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Comment by johnnyworker | Hacker News Reader

People don't like hearing it, but if you can't make peace with your mortality in 80 years, you won't manage it in 800 either. And you (whoever is reading is) isn't actually that special that you should go on forever, instead of new life coming into the world. It would be a bigger loss for you to stay, than for you to pass on, because of the implied opportunity costs of other people being born. We all think we're hot shit, but so did the people hundreds or thousands of years ago whose outlook and lifestyle makes us cringe or even puke in our mouth a little.

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This argument also extends the other direction, why not call it a day after 40 years then? You're only going to get more crochety and require more costly health interventions. And older people tend to take up more precious m2 of living space.

Sounds like an angry projection of your own value of your life. Its as if you're supposed to accept your death by 80, otherwise you'll... die and not accept it?

Very few people that die 'made peace with their morality'. Why is it a prerequisite? How do you assign value to another person's life simply based on if they made you cringe or not? That's cringe.

The whole universe runs on decay & arise of the new. From stars through chemical compounds through cells to us humans.

If the rotating cloud of gas and dust stayed forever, there would be no Earth. If the chemical compounds would be super stable, there would be no life. And so on. Systems are kept in equilibrium by this, otherwise they became unstable.

Making space for the next, better entity is a cosmological principle.

If you can't make peace with that, I am sad for you.

Carbon is very stable, so there's no life? I'm hearing 2deep4u 'philosophy' about the universe, nobody needs a condescending goofy sounding false prophet about how to think.

Carbon is created by nuclear fusion in stars. Thus, something has to perish for carbon to appear. Carbon is also mostly found as compounds in the universe, not as elemental form. Indeed, if carbon was stable as argon, there would be no life. Luckily it forms many volatile organic compounds which can be in an endless cycle of reorganizing.

It's not some deep philosophy, it's basic science.

None of those Wikipedia facts will prepare someone for death. Reciting what psychedelics are or describing color with words would yield the same result. Why would that knowledge help someone prepare for death?

Nothing can prepare a self-obsessed person for death. It is not my duty to prepare you for death or make it easy for you, it is my duty to be intellectually honest.

The tapestry of live consists of all the individual threads (lives) and if someone of those threads never ended, new threads cannot be in the space they occupy. That's trivially true. And to me that does the same to the tapestry of live what a cancer cell does to an individual body.

We already have shit like, let's say, old people starting a war of aggression over oil and profits for Halliburton et al, and then torture someone like Assange, who is still not free. And that's even though they'll only live for a few decades at most! If they knew they could potentially live hundreds or thousands of years, the gloves would come off in ways you cannot even imagine, and if that's "2deep4u" or "conspiracy theory" for you that's great, don't bother telling me.

You wrote a lot but said nothing except your own projecting of me as a self obsessed person. Your post just says accept death or I'll look down on you, because the universe and stars and assange? Lol.

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