> sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice.

That's not what I'm saying. Sick kids dying is not the same as old people living and holding social/economic/positional/etc capital into perpetuity.

And further, what I'm saying is about "us" as a larger living system, at coarse-grain scale. We each live at fine-grained scale. Negotiating truths and values between those is the fuckin work of being alive. Bluntly, some might reasonably ask: who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse? That's not me saying "I don't care about you" (I do!) but it's me pointing out that there are fuzzy lines when negotiating values across scales. A thing that makes you happy (heck, that makes a majority happy) might conceivably invite some variant of the endtimes. Something good for the health of some parts can be bad for the health of the whole.

Death is part of our thriving and a part of us ("us" in the Gaian sense) at the largest coarse-grain scale, though it hurts like hell at the fine-grain one