Never gonna stop me
Never gonna stop.
Scream if you want in, 'cause I want more.
Rob Zombie - Never Gonna Stop
So Fred doesn't want to live forever. He finds a life span to be comforting and natural end to the story. As for me, as long as I'm not feebly old and propped up in a chair or hooked up to anything helping me breathe/eat/use the bathroom, I'd be perfectly happy with it. I love the life I've constructed for myself and I find death to be a completely inconvenient interruption of that. Now, of course, if no one ever died, we'd have population overcrowding and disproportionate accumulation of wealth, but besides the societal problems it presents, I think living forever would give you fantastic perspective. I'll bet you'd be less likely to get caught up in hysterias and fads, because you've seen so much of it before. You'd also have a higher bar for the people around you, because, while most of us can probably only say we know of two or three really great people, if that many, we'd be able to say that the path of our lives has brought us encounters with dozens of great people, all of whom raise your expectation of the next person you'd meet.
Perhaps you'd also take some more time to do not so much of anything, because you wouldn't feel so rushed. I think 80 or 85 years isn't really enough, considering you pretty much wasted the first 10-15 of them, and the last 5 probably isn't too productive either. You sleep a third of it away and then you probably spend a good year of your life brushing your teeth or something ridiculous like that, which is important, but isn't terribly productive in the grand scheme of things. Given all that, that doesn't leave you much time to get everything done you'd like to... you probably need at least twice that much... at least I do.
I wasn't born with the idea that dying is natural... and I don't think that many of us think that the current lifespan is acceptable, because we never accept when people just make it. I mean, how long does a person have to live before most people go, "Oh, well, he lived a full life." At least 85, if not 90. Who says someone had a full life when someone makes it to 78? My Deathclock puts me almost making 86, but I'm going to try and stretch it to at least 90 if I can. In fact, given that I don't smoke, don't drink, have a positive attitude and eat healthy, I'm going to be pretty pissed if I don't make it to 90.
PS... I didn't know that Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order:SVU was Jayne Mansfield's daughter. I was wondering who she was referring to during the Golden Globes and Sam brought it up on her new blog. You learn something new everyday.