I like the point that we should not only consider the individual case. I guess people’s hope is that, in a future where everything goes maximally well, bad externalities like “old people’s beliefs become ossified” can be addressed by some really clever governance structure.
On the individual case:
In my post “The Life-Goals Framework: How I Reason About Morality as an Anti-Realist,” I mention longevity/not wanting to die a couple of times as an example of a “life goal.” (“Life goal” is a term I introduce that means something like “an objective you care about terminally, so much that you have formed [or want to form] an optimizing mindset around it.”) In the post, I argue that it’s a personal choice which (if any) life goals we adopt.
One point I make there is that by deciding that not wanting to die is immensely important to you, you adopt a new metric of scoring how well you’re doing in life. That particular metric (not wanting to die) places a lot of demands on you. I think this point is related to your example where you dislike telling people (implicitly or explicitly) that they’re failing if they’ve had a happy routine, watched their grandkids grow up and have kids of their own, and feel like they can let go rather than needing to do more in the world.
Here some relevant quotes from my article (one theme is that the way we form life goals isn’t too dissimilar from how we chose between leisure activities and adopt lifestyles or careers):
In the same way different people feel the most satisfied with different lifestyles or careers, people’s intuitions may differ concerning how they’d feel with the type of identity (or mindset) implied by a given life goal.
[...]
For the objective “valuing longevity,” it’s worth noting how life-altering it would be to adopt the corresponding optimizing mindset. Instead of trusting your gut about how well life is going, you’d have to regularly remind yourself that perceived happiness over the next decades is entirely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. What matters most is that you do your best to optimize your probability of survival. People with naturally high degrees of foresight and agency (or those with somewhat of a “prepper mentality”) may actively enjoy that type of mindset – even though it conflicts with common sense notions of living a fulfilled life. By contrast, the people who are happiest when they enjoy their lives moment-by-moment may find the future-focused optimizing mindset off-putting.
[...]
Earlier on, I wrote the following about how we choose leisure activities [this was in the context of discussing whether to go skiing or spend the weekend cozily at home]:
>[...] [W]e tend to have a lot of freedom in how we frame our decision options. We use this >freedom, this reframing capacity, to become comfortable with the choices we are about to >make. In case skiing wins out, then “warm and cozy” becomes “lazy and boring,” and “cold and >tired” becomes “an opportunity to train resilience / apply Stoicism.” This reframing ability is a >double-edged sword: it enables rationalizing, but it also allows us to stick to our beliefs and >values when we’re facing temptations and other difficulties.
The same applies to how we choose self-oriented life goals. On one side, there’s the appeal of the potential life-goal objective (e.g., “how good it would be to live forever” or “how meaningful it would be to have children”). On the other side, there are all the ways how the corresponding optimizing mindset would make our lives more complicated and demanding. Human psychology seems somewhat dynamic here because the reflective equilibrium can end up on opposite sides depending on each side’s momentum. Option one – by committing to the life goal in question, “complicated and demanding” can become “difficult but meaningful.” Alternatively, there’s option two. By deciding that we don’t care about the particular life-goal objective, we can focus on how much we value the freedom that comes with it. In turn, that freedom can become part of our terminal values. (For example, adopting a Buddhist/Epicurean stance toward personal death can feel liberating, and the same goes for some other major life choices, such as not wanting children.)
These quotes describe how people form their objectives, the standards by which they measure their lives. Of course, someone can now say “An objective being ‘demanding’ isn’t necessarily a good reason to give up on it. What about the possibility that some people form ill-inspired life goals because they don’t know/don’t fully realize what they’re giving?”
I talk about this concern (“ill-inspired life goals”) in this section of the post.
I like the point that we should not only consider the individual case. I guess people’s hope is that,
in a future where everything goes maximally well, bad externalities like “old people’s beliefs become ossified” can be addressed by some really clever governance structure.
On the individual case:
In my post “The Life-Goals Framework: How I Reason About Morality as an Anti-Realist,” I mention longevity/not wanting to die a couple of times as an example of a “life goal.” (“Life goal” is a term I introduce that means something like “an objective you care about terminally, so much that you have formed [or want to form] an optimizing mindset around it.”) In the post, I argue that it’s a personal choice which (if any) life goals we adopt.
One point I make there is that by deciding that not wanting to die is immensely important to you, you adopt a new metric of scoring how well you’re doing in life. That particular metric (not wanting to die) places a lot of demands on you. I think this point is related to your example where you dislike telling people (implicitly or explicitly) that they’re failing if they’ve had a happy routine, watched their grandkids grow up and have kids of their own, and feel like they can let go rather than needing to do more in the world.
Here some relevant quotes from my article (one theme is that the way we form life goals isn’t too dissimilar from how we chose between leisure activities and adopt lifestyles or careers):
These quotes describe how people form their objectives, the standards by which they measure their lives. Of course, someone can now say “An objective being ‘demanding’ isn’t necessarily a good reason to give up on it. What about the possibility that some people form ill-inspired life goals because they don’t know/don’t fully realize what they’re giving?”
I talk about this concern (“ill-inspired life goals”) in this section of the post.