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gjm comments on An alarming fact about the anti-aging community - Less Wrong
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I am new to this community. Is the anti-aging stuff popular here? To me it comes accross as a bit weird. There is a scale of depression/hedonia from being almost catatonic to being ecstatically happy. Very depressed people often want to kill themselves right now. Supposedly, ecstatically happy people would like to live forever. If you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you supposedly want live another few decades, not more. If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good. By that time you can expect to be tired about life anyway, you will have less and less of the good stuff (childhood friends, experiences to discover etc.) and more and more of the bad stuff (cumulative stress, aches etc.) and it will sound like a good deal to end it without shame i.e. naturally.
I think this largely depends on one thing really. If you have a purpose for your life, you supposed want to work on it forever. If you are like most people or like me, just going through life and trying to fish out pleasurable experiences from it, nice holidays in interesting places and big laughs with friends drunk, you probably don't want to do that forever.
If someone figures out how to stop or reverse aging, presumably that will mean higher quality of life for old people, so the
will no longer apply, at least in so far as the bad stuff is physical rather than mental. As for people "somewhere in the middle of the spectrum" -- if we suppose roughly constant quality of life thanks to anti-aging treatments, always wanting to live a few more decades means never wanting to stop living just as much as always wanting to live a few more millennia does.
If I came to expect a thousand years of healthy life, I think I would be more inclined to find long-term purposes. (Maybe a succession of projects each taking a few decades to a few centuries.) Wouldn't you? I mean, my motivation to try to cure aging, or prove the Riemann Hypothesis, or put an end to poverty or malaria, is less than it could be because I don't expect to be able to make a very large contribution to any of those things. (I am not claiming that this is rational, that an ideal agent would have that motivational structure. Only that I do and I don't think I'm alone.) If I thought I could make 50x as big a difference, I think I'd be willing to work harder. But I may be wrong; introspection is unreliable.