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Mitchell_Porter comments on Abandoning Cached Selves to Re-Write My Source Code Partially, I've Become Unstable - Less Wrong Discussion
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Transhumanist altruism - e.g. the attempt to make life extension possible for everyone - burns out when you see that most people don't want this "help". In the beginning it's not a pure self-disinterested altruism anyway. It starts with individuals who want immortality for themselves and who want to share it with other people. Eventually it dawns on them that other people are living with a completely different sense of expectations and priorities; resigned to their finitude in the here and now, or just hoping to get their personal eternity handed to them by a higher power in another reality.
It sounds like this happened to you. Your values and your ideas of what's possible make you a member of an extreme cognitive minority, but you were living as if other people share those values and ideas, or would naturally adopt them once they were exposed to them. That hasn't happened, you've woken up to the fact that something doesn't add up, and you've become more conscious of yourself. What you haven't done yet is to "theorize" your own difference from other people - i.e. develop a model of the cognitive majorities around you, and how and why you are different from them. Are you just inherently different from them, and always will be, or are your differences more the result of unusual personal circumstances?
In what you write, I don't see much interest in that last issue yet. You're still coming to terms with the possibility of living just for yourself; you're detaching from ideas in which you have been fruitlessly invested, so that you can come to know your own mind again; the last thing you want to do right now is to become abstractly preoccupied with other people again. But in time, you may want to resume your old activities but on a bigger scale, if you are willing to take the step of being someone who plants new ideas and values in other people. 99+% of the human race doesn't seek longevity; 99+% of the human race doesn't spontaneously join the campaign for longevity when it appears; but if you were to seriously shoulder the burden of, say, being the founder of a Brazilian Longevity Party, then you would find allies, supporters, and followers.
The magnitude of your success would depend partly on how well you understood the facts of political life and of life in general. You could start something like that, and still have it end up as nothing but a political sect with a few dozen members, if it was pursued wrongly. But if it was grounded in realities that are happening anyway, like the discovery and diffusion of advanced medical techniques, and the general increase in life expectancy, then it would have much greater potential. Similarly, if you were concerned not just with longevity but with singularity, Brazil is a power, it has all the ingredients to eventually create a singularity itself even if the rest of the world disappeared. There is a technical elite in your country and you could engage with them; but it would require a willingness to also engage with their outlook of worldly patriotic selfishness, rather than effective transhumanist altruism.
Christian altruism - e.g. the attempt to make heaven possible for everyone - burns out when you see that most people don't want this "help". In the beginning it's not a pure self-disinterested altruism anyway. It starts with individuals who want immortality for themselves and who want to share it with other people. Eventually it dawns on them that other people are living with a completely different sense of expectations and priorities; resigned to their finitude in the here and now, or just hoping to get their personal eternity handed to them by technology in the material world.
Are you sure?
The guy is dedicated to cryonics and "existential risk", among other things. Those are extremely uncommon interests, so just in terms of cognitive content, he is clearly in a minority.
On the other hand, it could be a bit ostentatious to claim to be a "cognitive minority" just because you believe uncommon things. To me, "cognitive minority" suggests that your process of thought is unusual, not just its contents. (Although the two aren't completely separate; unusual cognitive content can have consequences for process, if you regularly end up arriving at unusual conclusions because of your unusual premises.)
Now maybe the point of your religious/transhumanist analogy is that the "burnout of a transhumanist altruist" is not as unique as it sounds; that it's just a secular manifestation of a weariness with saving the world and spreading the good news, that might affect anyone with utopian or transcendent aspirations that society refuses to support. I will concede this much, that the same feeling might be felt by an exhausted Christian evangelist, or by an exhausted Marxist evangelist.
But the basis of the specific hopes does make a difference. The Christian hope is based on emotion, coincidence, a sense that the soul is distinct from the body, rumors of miracles, and faith in authority. The Marxist hope is based on the excitement of revolution, belief in progress, the theory of history as class struggle, and optimism about the nature of life in high-tech collectivist societies. The transhumanist hope is based on science and technology. In its individual flavors it may be naively optimistic, naive about politics, wrong about human psychology, wrong about specific scenarios. But the progress of science and technology is giving us a lot of reason to think that something like rejuvenation is materially possible. I can't say the same for the Second Coming of Christ, or the moneyless harmony of the Venus Project.
That's what transhumanists like to tell themselves, much like Marxists talking about "scientific socialism", or some brands of Christians with their "creation science" and "intelligent design".
Transhumanists are the spiritual grandchildren of the sixteenth century (edited) alchemists who tried to make the Philosopher's stone and the Homunculus. They can dress it with scientific-sounding language and speculative technology, but the irrational cognitive processes that underlay the formation and maintenance of such beliefs are the same of other religious or religious-like belief systems.
Sure, but that falls in the scope of medical science: My grandma had walking difficulties because her knee had worn out with age. So her knee was replaced by an artificial one, and now she walks like when she was younger. Is she a transhuman cyborg?
When a medical procedure of proven effectiveness becomes available, it is applied without much fuss. This has nothing to do with freezing corpses and dreaming of brain uploads and godlike AIs.
We have space travel, robots, instant communication with the other side of the world, instant access to most art and most writing ever produced, weapons based on the reactions that power the stars, systems of wires that transmit an invisible energy that makes our mechanical slaves operate, face transplants, X-rays, cloning... and you think those people were irrational?