X-Message-Number: 10320
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 11:58:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Fun

Well, I'm sorry, but cryonics is not fun. How can it be? We are a small 
bunch of rebels fighting a dubious battle to avert personal oblivion. 
Along the way, those of us who are actively involved must witness our 
friends and acquaintances dying, first-hand. Moreover, we have absolutely 
no guarantee that our efforts to preserve them are going to work. We 
could be wasting our time. We don't think so, but we don't know, and we 
may never know.

Having said that, I will agree that with my friends in cryonics, I have 
enjoyed some good times. This however tends to manifest itself in black 
humor of the type enjoyed by paramedics. I remember, for instance, 
driving a cryonics ambulance back to the facility with a friend beside me 
and a dead person in the back, who had undergone autopsy and a day or so 
of warm ischemia, rendering his chances of future resuscitation dubious 
at best. We debated whether he would count as a passenger, enabling us to 
take the High Occupancy Vehicle express lane on the freeway (minimum: 3 
persons per vehicle). This of course was a classic case of humor (?) 
being used as a weapon against a situation that was so damned awful, it 
was very hard to cope with.

I can recount many similar examples of "fun" if people would enjoy them 
here, but someone I don't think that's what the original poster had in 
mind. 

From my perspective, there is entirely too much "feelgood cryonics" going 
on already--what I sometimes think of as the Alfred E. Neuman school, 
where the motto is, "What--me worry?" Often this is an unfortunate 
byproduct of faith in nanotechnology to save lives under any 
circumstances. Therefore, I would like to see more realism and less 
denial in cryonics, which probably means LESS "fun."

Outside of cryonics, of course, I have a great deal of fun. Indeed, my
life has been primarily a pursuit of pleasure as opposed to drudgery, and
I enjoy every day. Currently I have a job that requires me to work less
than half the time, and the job itself enables me to travel and meet
fascinating people, whom I write about in the style of my choice, for a
magazine that values my work. Can't have much more fun than that! 

But I can think of many other news groups and mail lists that are better 
suited to sharing this kind of thing. Here, we're stuck with cryonics, 
and if you think cryonics is fun, I suggest you are fooling yourself.

--Charles Platt

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