I can't imagine someone wanting death. How could someone want everything they've worked so hard for to just vanish and be lost? They might as well go into an insane asylum. How could someone put no value on everything? I just can't begin to comprehend that...
Perhaps it's not so much "wanting it" as seeing that the way things (presently) work, we're going to "get it" (death) whether we want it or not.
The only remaining question, then, is how to interpret it, and what (if anything) to do about it?
The religious person "invents" a
reality scenario in which death is a "doorway" to another life, perhaps one offering "eternal happiness".
The cryonicist pursues a destiny in which he or she "awakens" at a later time and has some level of confidence that "it is really he, or she". These people (and I am one of them) set aside the perceived odds against, the uncertainties of, it "working", on the basis of a perceived "non-zero" chance of survival by a technological approach.
The Buddhist who accepts "nirvana as nothingness", along with stoics, secular humanists, and many others, "takes what he/she can get from life in the way of positive happiness", and (in that pursuit) elects to refuse to focus on the onrushing approach of oblivion.
The person who places hopes in the near-term perfection of anti-aging technology hopes for the best, of a technology which advances slowly toward what will almost surely, ultimately, be available, but who knows how soon?
Finally, the person in the agonal stages of a terminal illness who elects to inhale helium, and thereby end his/her life, rather than endure the pain and/or virtually unbearable discomfort of the condition, accepts death as the alternative to an existence in which every moment is a "living hell".
None of these people, even the one who inhales helium as an alternative to enduring virtually unbearable suffering, is exactly "seeking death" in the way of "wanting oblivion", but the challenges are large, and our abilities to respond are finite.
I'm grateful for the existence of this forum, on which concerns of this kind can be explored in depth, among those who are able to face up to these realities, and share their concerns, hopes, and ideas about possible pathways around what others blindly accept as inevitable, giving it no thought at all.
boundlesslife
LongeCity
