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Yes, we are generally very anti-aging here. It is probably one of the core parts of our culture.
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.
My response would be: my desire to continue living or die would depend on my expected future utility of continuing to live. That is, if I expected that my future utility would be negative and would continue to always be negative, I might want to die, but that is not the case.
I don't consider myself someone who is either ecstatically happy or depressed. Like you I am in the middle. However, I feel that this middle state still has an overall positive utility.
But even if I was currently suffering so much that I considered my life to be negative utility, I would still want to live if I expected things could improve in the future, which I do. If we observe the course of human civilization, life conditions have generally improved greatly for almost everyone in society over long periods of time, and will probably continue to do so if our civilization continues to advance technologically, economically, socially, etc.
Thus, I do not wish to 'only live a few more decades and then die'. Instead, I anticipate that the utility of my living could continue to increase in the far future, and might actually be significantly better than it is now.
For many people in our current time, quality of life declines as they get old, especially near the end, due to health decline, loss of social connections due to friends deaths, etc. As a result, many people 'accept' that death is necessary, as life would only keep getting worse anyway.
But if we are able to cure and reverse aging, this would no longer necessarily be the case. We may be able to reach a point where we are able to restore youth, energy, and health to people. If so, living forever would not be a state of being an old., decrepit person with no social life, but would be a return to the healthful youth state that many associate with the best years of their life!
Regarding having a purpose for one's life: If you do not feel that you have a purpose for you life, this does not mean that you would never find one in the future, especially if one were to live a very long time. For example, if you knew you were going to live forever, and you didn't have to deal with some of the sufferings and energy drains of your current life, would you then perhaps be more motivated to find such a purpose?
If you are afraid of running out of different experiences to enjoy, consider that people are continually inventing new things to be interested in. Stories, games, knowledge, shared cultural experiences, etc. People are generating new information that you can consume at a rate faster than you can consume it, and in a future more advanced world this would only become more and more true.
f you think you will get bored of everything that there is, consider that we now have ideas and experiences and potential hobbies which were almost inconceivable 100 years ago, and in a universe that allows for infinite complexity we can continue to generate them for as long as the universe lasts, for as long as there is negentropy left for us to consume.
I want to see the future, not just because I think living has positive value, but because I anticipate that value might increase in the more technologically advanced future.
I don't think I could ever run out of things to explore, but if I did, and I eventually wanted to not live anymore, I would rather make that choice myself when I reached that point, and not have it forced upon me too soon because of accumulated damage to my mitochondrial dna, loss of telomeres, accumulation of mutations, and/or whatever else is the cause of the aging process.
Past and Present
Ten years ago teenager me was hopeful. And stupid.
The world neglected aging as a disease, Aubrey had barely started spreading memes, to the point it was worth it for him to let me work remotely to help with Metuselah foundation. They had not even received that initial 1,000,000 donation from an anonymous donor. The Metuselah prize was running for less than 400,000 if I remember well. Still, I was a believer.
Now we live in the age of Larry Page's Calico, 100,000,000 dollars trying to tackle the problem, besides many other amazing initiatives, from the research paid for by Life Extension Foundation and Bill Faloon, to scholars in top universities like Steve Garan and Kenneth Hayworth fixing things from our models of aging to plastination techniques. Yet, I am much more skeptical now.
Individual risk
I am skeptical because I could not find a single individual who already used a simple technique that could certainly save you many years of healthy life. I could not even find a single individual who looked into it and decided it wasn't worth it, or was too pricy, or something of that sort.
That technique is freezing some of your cells now.
Freezing cells is not a far future hope, this is something that already exists, and has been possible for decades. The reason you would want to freeze them, in case you haven't thought of it, is that they are getting older every day, so the ones you have now are the youngest ones you'll ever be able to use.
Using these cells to create new organs is not something that may help you if medicine and technology continue progressing according to the law of accelerating returns in 10 or 30 years. We already know how to make organs out of your cells. Right now. Some organs live longer, some shorter, but it can be done - for instance to bladders - and is being done.
Hope versus Reason
Now, you'd think if there was an almost non-invasive technique already shown to work in humans that can preserve many years of your life and involves only a few trivial inconveniences - compared to changing diet or exercising for instance- the whole longevist/immortalist crowd would be lining up for it and keeping back up tissue samples all over the place.
Well I've asked them. I've asked some of the adamant researchers, and I've asked the superwealthy; I've asked the cryonicists and supplement gorgers; I've asked those who work on this 8 hour a day every day, and I've asked those who pay others to do so. I asked it mostly for selfish reasons, I saw the TEDs by Juan Enriquez and Anthony Atala and thought: hey look, clearly beneficial expected life length increase, yay! let me call someone who found this out before me - anyone, I'm probably the last one, silly me - and fix this.
I've asked them all, and I have nothing to show for it.
My takeaway lesson is: whatever it is that other people are doing to solve their own impending death, they are far from doing it rationally, and maybe most of the money and psychology involved in this whole business is about buying hope, not about staring into the void and finding out the best ways of dodging it. Maybe people are not in fact going to go all-in if the opportunity comes.
How to fix this?
Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem. I don't mean the problem of getting all longevists to freeze their cells, I mean the problem of getting them to take information from the world of science and biomedicine and applying it to themselves. To become users of the technology they are boasters of. To behave rationally in a CFAR or even homo economicus sense.
I was hoping for a grandiose idea in this last paragraph, but it didn't come. I'll go with a quote from this emotional song sung by us during last year's Secular Solstice celebration