The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain (theguardian.com)

My SO worked at a nursing home which had several elderly with dementia cry out they just wanted to die all day long, day after day.

Yet they got their flu shots and got treated for any infections they might get. This went on for the two years my SO worked there.

My dad had cancer that spread to his lungs, and then he got pneumonia. The day after being hospitalized, he asked the doctor if it was a chance he'd ever get home and they admitted that no, that was not very likely. Later that day he asked them to turn off the oxygen, which they did after confirming his wish. He passed peacefully a few hours later.

I was so glad he was given the opportunity to make his choice, and that the doctors respected it.

Sure, I lost some months with my dad, but he'd be in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. I hope I get to make a similar choice when that time comes.

People are different. For example, my fear of death is in the from existential dread. It's an occasional thing.

We should probably try harder to make people healthier in general. Much of the frailty of the elderly can be avoided with rigorous exercise. Maybe heart disease and dementia doesn't have to be your fate. I don't know how much longer people will be able to live if they optimize the hell out of their biomarkers.

But I do know...I don't want to be in pain and frail when I die. The best way to do that is making health my priority.

I fear for the people I would leave behind, mainly my wife and two little children, if I was gone today, it would seriously impact all their lives.

Similarly, I don’t really fear my death, I fear the death of others.

This sort of utilitarian "unit of suffering" metric has never made much sense to me. 1B people die in a given decade, each perceives or experiences some amount of suffering, so we have say 2B units of suffering, 2 units per person on average.

Is anything better or worse if 2B people die instead of 1B with the same aggregate amount of suffering? Average suffering reduced by half! What about 100,000 people instead of 1B? Those people presumably die horrific, painful, suffering deaths but now there a lot more people alive. Is that better or worse?

I agree with your take. Very long story, while my family doesn't talk about feelings, we're pretty good at talking about end of life.

Separately, some years ago spent a good amount of time listening to what Atul Gawande thought about medicine and doctors and dying. He wrote Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and there's a Frontline documentary (Being Mortal) about his experience and his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQhI3Jb7vMg. I've not yet read the book.

> I don’t fear death, it is natural. I fear the suffering society will put me through when I’m old and ill, because they can’t cope with death.

Assisted death--one with dignity--is rare recent development about which I'm genuinely and wholeheartedly happy.

What unsettles me--as rational as I think I'm--is the thought of being born again (duh!). I lead a very comfortable life, but far from "perfect". I can say I'm content. What are the odds that I'll be content in my next life? How likely is it that I'll be born in the right country, to good parents, follow the right religion, and have a brain wired in the right way to make a decent living? I'm not hopeful. So, I've "decided" that I want to be a rock in all my next lives. No emotions, no feelings, no struggle, no pain, no indignation. Just a fricking rock.

I would welcome death, but I don't seek it out. Life is generally miserable. It wouldn't be that bad if I got hit by a bus on the way into work.

I think you do fear death, given that you plan to live until it is physically impossible for you to do so painlessly. If you don't fear death, an easy and reliable way to avoid suffering in your old age is to painlessly commit suicide right now. But be aware that we treat people who don't express a preference for staying alive as having a serious mental illness worth locking them up for.

Fear of death is not just natural, it is the most fundamental instinct of any creature besides reproduction. Those who don't have it, don't last long. Perhaps society's attitudes towards it could profitably be improved, but don't make out like it's an irrational personality flaw.

Being "natural" doesnt mean anything on relation to fear. Being eaten alive by lions is 100% natural too. Death is inevitable. So there is little to gain from being too afraid of it, but i would never suggest that anyone not fear the unknown. That fear is what has kept us alive and evolving. The fear is natural.

There is nothing more natural than fear of death itself

Fear of death can be healthy (esp when one is young)! That said, courage is the first virtue, don't pay attention to people who complain about its signalling

You can’t honestly say you don’t fear death until you face it directly. Tell someone they’ll be executed tomorrow, then ask if they fear death, some people lose their minds when told they’re terminally ill. It’s not as simple as just saying, “I don’t fear death.”

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Overworked nurses and suicide booth technicians on night shift will greatly dampen this utopia where dignified death isn’t usurped by lower-cost-at-all-costs reality.

Idealism can cause so much suffering in this way.

When I reach that point in my life I’ll probably just put a bullet in my own head. And I don’t want a fancy burial or cremation… toss me in the ground and plant a tree on top of me.

Death itself is fine, but the miserable (and often long) time before that much less so

Humans don't have a self-preservation instinct. Instead, like all life, they properly have a reproductive instinct. We only have self-preservation instincts as far as is necessary to make reproduction possible. In an age where many are deliberately "child free" it might start to look as if terror management is the name of the game, but that's just an artifact of a bunch of other neuroses that have taken hold.

I need to die so that there's room for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

My dad chose hospice over dialysis and constant potassium problems. I feel you there.

The quote that really has stuck with me was also from Pratchett:

"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"

This caught me in two ways:

1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.

But moreso:

2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.

Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.

His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.

Terrifying.

I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.

Thanks for your comment. Wishing you the best, especially a life free of pain.

You're a warlord man! Atheist or not, I'll be honored to meet you on the other side. I wish you many blessings inbetween and appreciate the courage.

I'm not too confident that mortality will be cured this century. Even if we cure some of the big targets (dementia, muscle wasting and cancer come to mind) there will inevitably be a long tail of problems.

If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.

I'm sure various scifi authors have covered this topic to death (pun intended). But something about eternal life just feels so empty to me.

And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.

> Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death

We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death.

I agree, likely the first immortal person has already been born. Perhaps even large swaths of the population are already effectively immortal, but they just don't know it yet.

Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires.

I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.

Death from aging maybe. But as we saw, the next most dangerous things are each other and the systems that push toward people to death.

Psychological health and well being are going to be key to resolving the problem of peaceful coexistence between humans.

Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..

We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more?

As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.

If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.

Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.

Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.

If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?

Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.

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