Erik, I’m really impressed by this sober, thoughtful meditation. Speaking as a 67yo human, what you say accords with my experience. Given my mind and body are slowly falling apart, I don’t want to live forever. More importantly, more and more of life bores me, and I’m impatient with people who don’t see what I see. (I did a reasonably good job of pursuing and fulfilling my aspirations when I was younger.)

Separately, to respond to one of your key themes, I believe so many of our feelings about death are a function of our instinct for self-preservation. If we didn’t crave self-preservation, we would not have lived long enough to pass on our self-preserving genes to our offspring.

But self-preservation has no philosophical value whatsoever! All the “enlightened” ones to us this! So to me the issue is to “bracket” our instincts and not take them too seriously.

At the end of the day, our consciousness is biological, and will disappear with us. There are ideas that consciousness exists without sophisticated brains, which seem plausible, so we’ll see.

Thank you for writing this so well and sharing your thoughtful thoughts.