Comment by 1dom
3 days ago
> If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren.
Counter-anecdote, my partners Granddad is 93. Age 90, we said the same as you. Now he's an old, rude, obnoxious liability - he's still great, and I don't hold it against him, he's earned the right. But I've never known anyone naturally age and die without losing their ability to be civil in some way towards the end.
From the article:
> Kahneman knew that many would see his decision as premature. But that was exactly what he intended, he wrote: If you wait until a life is "obviously no longer worth living", it is already too late.
I personally wish my partners final memories of her Granddad were him at 90, and not at 93. I've known for a good 5 - 10 years I will take the same route as Kahneman. I feel the desire to stay alive long enough to be a liability for yourself and those around you is a decision motivated by ego and fear, rather than compassion or logic.
>I feel the desire to stay alive long enough to be a liability for yourself and those around you is a decision motivated by ego and fear, rather than compassion or logic.
Everyone becomes a liability at some point. By that logic we should just go full Logan’s run and kill people as soon as they stop being productive.
There nothing wrong with saying that you aren’t going to take extreme measures to preserve your life past a certain age.
But I don’t want this attitude of “you should kill yourself so you don’t burden your family” to become the norm either.
What if your partner’s grandad heard you calling him a rude obnoxious liability and felt pressured into killing himself?
>I've never known anyone naturally age and die without losing their ability to be civil in some way towards the end.
But many people die suddenly with no serious mental decline at all. That can happen at 95 or 100 the same as it happens earlier.
If you rule out everyone who didn’t die of some nebulous cause as the result of a slow decline you are selecting for people who mentally decline.
> Everyone becomes a liability at some point. By that logic we should just go full Logan’s run and kill people as soon as they stop being productive.
That's ridiculous. People can be unproductive, but not a liability.
> But I don’t want this attitude of “you should kill yourself so you don’t burden your family” to become the norm either.
I can see that, but you haven't explained why. Personally, I don't want to burden myself, my family and those I care about, that's important to me. There must be something more important to you that justifies burdening loved ones with a hard painful death of a loved one. Help me understand: what's that thing for you, if not ego/fear?
> What if your partner’s grandad heard you calling him a rude obnoxious liability and felt pressured into killing himself?
The alternative is he's unnaturally kept alive in a perpetual state of suffering for him and the people around him. If he hadn't suffered mental decline, I know he'd never consciously choose that, another reason why I'd like to make sure I'm gone before serious decline kicks in.
> But many people die suddenly with no serious mental decline at all. That can happen at 95 or 100 the same as it happens earlier.
That doesn't change anything. I agree with Kahnemans point that becoming a burden is too late. If I accept that, without being able to predict the future, it then becomes a game of risk. Kahnamen decided the risk of him becoming a burden was greater than the risk of him continuing to live what he would consider a productive (edit: "valuable" is probably a better word here) life.
>That's ridiculous. People can be unproductive, but not a liability.
That would depend on your definition of liability I suppose. Many people would consider a parent who was no longer capable of productive output (work, helping out around the house, watching the kids) a liability. I suppose you may be using the term to mean "you'd rather not have them around anymore because their company is no longer offsetting the cost to you".
>There must be something more important to you that justifies burdening loved ones with a hard painful death of a loved one. Help me understand: what's that thing for you, if not ego/fear?
This isn't about me. As of right now I don't plan on taking any heroic measures to preserve my life past a certain point. The issue is I don't care why someone wants to stick around. I want them to feel free to do continue to do so.
>The alternative is he's unnaturally kept alive in a perpetual state of suffering for him and the people around him.
Depends on what you mean by being unnaturally kept alive. He could have opted out of medical treatment at any time. Once his capacity to make his own decisions was gone, his family could opt out of that treatment for him.
>That doesn't change anything. I agree with Kahnemans point that becoming a burden is too late. If I accept that, without being able to predict the future, it then becomes a game of risk. Kahnamen decided the risk of him becoming a burden was greater than the risk of him continuing to live what he would consider a productive (edit: "valuable" is probably a better word here) life.
Personally I think trying to predict the future and what the people around me would or wouldn't want is futile. And choosing when to die to prevent this is impossible. Some people will go downhill at 55, some at 110. If you really consider the burden of a few years of decline to be so awful on your family that you place a very high value on avoiding it, you'd need probably need to kill yourself much earlier than 90, probably 75 to really reduce the chance to a small enough level that you don't really need to worry about it very much.
The problems I see are that several.
1. People will feel pressured into suicide because they feel they are might be a burden to their family that their family doesn't want. Even if they aren't. You can't know what your family actually thinks. If they say "no dad I don't want you to kill yourself", are they being honest or not?
2. People will feel pressured into suicide because their family has made it clear that they are a burden on them. These people might want to keep living for whatever reason. Fear/ego whatever. I don't care why they want to. I don't want them to feel obligated to commit suicide.
3. The financial incentives for families to pressure otherwise healthy people into suicide.
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the big question is why do you get to choose that for me or why is it society's choice and not my own? assuming I'm of a healthy mental state.
If you want to kill yourself the way many old people have done forever (by no longer eating), in most cases society doesn’t have a say.
If you want to involve society by petitioning the courts to have a doctor kill you, society gets a say because you’ve involved society.
There’s no country with assisted suicide laws where society doesn’t get a say because killing someone by default is murder, and exceptions must be highly regulated.
Because we can't make it so that your choice isn't influenced by society.