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Victor's essay


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#1 VictorBjoerk

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Posted 13 May 2009 - 01:15 PM


My mind has decided to be creative today, so I wrote a short essay, feel free to criticize and comment. Please remember that English is not my native language...........









Death doesn't solve any problems




Essay by Victor Bjoerk




In Sweden, a typical wealthy European country, we have a unique history of good recordkeeping since roughly 250 years ago. The central bureau of statistics keeps track on just about anything from human height to cheese consumption.

As in most of what we call "civilized" parts of the world we have a really low infant mortality, Actually it is so low that 997 out of 1000 babies will celebrate their 5th birthday.

The life expectancy is also high by international standards, 79 years for men and 83 for women, but the gains for each year are getting smaller and smaller.

The "natural" aging process is in fact so dangerous that you have a probability of dying between 80 and 81 that is over 500 times the odds of dying between 20-21.

The Swedish government is famous for constantly warning about the threats and dangers of just about everything, just look at the recent example of ZnO in sunscreens. Also they constantly give health messages to the public on how we should improve our lifestyle.

Despite this it seems that we are stuck with a "death wall" between 80 and 85. Actually 40% of Swedish people will die between their 80th and 90th birthday of aging.

This is in part a good scenario since we consider it better to live to 80 than 30, but we are still stuck with this "death wall" of the typical age-related disease that overlap lifestyle-related disease.

Many people are deathists and supporters of death through aging, they think terminal age-related illnesses are acceptable as a part of life. Some even describe it as something beautiful and that the torturous aging process brings more "value to the youthful years, and makes people less egoistical" and that people should just accept getting frail and sick.

However beautiful some people may think the aging process is one things remain clear, The amount of resources the elderly care costs is going up to such astronomical levels in Sweden that we soon won't be able to cope with caring for all the people with long-term age-related diseases. Producing more children is one solution people are talking about,( like they would want to work in the elderly care)

A philosophical question I would like to ask deathists is the following….



Is life in the form as you are currently really such a worthless thing that you need to die to replace it with the eventual possibility of life in another dimension to reach "peace"?



In the world of today we are on the border of being able to extend human life by a large factor, perhaps even indefinitely, and more and more people view the defeat of aging as realistic, perhaps even in a few decades. I've asked many people the question if they would want to extend their lifespan and surprisingly often the answer is no because they think it's so natural and beautiful to die of old age although they of course does not deny the excruciatingly horrible manner which aging often kill people in.



In our mindset many of us are sticking to the, upon when I'm thinking about it, rather grim idea of "generational change". As one may see it is something that goes through society in many aspects.

Children are constantly hailed to the skies because they are viewed as "the future" and old people are treated badly because of the subconscious stupid thinking that they shall soon die to make room for new generations. (Obviously it is not like that in the Japanese culture for example.)

Recently I felt very disturbed when watching a demonstration against the closure of a school in my local area, Many children, followed by a few teachers where marching across the town passing the town hall, with banderolls reading "remember that WE are the future, NOT you".

The idea of generational change is inhuman; it is built up for discrimination as it is today where old people are denied medical care because children are seen as more important.



Likely when technology progresses to the point where we can talk about "eliminating the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year" as the biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey puts it, those kind of views will be skewed.



But it's still interesting the reason to why old people are treated badly. Although I am young I've been working extra on several nursing homes. Many nurses have often worked on the same place for more than 20 years. They are so used to seeing suffering that they do no longer understand what suffering is; also they feel hopelessness because there isn't much you can do to help them.

Therefore they don't mind doing anything non-essential with them and they are objectified as care objects, not even allowed to go outdoors during the summer!

Hence, instead of chatting with the still lucid old people they leave them alone sitting as soon as they have the opportunity smoking or eating cookies. Many old people I've been talking to describes nursing homes are "storages".



There is no difference between an old person and a sick child, That should be understood.



Death doesn't solve any problems, Instead it creates problems, for example in several scientific areas as for example particle physics where experiments may take years or decades to complete and also by the fact that as humans become more and more knowledgeable more time is necessary to have qualifications and perspective to keep up the progress. Just a few decades ago you didn't need high school level education to perform many tasks.



The generational change needs to become a thing of the past. Children do not have a larger "right" to life than old people.

Currently we are so used to being oppressed slaves of the terror reign of aging that we do not dare questioning the "right" of aging to kill and torture old people.

Time to prioritise that the basic human right to life as stated by UN in fact is guaranteed.

So I end with a question that I really think we should ask ourselves.



Why is it so important to replace person A with person B?

Edited by VictorBjoerk, 13 May 2009 - 01:44 PM.


#2 JLL

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Posted 13 May 2009 - 03:22 PM

I think your essay is very good. It's not exactly anything groundbreaking, but it doesn't have to be - things like this are needed to get the message out there and make people think. You should show it to some deathist folks and see how they feel about it.

One minor point: the reference to the human rights declaration of UN bugs me somewhat. Most of the things UN calls "human rights" are nothing but obligations on others (e.g. working a decent job). That's probably just libertarian old me, but IMO, the reference is unneeded.

Converting a Swede from deathism to immortalism is going to be a tough nut to crack. I think Finnish people are in many cases almost entirely incapable of independent thought and self-respect, but we gotta give it to the Swedes who do an even worse job. The collective mind prevails in the Nordic countries, unfortunately.

#3 VictorBjoerk

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Posted 13 May 2009 - 09:00 PM

Yes the deathism is very strong in the nordic countries...... Hard work and collectivism is the mantra and of course the swedish "jante law"...

It goes like this...

Don't think that you are special.

Don't think that you are of the same standing as us.
Don't think that you are smarter than us.

Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.

Don't think that you know more than us.

Don't think that you are more important than us.

Don't think that you are good at anything.

Don't laugh at us.

Don't think that anyone of us cares about you.

Don't think that you can teach us anything


This subconscious mantra is what creates fatalism and deathism...

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#4 rwac

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Posted 18 May 2009 - 09:20 PM

I think it all comes down to this.

Do you exist for your sake or for society ?

If you exist for society, then the answer is quite simple: You're replacing a broken part with a new part.

But there are always people who don't agree with society, and that's who you might try to convince first.

#5 JLL

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Posted 19 May 2009 - 10:01 AM

I think it all comes down to this.

Do you exist for your sake or for society ?

If you exist for society, then the answer is quite simple: You're replacing a broken part with a new part.

But there are always people who don't agree with society, and that's who you might try to convince first.


Yeah, well said.

What doesn't baffle me so much is that some people exist for their own sake but want others to exist for society's sake; what baffles me that so many want to exist for society's sake themselves. A vulgar display of idiocy.

#6 Luna

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Posted 19 May 2009 - 11:16 AM

Yes the deathism is very strong in the nordic countries...... Hard work and collectivism is the mantra and of course the swedish "jante law"...

It goes like this...

Don't think that you are special.

Don't think that you are of the same standing as us.
Don't think that you are smarter than us.

Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.

Don't think that you know more than us.

Don't think that you are more important than us.

Don't think that you are good at anything.

Don't laugh at us.

Don't think that anyone of us cares about you.

Don't think that you can teach us anything


This subconscious mantra is what creates fatalism and deathism...


While keeping all of those things in mind! please do try to achieve reality opposition of each and every line there :D
Even better philosophy! ;)

#7 seanait

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Posted 22 May 2009 - 02:39 AM

i like this a lot - it raises a good deal of questions that our society should carefully look at.

we send our elderly away so we dont have to be "reminded" that death is on the horizon... then our elder loved ones are the victims of us feeling mortal.

#8 VictorBjoerk

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Posted 26 May 2009 - 07:31 PM

I often feel (as many here do) very frustrated by the lack of action against aging which comes from the absence of interest in it.

When I ran a blog about ideas of transhumanism it was flooded in 100's comments about how "beautiful and natural" aging is and how it "brings value to the youthful years" "The meaning of life is to create children and die" and "we should not try to play god". Not a lot of support to the idea of life extension, It boggles my mind why especially young people are writing things like that.

Someone prosecuted my blog to the admin of the blog portal I was using. They said that if I continued to write about such "extreme ideas that people complained about " they would delete my blog.

I am a strong opponent to the idea of "the generational change", It is a disgusting view of humans and leads to ageism. They think children have a larger right to life because they have lived fewer years than the older ones. It isn't a system that will work in the future.
My own, as well as other immortalists view of old people is of course that "old people" are sick young people.

I am also frustrated by the fact that Imminst is the largest online forum for life extension and yet so comparable small.

Action must be taken!

A couple of ideas....

1. There should be advertisements for donating money to aging research everywhere in the cities!, preferably showing the most terrible dying corpse-looking old people with the text "this is your future if aging is allowed to continue, but you can change it, support XXXXX....."

2. We should take children to nursing homes to show them how it is to be old, no things should be censored for them. The reason why I am a member at this forum may come from the fact that I visited nursing homes as a child and I was terrified of getting old myself.

#9 Shoe

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Posted 26 May 2009 - 08:28 PM

Someone prosecuted my blog to the admin of the blog portal I was using. They said that if I continued to write about such "extreme ideas that people complained about " they would delete my blog.


WTF?! That is one of the most bizarre things I've heard in a while. Is the administrator severely retarded?

#10 VictorBjoerk

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Posted 26 May 2009 - 11:39 PM

Someone prosecuted my blog to the admin of the blog portal I was using. They said that if I continued to write about such "extreme ideas that people complained about " they would delete my blog.


WTF?! That is one of the most bizarre things I've heard in a while. Is the administrator severely retarded?


Apparently,

#11 VictorBjoerk

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Posted 26 May 2009 - 11:42 PM

Leon Kass is as people here know a proponent of the importance of "the generational change"

#12 Luna

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Posted 27 May 2009 - 02:24 AM

I had a friend like that.. when we talked about it she said death gives the choice of her to meet with me a meaning..
and believed that without having "every second count" her time probably has no meaning.

I said that what it the point of the meaning of the time if the meeting if the life end.
It definitely won't mean a thing for people who come later, they wouldn't even know it happened or who was in it.

In some way I don't see a meaning in life and don't thing we need one, yet I somehow see that if it ends, it feels meaningless.
I want to live, meaning or not.

edit: sometimes people with that perspective say "it means to me" and don't care that if they are gone it doesn't matter anymore..
It is so easy for them.. I find them the most conceptional flawed people in the world in regarding to life.. looking for an excuse for living... though usually not bad people.. :X

Edited by Winterbreeze, 27 May 2009 - 02:27 AM.


#13 brokenportal

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Posted 21 December 2009 - 09:09 PM

I think this is good. I would consider restructuring it a little bit, combine some of the paraghraphs maybe.

I might throw in a more prominent challenge or something like maybe, "Stand up for whats right and join the cause that is striving for equality here." or something like that.

I used to say more things like this too, but it seems to me now that acknowledging deathism here like this is actually doing more to empower and acknowledge them than trying to counter act them. What I recommend trying to stick with is just tell them about whats going on, inform them about the work to counter act aging. Many may just join right in, as though it is normal every day progressive society. It is a normal progression of the times.

Someone prosecuted my blog to the admin of the blog portal I was using. They said that if I continued to write about such "extreme ideas that people complained about " they would delete my blog.


They said this blog you wrote here was too extreme and censored it?

#14 dustiiinnn5

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Posted 14 November 2023 - 08:08 PM

Thank you for the discussion! I need to write an essay on a topic that is difficult for me. How do you write your essays? Share your experience!



#15 adam delong

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Posted 14 November 2023 - 09:16 PM

 I can't write essays because I just don't have enough imagination. In such cases, I turn to https://mypaperwriter.com/. They helped me out when I was at school and they help me out now when I'm at university. Maybe my experience will help you. Good luck with your essay!



#16 Gahaka

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Posted 27 May 2024 - 01:35 AM

 

I often feel (as many here do) very frustrated by the lack of action against aging which comes from the absence of interest in it.

When I ran a blog about ideas of transhumanism it was flooded in 100's comments about how "beautiful and natural" aging is and how it "brings value to the youthful years" "The meaning of life is to create children and die" and "we should not try to play god". Not a lot of support to the idea of life extension, It boggles my mind why especially young people are writing things like that.

Someone prosecuted my blog to the admin of the blog portal I was using. They said that if I continued to write about such "extreme ideas that people complained about " they would delete my blog.

I am a strong opponent to the idea of "the generational change", It is a disgusting view of humans and leads to ageism. They think children have a larger right to life because they have lived fewer years than the older ones. It isn't a system that will work in the future.
My own, as well as other immortalists view of old people is of course that "old people" are sick young people.

I am also frustrated by the fact that Imminst is the largest online forum for life extension and yet so comparable small. Having come across a detailed review of Paper24, I carefully evaluated its strengths and weaknesses. The review provided a balanced perspective, outlining the service's efficiency, reliability, and areas for improvement. After weighing my options, I've decided https://www.linkedin...iam-nunez-ra6af to give Paper24 a try for my upcoming coursework. Their positive reputation and track record instill confidence in their ability to deliver results

Action must be taken!

A couple of ideas....

1. There should be advertisements for donating money to aging research everywhere in the cities!, preferably showing the most terrible dying corpse-looking old people with the text "this is your future if aging is allowed to continue, but you can change it, support XXXXX....."

2. We should take children to nursing homes to show them how it is to be old, no things should be censored for them. The reason why I am a member at this forum may come from the fact that I visited nursing homes as a child and I was terrified of getting old myself.

 

 

thanks for info

 


Edited by Gahaka, 27 May 2024 - 02:20 AM.





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