It’s usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can’t change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass.
Absence of terror is not biting me in the ass. I am so much stronger than I used to be. I came out of that illness in a state of bliss like I’ve never felt before—and I still feel it. It isn’t just because I’m healthy, it’s also because I learned so many tricks to reduce my stress. Such as not feeling terrified of death.
You are confusing lack of fear with learned helplessness. I didn’t say that I let go of control. I said that I stopped feeling terrified. You’re confusing what I said for something else. Ask yourself this: Does feeling helpless do anything to stop your terror? No. So why would it stop mine? That is not the method by which I learned not to be terrified.
You are also confusing “making peace with death” for “accepting death”. Obviously, I don’t accept it—otherwise, why would I have made this thread?
Please try and interpret what I am actually saying.
Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good.
I see them both as neutral, but I have a wish to make a difference in the world that burns and drives me to live, and I want to experience interacting with others like me (for reasons I don’t totally understand—it is probably some kind of social instinct). For these reasons, I want to live. However, I separate my wishes from my view of whether life and death are good and bad—for the same reason I separate desire from reality. Just because I want something out of life, doesn’t mean that life will give it to me. I could get quite the opposite. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to me to see life as good or bad. Life is an opportunity for both enjoyment and suffering, and you never know which one you are going to receive next.
but it’s always interesting
You have never been bored?
Also, have you considered that a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling? It sounds like you’ve never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you. You are likely to be experiencing normalcy bias.
Okay, then I’m mistaken about what you mean by “peace with death”. What I thought it meant is “GAH I’M GOING TO DIE!! …ehn, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least all this crap would be over. And it’s easier to just let it happen than do it myself. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.”. Obviously this isn’t what you’re getting at. So… you would have signed up for cryo to avoid both death and the fear of death, but just avoiding death isn’t good enough, because death is only bad if life is good, which it might not be. Is that right?
I see them both as neutral
If you don’t see death as inherently worse than life, I don’t think I can convince you to sign up for cryo! (Well, any future in which you get revived is more likely to get you a good life than an inescapable bad one. And you could always ask Mike Darwin if you can state conditions for revival. But still, if you like anchovy and I like pineapple, I can’t convince you to order the Hawaiian pizza.)
I could point to people in awful situations who get an overwhelming drive to survive. The archetypal example would be Saw, which is about people who don’t like life all that much forced to do very painful things to survive, thus revealing a preference for life. (It’s a terrible example, because it’s fictional and the characters have good things to return to, not just life. But you get the point.) But I don’t have stats on how many switch to survivor mode and how many just sort of give up or get suicidal, and even if most people did, you could just say “So? Many people are like you. I’m not.”
You have never been bored?
Well… I get bored when I can’t focus on the shiny, because there’s something I can’t block out (noise, pain, a droning teacher) or because I don’t have enough room in my brain (and any writing material I might have) to comprehend the shiny. I also get bored when I can’t find any new things, because there’s nothing to prompt me to think about a new question (my trick was to start thinking about the psychology of boredom, but that’s exhausted by now).
a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling
Nonconstructive? Where do you think physicists come from?
More seriously, it wouldn’t be very fulfilling, but I prefer feeling nothing but pleasure to feeling nothing at all.
It sounds like you’ve never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you.
To steelman your argument, I might not remember now what it really felt like, and thus have lost any aliefs I acquired then. I distinctly remember thinking “I’m gonna eat up this plate of shit and demand seconds”, but even that wasn’t at the worst of times.
Absence of terror is not biting me in the ass. I am so much stronger than I used to be. I came out of that illness in a state of bliss like I’ve never felt before—and I still feel it. It isn’t just because I’m healthy, it’s also because I learned so many tricks to reduce my stress. Such as not feeling terrified of death.
You are confusing lack of fear with learned helplessness. I didn’t say that I let go of control. I said that I stopped feeling terrified. You’re confusing what I said for something else. Ask yourself this: Does feeling helpless do anything to stop your terror? No. So why would it stop mine? That is not the method by which I learned not to be terrified.
You are also confusing “making peace with death” for “accepting death”. Obviously, I don’t accept it—otherwise, why would I have made this thread?
Please try and interpret what I am actually saying.
I see them both as neutral, but I have a wish to make a difference in the world that burns and drives me to live, and I want to experience interacting with others like me (for reasons I don’t totally understand—it is probably some kind of social instinct). For these reasons, I want to live. However, I separate my wishes from my view of whether life and death are good and bad—for the same reason I separate desire from reality. Just because I want something out of life, doesn’t mean that life will give it to me. I could get quite the opposite. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to me to see life as good or bad. Life is an opportunity for both enjoyment and suffering, and you never know which one you are going to receive next.
You have never been bored?
Also, have you considered that a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling? It sounds like you’ve never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you. You are likely to be experiencing normalcy bias.
Okay, then I’m mistaken about what you mean by “peace with death”. What I thought it meant is “GAH I’M GOING TO DIE!! …ehn, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least all this crap would be over. And it’s easier to just let it happen than do it myself. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.”. Obviously this isn’t what you’re getting at. So… you would have signed up for cryo to avoid both death and the fear of death, but just avoiding death isn’t good enough, because death is only bad if life is good, which it might not be. Is that right?
If you don’t see death as inherently worse than life, I don’t think I can convince you to sign up for cryo! (Well, any future in which you get revived is more likely to get you a good life than an inescapable bad one. And you could always ask Mike Darwin if you can state conditions for revival. But still, if you like anchovy and I like pineapple, I can’t convince you to order the Hawaiian pizza.)
I could point to people in awful situations who get an overwhelming drive to survive. The archetypal example would be Saw, which is about people who don’t like life all that much forced to do very painful things to survive, thus revealing a preference for life. (It’s a terrible example, because it’s fictional and the characters have good things to return to, not just life. But you get the point.) But I don’t have stats on how many switch to survivor mode and how many just sort of give up or get suicidal, and even if most people did, you could just say “So? Many people are like you. I’m not.”
Well… I get bored when I can’t focus on the shiny, because there’s something I can’t block out (noise, pain, a droning teacher) or because I don’t have enough room in my brain (and any writing material I might have) to comprehend the shiny. I also get bored when I can’t find any new things, because there’s nothing to prompt me to think about a new question (my trick was to start thinking about the psychology of boredom, but that’s exhausted by now).
Nonconstructive? Where do you think physicists come from?
More seriously, it wouldn’t be very fulfilling, but I prefer feeling nothing but pleasure to feeling nothing at all.
To steelman your argument, I might not remember now what it really felt like, and thus have lost any aliefs I acquired then. I distinctly remember thinking “I’m gonna eat up this plate of shit and demand seconds”, but even that wasn’t at the worst of times.