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The_Jaded_One comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong
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If anti-aging technology was the medical standard, few would opt out of it. Many people would opt for voluntary suicide of some sort after 10^x years for x between roughly 2 and 4.
The claim that "people want to die" basically caches out to "if effective anti-ageing tech were available for free/cheap, then most voluntary suicides would just so happen to coincide with the present-day life expectancy of 80 years, or people would actually opt out of anti-ageing treatments entirely and decide to age".
Well, I find it extremely unlikely that that would be true.
Suppose that miss average woman who reads women's health magazines articles on the "top 8 natural anti-ageing solutions" today and buys expensive snake-oil anti ageing cream today is transported to the year 2200, as is Mr mid 30s metrosexual man with his "grooming arsenal". Will they use the cheap actually effective anti-ageing treatments instead of their snake oil that they spend money on today? Absolutely.
So years pass on the calendar without them ageing and they hit roughly 80. Will they suddenly decide to just kill themselves because it's been about 30 years since their kids grew up? But not 10 years or 60? It seems pretty unreasonable to me that the point of psychological exhaustion with life will happen to coincide with the point when biological bodies currently wear out.
The variance will be huge. Maybe Mr Metrosexual will just want to go clubbing, get drunk, play football, have a long series of major relationships, go on holidays, play xbox etc for 10^3 years? Why the hell not? Maybe mind modification will at some point become popular in non-nerdy circles at some point over those 1000 years? I don't think you have to be into majorly nerdy stuff to get 10^3 years of fun out of life.
You could alternatively argue that the claim that "people want to die" basically caches out to "people will eventually want to die rather than live for a literally infinite amout of time". At that point I think it basically becomes vacuous for reasons that have probably been debated ad nauseum in futurist spaces; finite dynamical system cannot evolve indefinitely without looping etc etc.
To comment on my own comment, what we are really arguing about is the form of the frequency distribution of suicide ages T_ suicide conditional on cheap, readily available anti-ageing tech.
The OP is basically saying that that distribution will be close to frequency distribution of age at death for ageing-related deaths that we see today (see page 9 of that document)
I am saying it will look nothing like that; the psychological factors determining suicide decisions will just produce loads of variance. It'll look more like a lognormal, where the log10 of T_ suicide is normally distributed with mean 3 and variance 2. Actually even that is probably wrong, but it's a pretty good starting point.