Thanks. Interesting. I think one issue is maintaining the will to live indefinitely, not getting tired of life, of cumulative stress, basically anti-depresison. I think it would be more useful to focus on fixing that, and when everybody totally wants to live on and on and on, then that generates motivation to throw more resources on anti-aging. Without that, there is a lesser motivation, as people who are not very happy, like myself, will not support it vigorously. Senescence is an acceptable, honorable, non-shameful way of slow suicide, suitable if you are only lightly depressed. You can get old and die without ever having to admit you are depressed or you want to die. If life is extended, you basically either have to endure it longer, or have to own up to, admit defeat, admit you fail at life, and choose suicide. Neither are very attractive options. This is why I recommend fixing the will to live i.e. light depression first.
Fixing the will to live is not going to be easy because it goes against the logic of evolution (which does not care if you are depressed or dead after you have reproduced) and much of human biology. You essentially want to keep people in a constant “expecting rewards” mindset, biologically speaking. In a look forward to tomorrow because something cool with happen mindset. However, it is likely that would lead to some kind of burnout, like, dopamine receptors becoming desensitized from over-use or something like that. Fixing this would be a major brain rewiring.
Hm. This was eye opening enough that I felt like commenting for the first time in a year. I’ve known for a while about people being too despaired to desire living on, but this puts it under a new perspective.
Most importantly it helps explain the huge discrepancy between how instrumentally important staying alive and able is for anyone who has any goal at all (barring some fringe cases), and how little most people do to plan and organize themselves in order to avoid aging and dying, even as it is reasonably expected to be unavoidable with our current means.
What you said suggests maybe another, little explored—to my knowledge—by life-extensionists set of strategies to sustain effective life extension projects—as generalized public acceptance and backing is still very much nowhere as far as it should be.
I have this impression that anti-aging and anti-death on LW is a general extension of that kind of culture in America that 50 and 60 year old still exercise and not smoke and drink little because they still expect a lot of happiness rolling in to worth it. At least this is the culture I generally glean from e.g. The New York times who seem to always have some fad diet and exercise and seem to at least pay lip service to health. They are the kind of people who would NOT find a joke like “A real mans six course dinner is one pizza, five beers” funny, which also suggests that this culture drifted quite afar from blue-collar values, I think it is the white-collarization of American society that ultimately created it. While I was strongly influenced by the culture of the less developed parts of Europe where that joke would be funny, mores are still on blue-collar levels, it is OK to drink and smoke yourself to death at 60 because by that your kids can make a living so you no longer owe much duty to them, and you lived for discharging your duties anyway and not for fun. Or, the fun was precisely in things getting drunk with friends.
What missing from this view is of course the third option, precisely the option that seems most prevalent on LW: living not for discharging duties nor for “partying” but for pursuing personally selected goals. I think the idea of personal selected goals requires a culture or attitude that is individualistic, and even egalitarian, where individuals are expected to be autonomous enough to find goals and empowered enough to have a chance at them. In other words, a political culture where people are more “association members” and less “subjects”. I think it also requires an economic environment with significant discretionary incomes that worrying about bills is no big deal, and people can expect to make a living out of interesting jobs, not simply taking anything that pays the bills.
I mentioned collars, because all this cultural background difference I describe is not that kind of cultural difference that is say between America and Japan, it is a difference in time, not space: almost everything I wrote as my experience would be entirely relevant to an American plumber in 1925 or 1950, not sure exactly when. In other words, it is more about being on different levels on the Maslow pyramid, really the difference is here that the white-collarization of American society is a collective climb upwards on that pyramid which explains more or less everything about this. Longevity is a high Maslow pyramid level desire.
One perfect example of of this climbing of the Maslow pyramid is how women, feminists refer to work as empowering careers. To a blue-collar culture, it is very strange—they see work as torture (French: travail), a necessary evil done for survival. Actually this is one of the best signals and predictors of Maslow level and longevity expectations IMHO.
Thanks. Interesting. I think one issue is maintaining the will to live indefinitely, not getting tired of life, of cumulative stress, basically anti-depresison. I think it would be more useful to focus on fixing that, and when everybody totally wants to live on and on and on, then that generates motivation to throw more resources on anti-aging. Without that, there is a lesser motivation, as people who are not very happy, like myself, will not support it vigorously. Senescence is an acceptable, honorable, non-shameful way of slow suicide, suitable if you are only lightly depressed. You can get old and die without ever having to admit you are depressed or you want to die. If life is extended, you basically either have to endure it longer, or have to own up to, admit defeat, admit you fail at life, and choose suicide. Neither are very attractive options. This is why I recommend fixing the will to live i.e. light depression first.
Fixing the will to live is not going to be easy because it goes against the logic of evolution (which does not care if you are depressed or dead after you have reproduced) and much of human biology. You essentially want to keep people in a constant “expecting rewards” mindset, biologically speaking. In a look forward to tomorrow because something cool with happen mindset. However, it is likely that would lead to some kind of burnout, like, dopamine receptors becoming desensitized from over-use or something like that. Fixing this would be a major brain rewiring.
I recommend reading the sequences, if you haven’t already. In particular, the fun theory sequence discusses exactly these issues.
Upvoted for suggesting a specific sequence.
Hm. This was eye opening enough that I felt like commenting for the first time in a year. I’ve known for a while about people being too despaired to desire living on, but this puts it under a new perspective.
Most importantly it helps explain the huge discrepancy between how instrumentally important staying alive and able is for anyone who has any goal at all (barring some fringe cases), and how little most people do to plan and organize themselves in order to avoid aging and dying, even as it is reasonably expected to be unavoidable with our current means.
What you said suggests maybe another, little explored—to my knowledge—by life-extensionists set of strategies to sustain effective life extension projects—as generalized public acceptance and backing is still very much nowhere as far as it should be.
I have this impression that anti-aging and anti-death on LW is a general extension of that kind of culture in America that 50 and 60 year old still exercise and not smoke and drink little because they still expect a lot of happiness rolling in to worth it. At least this is the culture I generally glean from e.g. The New York times who seem to always have some fad diet and exercise and seem to at least pay lip service to health. They are the kind of people who would NOT find a joke like “A real mans six course dinner is one pizza, five beers” funny, which also suggests that this culture drifted quite afar from blue-collar values, I think it is the white-collarization of American society that ultimately created it. While I was strongly influenced by the culture of the less developed parts of Europe where that joke would be funny, mores are still on blue-collar levels, it is OK to drink and smoke yourself to death at 60 because by that your kids can make a living so you no longer owe much duty to them, and you lived for discharging your duties anyway and not for fun. Or, the fun was precisely in things getting drunk with friends.
What missing from this view is of course the third option, precisely the option that seems most prevalent on LW: living not for discharging duties nor for “partying” but for pursuing personally selected goals. I think the idea of personal selected goals requires a culture or attitude that is individualistic, and even egalitarian, where individuals are expected to be autonomous enough to find goals and empowered enough to have a chance at them. In other words, a political culture where people are more “association members” and less “subjects”. I think it also requires an economic environment with significant discretionary incomes that worrying about bills is no big deal, and people can expect to make a living out of interesting jobs, not simply taking anything that pays the bills.
I mentioned collars, because all this cultural background difference I describe is not that kind of cultural difference that is say between America and Japan, it is a difference in time, not space: almost everything I wrote as my experience would be entirely relevant to an American plumber in 1925 or 1950, not sure exactly when. In other words, it is more about being on different levels on the Maslow pyramid, really the difference is here that the white-collarization of American society is a collective climb upwards on that pyramid which explains more or less everything about this. Longevity is a high Maslow pyramid level desire.
One perfect example of of this climbing of the Maslow pyramid is how women, feminists refer to work as empowering careers. To a blue-collar culture, it is very strange—they see work as torture (French: travail), a necessary evil done for survival. Actually this is one of the best signals and predictors of Maslow level and longevity expectations IMHO.