Ending death could heighten rather than eliminate death anxiety

Evidence

Even if the modern immortalists like Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil figure out how to extend life indefinitely, or replace body parts with robotic components, or upload themselves onto flash drives and computer clouds, they will never be able to completely eliminate random incidents and accidents that have irrevocable and fatal consequences. Perishing in a plane crash is tragic today because decades might be lost from one’s life. But being incinerated in an aerial mishap would be even more ominous for beings with a vast or infinite life span, because of the exponentially greater amount of time lost. Ironically, then, death anxiety might not be eliminated, and could even be heightened, in a world where death was not inevitable. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 784

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘exponentially greater time lost’ logic presumes a linear valuation of future time — worth probing whether a psychological account of immortality would really scale anxiety that way.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 784

Related

• People are generally oblivious to death yet it shapes their experience (similarity 0.78)