Death gives as much meaning to life as having your stomach ripped out gives meaning to having a stomach.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve probably heard this sentence a bagillion times. It\u2019s the kind of statement people assume to be deeply philosophical and meaningful by default. In my humble opinion, though, it\u2019s a pile of sh\u2014oh, well, you know what.<\/p>\n
If death gives meaning to life, I suppose diseases give meaning to being healthy, and thus we should leave some diseases around so that people can appreciate not being sick, right? How often do you say yourself, \u2018Hmm\u2026 I haven\u2019t been sick in a while\u2026 I should get one of those nasty cancers, before I stop appreciating how it feels being healthy. Where\u2019s my emergency plutonium bar?\u2019 Personally, I don\u2019t say that to myself very often. I mean, I can totally appreciate the feeling of not<\/em> being kicked in the nuts even<\/em> without ever being kicked in the nuts, really. And I can appreciate not<\/em> having a certain disease even if I\u2019m not aware the disease exists. I can totally enjoy life without dying, and I could still enjoy it even if it were impossible for me to die.<\/p>\n People reason by analogies. They know there are some concepts that would be more difficult to grasp without their opposite, and think the analogy can be extended to ANYTHING AT ALL. For example, if you\u2019ve never been sad, you can\u2019t be sure just how different it is from being happy. I\u2019m not sure how you can get from this to \u2018you need to be mortal to enjoy life\u2019, especially when there are no real-life examples of immortal people incapable to enjoy life because of their immortality. Can you smell the pungent aroma of foxes disdaining grapes?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Death gives as much meaning to life as having your stomach ripped out gives meaning to having a stomach. You\u2019ve probably heard this sentence a bagillion times. It\u2019s the kind of statement people assume to be deeply philosophical and meaningful by default. In my humble opinion, though, it\u2019s a pile of sh\u2014oh, well, you know [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/418"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}