This closely pattern-matches ableist attitudes like “$disability is worse than death!”, where people with $disability shrug and say “Enh, we’re good. We can’t do $thing, but we can’t be knitting prodigies either—and neither can you, and you’re not whining about it all that much.”
Admittedly, losing abilities is no fun, and mental abilities are genuinely good and important (though how much is not that clear—people with Down’s are happier), and aging then dying is strictly worse than just dying… but still, scarier than death?
Certain forms of disability scare me more than death does. They might or might not turn out, after the fact (heaven forfend), to be so awful that I would rather die than continue living with them; but scariness-wise? Oh yes. A smaller set of disabilities, mostly mental ones, seem to me to be so horrendous relative to my values that even if I think about them in a way that renders fear per se moot, I think I’d rather die than suffer them.
O_O
This closely pattern-matches ableist attitudes like “$disability is worse than death!”, where people with $disability shrug and say “Enh, we’re good. We can’t do $thing, but we can’t be knitting prodigies either—and neither can you, and you’re not whining about it all that much.”
Admittedly, losing abilities is no fun, and mental abilities are genuinely good and important (though how much is not that clear—people with Down’s are happier), and aging then dying is strictly worse than just dying… but still, scarier than death?
I’d interpret “old age” as “(neurological [and therefore identity] breakdown as a result of common diseases from) old age”.
Certain forms of disability scare me more than death does. They might or might not turn out, after the fact (heaven forfend), to be so awful that I would rather die than continue living with them; but scariness-wise? Oh yes. A smaller set of disabilities, mostly mental ones, seem to me to be so horrendous relative to my values that even if I think about them in a way that renders fear per se moot, I think I’d rather die than suffer them.