> I despise this attitude. Almost everyone who gets old dies painfully. Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?
FWIW I agree with the parent comment, and comparing "living in a barren nuclear winter wasteland" with "living past age 45 in the country" is a strawman and not really what the comment you replied to was talking about.
I've got my "nuclear war survival plan", and it involves a big fucking bag of weed, some super expensive wine, and having sex with the person I love until the nuclear fallout gets us.
Obviously I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but depending on the scope of a nuclear conflict I don't think it's irrational at all to decide on a comfortable end.
It's not a strawman (can we retire that term? Just make your argument), the parent wrote:
> I would prefer to live in the city and quickly die with my friends rather than move 200 miles away from civilization and experience inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter and painful death.
Some of those things are virtually guaranteed (inevitable sickness, painful death). Aging, culimating in death, is everyone's own personal apocalypse.
We don't know what a "nuclear winter wasteland" looks like. It has never happened. That aside, you and the parent are the wife in The Road (who kills herself rather than face life post civilization). To me it's very obvious that life stripped of almost everything is still worth living. People who don't understand that are, sorry, shallow.
It is a strawman. Why would we retire a term that describes the exact logical fallacy you were/are making?
The original argument was essentially "I would prefer to die quickly than go through a nuclear holocaust". Your response was to put up a much weaker form of pain or suffering (i.e. living past 45 or in a rural area) so you could bat that down: "Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?"
That is literally the exact definition of a strawman argument.
It doesn't matter if it's 45 or 55 or 85, at some point you're going to suffer, and quite a lot. I mentioned 45 to head off most suffering (i.e. most of us are relatively healthy at 45).
Aging aside, there are millions of people alive today whose lives are worse than you and the original commenter's hypothetical lives following a nuclear holocaust. Are their lives not worth living?
As far as "strawman" goes I've never seen an internet argument improved by someone calling out "logical fallacies". There's a reason people disagree over things and it's worth thinking about why rather than posting some stupid gotcha.
>Aging aside, there are millions of people alive today whose lives are worse than you and the original commenter's hypothetical lives following a nuclear holocaust. Are their lives not worth living?
I don't think you need to establish the value of the lives of others to make your own self-determination, nevermind a nuclear wasteland being an altogether distinct frontier of suffering and survival than growing up in a slightly more uncomfortable place than middle class America; nevermind surviving such an environment as an actual elderly person
I think it's clearly relevant that lots of people live in conditions of terrible privation and still enjoy life and don't think of killing themselves. Your argument is that suffering is relative, which is true to some extent, but suffering is also absolute and people can adjust to new circumstances quickly.
FWIW I agree with the parent comment, and comparing "living in a barren nuclear winter wasteland" with "living past age 45 in the country" is a strawman and not really what the comment you replied to was talking about.
I've got my "nuclear war survival plan", and it involves a big fucking bag of weed, some super expensive wine, and having sex with the person I love until the nuclear fallout gets us.
Obviously I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but depending on the scope of a nuclear conflict I don't think it's irrational at all to decide on a comfortable end.