have modified away from my current values and want more, but I’m in no particular rush to modify myself that way.

I set the bar so high for humanity (and by extension myself) because I think we strive harder when the bar is higher. My ultimate metric for “is this good” is “is this the thing that will most steer the future towards the ideal?” I don't want to get too attached to any given cause. But given that metric, I think most people should probably be working on object-level projects that they are personally invested in, if only because they'll be more effective at it.

The question’s obviously a lot more complicated than that, but I wanted to make this clarification.