Try to visualize yourself lying in bed 5 minutes before your death. Imagine you know you're dying, set a timer, lay down, and really try to put yourself in your own shoes.
Let the panic set in, don't try to change the subject. Imagine as the seconds slip by that you struggle to reflect on all the parts of your life. 5 minutes can seem like a long time, but when it is your last few seconds they vanish quickly.
Really be in that moment. Take it seriously. Embrace the terror.
When the timer goes off none of the problems in your life will seem one-tenth as serious as before.
Apart from wanting to delete all hentai and open the door so that my nice landlord doesn’t have to deal with a two weeks corpse, I only feel free and not particularly terrified. Also miserable because nothing made enough sense, as usual. Of course in a real situation a pure biological drive would kick in, but not in this thought experiment. The last time I’ve got the most popular disease of the decade, I actually thought I may end up dead and did the two things and felt as above. Thing is, people may have very different views on life and reasons to worry about it. I for one seem to not really worry about the end (still to be explored in case of something long like cancer), probably because I don’t see it as a period of existence. The period of existence and the fuck is with it is what worries me.
Disclaimer: I’m not in debt, pain, legal/criminal trouble, not relatively poor and not suicidal.
Or just remember that, on the timescale of the universe, 50 years is almost as brief as five minutes.
Soon you'll be dead, and everyone you love, everyone you know. And everyone who knows them, and everyone who knows them, and so on on down the line. And not just dead. Forgotten. Completely.
Does that change your priorities in life at all?
I take two things away from this exercise.
1. Try to be happy in the moment.
2. Try to build things that will outlast you. Nobody remembers the names of the architects of the Roman aqueducts, but people in Italy still benefit from their work today.
1 is fine, but do take into account the future sometimes, and be ready for change. As a human you have the ability to do both. Suppose medical technology advances so that within 50 years, you no longer have to worry about dying from old age and associated issues, only random factors like getting hit by a bus (which could just as well happen tomorrow). In effect, many of those still living will no longer soon be dead. If you had an oracle from the future to confirm a particular date when this happens, does that change your priorities in life at all?
2 is most done reliably by having children. Nevertheless, Vitruvius?
Not presuming that might focus your current priorities in life if you think the tech is reasonably likely to come about before it's too late for you and be expensive for a long time, like you may want to focus more on getting a higher paying job, more frequently asking for raises, or switching companies to make more money, better controlling your spending and trying to save/invest more wisely...
There's a moral argument I could make that suggests even with high costs lots of people would get it anyway out of a sense of civilizational fairness, or a history-of-technology argument I could make about tech getting cheaper over time, but I think the argument I like best and that works on its own is just pointing out that there's a huge economic incentive to government and society more broadly to provide such technology to everyone even for free (from their individual perspective at time of treatment).
On the production side is the incentive of having healthy citizens who don't have to stop working on account of age. There's something like 16% of the population just in the US who are older than 65, something like 20% of them are still working, and some of those not working would be more than happy to go back to working but can't because of age-related issues (the final one being death). Adding some of them back to the economy would be a nice boost worth paying a lot for.
From the spending side, currently governments subsidize medical treatment for lots of people, sometimes even for everyone and even for brand new technologies like mRNA vaccines. There's a huge network of so-called insurance providers which also play into this; some things are fully covered by a plan while others are subject to more complicated rules. The dynamics of how money actually flows around and who really pays for what are complicated but society as a whole is currently paying a lot of money for the benefit of individuals. So we can expect longevity treatments to be subsidized and affordable for some people to some extent because that's the case with every other medical treatment. We can expect it to be a large number of people, trending towards everyone, and heavily subsidized if not otherwise affordable, trending towards free (from the individual perspective), because of the nature of the 'disease' (age affects everyone, like a global pandemic) and the consequences of treating it or not. We already know the consequences of not treating aging, and a lot about their expenses. So much is spent just on end-of-life care (for US Medicare alone, 13%-25% of its budget is spent during recipients' last year of life) let alone all the age-related issues leading up to that. The government or society more broadly spending money on individuals now for otherwise unaffordable rejuvenation tech can make a lot of sense when the alternative is spending a lot more money on them not too much later for unaffordable end-of-life care.
Only allow ones that are hygienic. Maybe also have a tool like DrRacket which will show you stage by stage what macros expand to (including features like not expanding common ones like "define" in Racket or "println!" in Rust). I think the latter in particular is important since debugging what code you're generating is very important.
For Emacs Lisp users M-x macrostep-expand from the macrostep package is a cool tool that allows for inline expansion/collapse of macros, step by step if there are multiple levels of macros.
There is also M-x pp-macroexpand-last-sexp that comes with Emacs. And the macroexpand function itself of course.
It’s ok to worry, it just means you care. Find people who will worry and care with you about the same things you do and it will be feel better. Partially because you’ll find more important things to worry about, and partially because talking about it will help you cope!
