There is a big difference between wanting to be able to live forever and wanting to be forced to live forever. Once you make that distinction, there is no problem with wanting the former, but not the latter. Right now we don’t have the choice, and that is genuinely bad. Life wouldn’t immediately lose all value if you could live and be healthy for a few centuries instead of less than one. The function for the value of life vs age is not that simple. In some ways, as long as I can continue to grow as a person, I can place my experiences in an ever-larger context and derive more value and meaning from them.
That said, it also isn’t necessary to fear death in order to grasp that individual opportunities are valuable and fleeting. For the past 3 years I have been traveling full time in an RV. I stay in a place maybe a week or three, then leave. This really brings into focus what I want to spend my limited time on, in a way that has nothing to do with death. I can come back any time I want—plan to stay a month or two if I choose to! - but the individual things I wanted to do may be gone, or it may not be the right season for them, etc. etc. Even when I’m back in my home state, I find myself doing things I never bothered doing when I lived there permanently. I see friends and family more often, and for longer spans of time. I visit sights I knew were there but never went to. I talk to strangers I would have ignored. I hope and expect that I will maintain this when I no longer live nomadically.
In other words, you seem to be assuming that because we use death as a source of urgency and a way to structure our lives, that we would have a hard time finding something to replace it with if it were gone. This does not follow, and I don’t think it’s currently true or anywhere close to true. Even if it eventually becomes true, and the ideal length of life turns out to be finite, well, it’ll be a pretty interesting journey to discover that, no? And maybe when we do, we’ll be in a position to end our meaningless lives in stasis instead of death, just in case someone else figures out something we missed, and wants to show us.
There is a big difference between wanting to be able to live forever and wanting to be forced to live forever. Once you make that distinction, there is no problem with wanting the former, but not the latter. Right now we don’t have the choice, and that is genuinely bad. Life wouldn’t immediately lose all value if you could live and be healthy for a few centuries instead of less than one. The function for the value of life vs age is not that simple. In some ways, as long as I can continue to grow as a person, I can place my experiences in an ever-larger context and derive more value and meaning from them.
That said, it also isn’t necessary to fear death in order to grasp that individual opportunities are valuable and fleeting. For the past 3 years I have been traveling full time in an RV. I stay in a place maybe a week or three, then leave. This really brings into focus what I want to spend my limited time on, in a way that has nothing to do with death. I can come back any time I want—plan to stay a month or two if I choose to! - but the individual things I wanted to do may be gone, or it may not be the right season for them, etc. etc. Even when I’m back in my home state, I find myself doing things I never bothered doing when I lived there permanently. I see friends and family more often, and for longer spans of time. I visit sights I knew were there but never went to. I talk to strangers I would have ignored. I hope and expect that I will maintain this when I no longer live nomadically.
In other words, you seem to be assuming that because we use death as a source of urgency and a way to structure our lives, that we would have a hard time finding something to replace it with if it were gone. This does not follow, and I don’t think it’s currently true or anywhere close to true. Even if it eventually becomes true, and the ideal length of life turns out to be finite, well, it’ll be a pretty interesting journey to discover that, no? And maybe when we do, we’ll be in a position to end our meaningless lives in stasis instead of death, just in case someone else figures out something we missed, and wants to show us.