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advancedatheist 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.
The politically incorrect Manosphere blogs discuss how women who reject traditional roles for themselves, namely, early marriage and family formation, seem to hit a "wall" in their later 20's as they realize that men will stop paying attention to them (as their fertility crashes) in favor of younger crops of women. The women who miss the marriage and childbirth window altogether wind up living alone with their cats, and they seem to lack much meaning and purpose in life because they neglected doing what women evolved to do.
I suppose if you could rejuvenate these women, restock their eggs and make them fertile like 18 year old girls again, they might find a renewed zest for life. Only I doubt that because I don't see how you can de-experience them psychologically to undo the damage from having all those sterile sexual encounters the first time around.
So, yes, I do find it plausible that most women probably lack the inner resources to handle radical life extension, given the limited nature of their lives under current circumstances.
be careful: there's a decent amount of variance in how people respond to things. Maybe some people are "damaged" by having a lot of non-procreative sexual encounters. Maybe this applies particularly to women. But I highly doubt that it's a uniform effect.
Do you seriously think there'll be a big gender difference? BTW I am definitely not particularly politically correct with respect to gender politics and I've read the blogs you mention, but as a rationalist I am not sure you're on sound footing here. Yes, men and women are different (on average!) psychologically.
But if women didn't physically age and men didn't physically age why would the average woman deal with immortality by committing suicide more quickly than the average man? Is there any contemporary analogue of a woman having a family and suddenly being biologically 18 again that we can generalize from? I suspect you could look at women from affluent backgrounds who got pregnant at a young age and see what they did in, e.g. their late 30s. Sill, that's considered "old" by society, and there is a decent amount of sexism and sexist taboo which kind of shoehorns such people in some ways, though this is decreasing.
On the other side men in their 40s and 50s definitely seem to want to be 20 again. We call it a mid-life crisis!
Basically I think you are extrapolating into fairly unknown territory, and what I do think we can extrapolate seems to point to just a lot of variability based on personality, life-philosophy, etc.
Though I suppose the fact that "mid life crisis/buying a sports car and a leather jacket" is associated with men does count as evidence in favour of your hypothesis.