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jlp comments on Can we decrease the risk of worse-than-death outcomes following brain preservation? - Less Wrong
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Uh, plenty of born are born into worse-than-death situations already, at least by our standards, yet they generally make a go of their lives instead of committing suicide. We call many of them our "ancestors."
I get a chuckle out of all the contrived excuses people come up with for not having their brains preserved. I really have to laugh at "But I won't know anyone in Future World!" We go through our lives meeting people every day we've never met before, and humans have good heuristics for deciding which strangers we should get to know better and add to our social circles. I had that experience the other day from meeting a married couple involved in anti-aging research, and I got the sense that they felt that way about me, despite my social inadequacies in some areas.
As for revival in a sucky Future World, well, John Milton said it pretty good:
"The mind is its own place, and in it self/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n "
Besides, if you have radical life extension and some freedom of action, you'll have the time and resources to find situations more to your liking. For example, suppose you wake up in Neoreactionary Future World, and you long for the Enlightenment sort of world you remembered in the 21st Century. Well, find your place in the current hierarchy and wait a few centuries. The Enlightenment might come around for a second go.
Can you elaborate? Your statement seems self-contradictory. By definition, situations "worse than death" would be the ones in which people prefer to kill themselves rather than continue living.
In the context of the original post, I take "worse-than-death" to mean (1) enough misery that a typical person would rather not continue living, and (2) an inability to commit suicide. While I agree many of our ancestors have had a rough time, relatively few of them have had it that hard.
I'm guessing the author meant that the ancestral environment was one that many of us now would consider "worse than death" considering our higher standards of expectation for standard of living, whereas our ancestors were just perfectly happy to live in cold caves and die from unknown diseases and whatnot.
I guess the question is, how much higher are our expectations now, really? And how much better do we really have it now, really?
Some things, like material comfort and feelings of material security, have obviously gotten better, but others, such as positional social status anxiety and lack of warm social conviviality, have arguably gotten worse.