Should We Fear Death? Epicurean and Modern Arguments 268 If we live much longer lives than have ever been possible, our experience of our own identity may change, but that does not mean that our lives will be empty, discontinuous or with- out  fascinating  internal  connections.  Changed  conceptions of personal identity might open up possibilities for growth, rather than being burdensome. Perhaps if we could all live indefinitely, a time might even- tually come for each of us when we believed ourselves fulfilled and no longer able to grow. Eventually, we might cease to feel attached to life in the ways that I have described, especially if we reached some kind of hard limit to our ability to adapt to a changing world, to maintain a strong sense of identity, and to remain creative. Personally, though, I would like to have the option of exploring the world and my own capacities until I found those limits. If I ever did come up against them, I could die at a time of my own choosing. If everything was right with my health, and my creative and intellectual powers, I can not imagine that any such time would arrive except many, many years after the completion of the eight or ten decades that I can currently hope for. When we take a hard look at what is so bad about having to decline and die, it appears that we fear death too much. Yet, we should be careful not to rationalize the situation to the extent that we understate what is regrettable about aging and death. The reasons why death is a bad thing are simply the reasons why we are attached to life. Not only that, they are reasons that could attach us to it indefinitely, at least if we could retain the faculties that enable us to live life to the full. This suggests that we should do what we can to turn down the volume of our fear of death, but we should not console ourselves with false reassurances about the supposed virtues of being mortal. Certainly, we should not adopt a stance of fash- ionable pessimism about the desirability of living beyond the rather pitiful limits that nature has allowed. Instead, we should