#re: the medical system: without insurance the monthly dosage of one of my medications costs about 4x my rent

[senadimell]

Re: the death post, is it wrong to ask why you see it as a bad ideal for society to aspire to? I agree that coming to peace with death is healthy for individuals but I don’t think we should have that attitude as a society. The ideal of immortality, of being physically ~26 forever, seems a noble one to aspire to. Our deaths should ideally be under our control. That they aren’t is probably not changing in the near future (hence the need to come to peace with it as individuals) but it doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy imo. Plus as an ideal it doesn’t seem that impossible in comparison to others, we have real life examples of immortal organisms, we have no indication that it goes against the laws of physics (unlike, say, teleportation).

Sorry for the long delay in answering @urupotter. It's not wrong to ask, but the answer is complicated because it's deeply personal and touches on my moral convictions, so it's emotionally taxing to discuss. Also, my religious upbringing likely plays a part in how I see things and I don't expect that to be universal.

The short of it is this: I cannot imagine a society that seeks immortality that is not deeply, deeply ableist.

I live in a country that used to be renowned for its eugenics and those attitudes didn't go away after the second world war, we just focused it on health and beauty and perfect babies and anti-miscegenation.

Literally, there's a supreme court ruling still on the books that upholds state-decided compulsory sterilization. Legally, it's just fine for the state to decide who's allowed to reproduce because "three generations of imbeciles is enough."

I already live in an ableist society, and I live in a society that's terrified of and ignorant towards death. We are phobic towards aging and disease. We bury and hide those things. Parents go to live in nursing homes when they're sick and unless someone dies in hospice in your home or you were in an accident or the military or work in hospice or mortuaries etc., most people have literally not seen an unembalmed corpse. You also don't see fragile, elderly people in public, and multigenerational households are rare.

I don't know if I'm communicating this well, but for us to pursue immortality, I have a really hard time believing we could do that without denigrating mortality, aging, and disability.

So if we have a system where those things are looked down on, then we think about who has access to life-extending treatment, and that's where class comes in. Even if we could technically come up with something that makes you immortal, I highly doubt that everyone would have equal access to it. So you end up with an amplified version of the society we live in now, where youth and beauty is praised and age is feared or disparaged, and even more than now, access to beauty and immortality is tied to wealth and power. (ageism in hiring is already a huge problem!)

Do I think it's a good use of societal resources? Not really, no. Even if we put aside all of the problems for the policymakers, I think there's other things I'd rather medical researchers be focusing on.

Now, there are definitely age-related things that I think are great to focus on fixing. Coming up for some ways to get rid of arthritis = great! would make lots of people's lives easier! Getting rid of Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia? Absolutely! While we're at it, let's cure Parkinson's.

It might seem contradictory that I'm totally find with finding cures for degenerative diseases but am not okay with treating death, perhaps the ultimate degenerative disease. But I guess that's the thing, I don't see death as a disease, and I don't see disability as inherently bad (some kinds of disability are just bad—there is nothing redeeming about migraines. Or Alzheimer's). I'm not sure how to describe why those two goals feel different, but it just seems like hubris to pursue eternal youth, whereas stopping specific kinds of suffering seems noble.

Here's where I get into the fuzzy philosophical side of things. I think aging and death have a whole lot to teach us as a society. I think we learn compassion through caregiving. I think we learn humility and patience. I think there's tremendous wisdom to be found in aging and dealing with aging and death. I don't think we should go around inflicting it, obviously, but I do think that we have so much to learn.

This is the part where I'm speaking purely personally, and don't expect others to have to agree with me, but I don't think in a perfect world we would have control over our deaths. This has to do with what I understand the purpose of life to be.

(I'd rather not get into a public discussion on assisted suicide; the short of it is that I'm not blanket opposed to it but I think it's a very very delicate issue and I lack the life experience to know if it's something I would ever pursue, so I'm not the one who should be setting policy)

And maybe this is silly or morbid or crass, but tbh it does give me a sense of relief to know that we all die because there are some sucky people in the world with a lot of power and money and I don't think it would be a better world if they were immortal.

So in conclusion, I think it's actually worse for a society as a whole to be pursuing immortality (as opposed to individuals) because of all the attitudes that go around with it. Also, there's enough preventable deaths to go round and I think we should focus on that.