Intimations of Immortality
From Daybreak Magazine: "I think immortality is in the same class as Utopia, infinity and perfection: a great destination to travel to, but one that can never be reached. Yet we should try, nevertheless. While immortality is an unreachable ideal, the effort of reaching it will bring huge progress and immense advantages. So let's be a tad more realistic and call it the quest for longevity, or extreme longevity. Problem is, a lot of people think we shouldn't be on this quest anyway, because of several misconceptions. ... Will McIntosh said (I'm paraphrasing here): "the human psyche is not wired for immortality: in almost every thing we do lies the shadow of our oncoming demise." However, this assumes that humans will not change. I think humans will change. Actually, humans are already changing, and have been changing throughout history. ... it will take time to develop much longer lifespans, followed by extreme longevity. Time enough for humans to change, and to adapt successfully to a much longer life. People have been changing all the time - albeit at a much higher rate in the past 100 years - and have been able to cope. Why shouldn't we be able to do so in the future? ... such thinking - [that] humans will remain the same while the world around them changes - is 'a failure of the imagination'. I agree: by the time extreme longevity is possible, we will have developed the right mindset for it."
It seems tome that people have already changed, at least to the point that they reject everything associated with old age. There's a bit of cognitive dissonance going on because getting old is rejected on an individual level, but still seen as necessary globally.