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It may be a blessing that most younger people regard old age as very f — Philosophical pessimism

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"It may be a blessing that most younger people regard old age as very far away for themselves, but it is certainly an illusion that it won’t happen to them. The gradualness of time passing means that we can feel shocked to find ourselves ‘suddenly’ so old, with many of the above-listed unfortunate features. Time tricks us, passing slowly during empty days but seeming to rush by in annual terms. It is a commonplace to warn the young of the importance of saving and preparing for old age but it really hits home only when the time actually comes, when the wrinkles, liver spots, cataracts, sarcopenia, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and other horrors are theirs. Only first-hand experience of the mixed difficulties of living and aversion to dying really cuts it. We now speak often of Holocaust denial and climate change denial but rarely do we speak openly of denial in regard to old age. But the young deny it in themselves, optimists often deny that it’s really so bad when it happens (exceptional cases are always available) and the depressing nature of the topic is generally skirted around: it will happen to you, it will probably entail some increased misery, it does mean that most of your life is behind you and you are closer to your own complete extinction. It may not be exactly a taboo topic but it is avoided or minimised in conversation, and precisely because it is universal, inescapable and depressing."
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Philosophical pessimism
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Philosophical pessimism
Philosophical pessimism
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Philosophical pessimism is the view that life and existence are of negative value. It is often expressed as the claim that life is not worth living and that non-existence would, at least in many cases, be preferable to coming into or remaining in existence. Other formulations focus on claims that suffering and other harms have more impact or severity than pleasure and other goods; that the amount

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"What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction of all the organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, light-hearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it not look exactly as if existence were a false step whose consequences gradually become more and more obvious?"
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"Following Schopenhauer, Julius Bahnsen said that we are will, but a will in conflict with itself: always in tension and contradiction. There is no eternal and indivisible will. It is not that the will wants one thing. It wants both. It wants everything, all possibilities. It wants to go and it wants to stay. But we cannot go and stay. We have to choose, which leaves the will forever dissatisfied, because the only way for it to be satisfied is for it to obtain everything it wants, even what is contradictory; but it cannot obtain such a thing."
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"The Syndrome. In August 1973 a group of robbers entered the Swedish Credit Bank in Stockholm and took hostages for six days. What no one expected was that the hostages would end up identifying with the robbers/kidnappers. Suddenly they were more afraid of the police and felt that those who were holding them hostage were precisely the only ones who could now protect them. The victims identified with the perpetrators. That event was a small-scale recreation of what happens on a cosmic level. Life is a torment and a curse from the day we are born, but at some point we identify with it. Life is the cause of all our ills. But now we defend it."
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Philosophical pessimism