Wow, really? I must be the odd one in the gene pool, then. Good to know.
As for existential crises, I respect them, but I don't accept them as a permanent fact. Life might be absurd, pointless, undefinable, and cruel. I'm even willing to agree with Camus, somewhat, and say that the first question is "shall I commit suicide today?" But, really, isn't that just an even better reason to seek as much enjoyment and pleasure as one can out of it? Hell, even rage, spite, and hatred are wonderful reasons to propel oneself out of bed every morning.
I enjoy the experiences of living far too much to want to let it go, especially the intellectual ones. You could give me ten thousand years and I still wouldn't be bored. Trust me, I can schedule what I'd be doing. I'd take option 2 in a heartbeat.
There are millions of books I'm never going to have the time to read. Millions of things I'll never get to learn. I'd love to have doctorates in astronomy, physics, math, engineering, history, and about thirty other subjects I have neither the time or money to pursue. And that's just scholastically. I'd like to play through every RPG I own with every potential character build. I'd like to keep writing until I can actually produce something good. Hell, give me time and I would actually bother to go backpacking and sleep under the stars again.
I simply don't have enough time. I watch movies or read while I play computer games, because I can, I enjoy it, and it provides a maximum of information inflow. I listen to audio books on philosophy (currently working on Arendt), science, and history during work, whenever I am working on something that doesn't take much concentration.
I'm not afraid of the pain leading up to death, particularly, or even afraid of death. But, when I examine my own life, I find so much enjoyment in learning, in thought, in positive and negative emotions, even in the experience of pain, that I find the idea of welcoming an eventual end to it pretty abhorrent. It's not even so much a worry about the dissolution of "I", as the fact that this particular organization of atoms has managed - if I do say so myself - to be a fairly intelligent, not-too-serious entity that really loves discovering reality as it is. I am biased, of course, but I don't see why it is a good thing that that should ever end. Extrapolating from that, I don't see why others would want to ever end, either. But, apparently, they do, and who is this particular peculiar arrangement to question that?
I'm not in denial about it. I don't believe in any gods, in any afterlife, or in anything spiritual at all. I'm skeptical of the idea of the transcendent. But if offered immortality and/or transcendence to some higher plane of existence, or even a much-prolonged life? Yeah, I'd take it. Without a second thought.
