A bad body is better than no body at all. It's not uncommon for abled people to go "Ew, I'd rather die than get $disability", but when they do... actually I don't know if they're as happy as before after 18 months, because everyone mentions that but gives no cite. Anyway, people after a bad event are less unhappy and get happier faster than they predicted, and will remember afterwards. At least for some disabilities, this depends on people adapting to their condition, rather than putting their life on hold until they get better. (More affective forecasting papers.)
Poke around in the disability blogosphere for more perspectives on that. They range from "My body is awesome, but because it's not the type you build your world for you call it 'disabled'", through "It kinda sucks that you're not an Olympic-level athlete and you don't obsess over that all the time; I feel the same way about my disability", through "It's miserable when you're not used to it, but once you adapt it's not so bad", to "It's awful, but still better than being dead".
The things you're afraid of aren't even particularly freaky ones: weakness, limited mobility and endurance, need for support systems, body dysphoria, inability to live as you used to. People live with that every day.
I admit I have no idea what would happen if you lacked a body completely. A head-in-a-jar scenario sounds like locked-in syndrome, which is still better than death. The other scenario could be anything from total sensory deprivation (yeah, that one is probably worse than death) to living in a simulation.
A bad body is better than no body at all.
Then why do so many people have living wills?
this depends on people adapting to their condition
Also, which condition they get. I could see myself happy in this body with a wheelchair, but I can't see myself happy as a paraplegic. I think my ideas about how happy I'd be with a disability are pretty realistic. Anything that keeps me from communicating would make me miserable. Anything that makes me dependent on others will be stressful. Not being able to walk I could get around - I could still program and ...
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.