The problem is that once you have convinced yourself death is good, of course immortality is bad.
It is ironic that these philosophies that tell us it is good to die can themselves be viewed as living organisims, some of which have lived for thousands of years, all of which claim the right for themselves to live forever or at least to the end of the world.
Problem is, when I began looking at this idea, I wasn't against the idea of immortality -- far from it. But I began doing some serious thought about the subject, both as a mental exercise and for a series of stories I was working on. The more I looked into the repercussions, the less appealing immortality became. And the more I've learned about the complexities of human psychology, emotions, interactions, etc., the more the evidence points to it being a very bad idea ... at least, until we evolve into something that is essentially no longer human as we've ever known it. But the probability of that is extremely slim (possible, but probable? no) for more reasons than can be gone into in anything less than a rather sizable tome. And the evolution would have to be something that rewrites our most basic brain structure -- as far as I know, no evolution in any species has really done that. It becomes more complex, but it does
not go back and restructure the most basic parts of the brain, and that is what would be necessary to eliminate the most difficult things where a viable immortality would be concerned.
It's not a preference; it's realistic observation of who and what human beings are, and what would be required for immortality to work. The two simply don't mix.
And, lest this be chalked up to simply my individual experience -- on your earlier statement: While it's an interesting view I don't think it quite matches up with the evidence. I recommend looking into the anthropological (as well as historical) evidence for how concepts of death and its part in life evolved over time. Trauma tends to be something requiring a sense of a disjuncture; this in turn implies a "norm" where the traumatizing aspect does not exist. But as we evolved, we were experiencing death all around us the entire time. It was the norm for us as a
species, but not as
individuals.
That is where the trauma comes in: on the individual level, not the species level. And not understanding death, this cessation of normal action, puzzles and hurts and frightens (once a certain level of reasoning is reached), as one misses one's loved ones, and can also make the analogy that if they are no longer moving or breathing, laughing, eating, having sex, etc., then the same thing may happen to "me". Hence the mystery. The evolving of the various myths of immortality that we are familiar with came a lot later, as a set of responses to this reaction of fear on an individual and also collective (not species) level. (This is not to say that earlier ideas of immortality did not exist, but they were certainly refined and replaced by other models of the concept. It is these with which we are generally familiar.)
I believe the difference in our thinking comes in our understanding of "next step." To me "next step" implies directionality and intentionality. A step in a direction whether for better or worse is as you say not clear from our limited perspective. For me if we are simply talking about natural selection, you would say something like the next era or epoch or the like. If we have the forces of nature moving with directionality and intentionality than I maintain we have entered into the domain of an intelligence so much superior to ours that it would certainly have to be considered at least a demiurge. If not truly God.
