As we come closer to understanding the process of human aging and the potential to reverse it from a scientific point of view (explored here), we should start tackling questions around what societal impact such developments could have. What is the Meaning of Death in society as it stands today and what are the consequences if it were to be uprooted?
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Recently, Aubrey de Grey was interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast where he expressed a frustration that he often contends with: “The mindset that people have got about aging is that for millennia we haven’t been able to do anything about it, basically saying it’s natural. Even if we could fix it, it would be bad to do it, that dying is a blessing in disguise, otherwise, for example, tyrants could live forever. And where are we going to put all the people? Etc. etc. “ [source]

These are important points but pale in comparison to the biggest one, the fact that an inevitable death in itself can be the source of meaning of life. In medieval times humans used to collect skulls in their homes, displayed formidably as a centerpiece, serving as Memento mori, a reminder to live life to the fullest because there’s an end to it in physical form.
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We are attracted to negative news, be it a gruesome crash or a horrific accident. It attracts our attention, perhaps the reason being that it juxtaposes our aliveness with it, makes us notice how fragile we are, reminding us of our mortality. Tragic news serve a salient reminder of our own inevitable death, makes us think what it means to be alive.
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The story of death is embedded deeply in our culture. Aphorisms such as "Life's too short. Do what you love." are far too many to count, and essentially became ground truths, not to be ever challenged.
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How do we reframe our thinking once death is no longer the ever present omnipotent force to contend with? How do we make decisions on a day to day basis, at minute timescales? Could we, for example, become more risk averse knowing that we are potentially gambling infinite life’s worth on that dangerous physical stunt that we are about to undertake?
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Second ingrained model in our mind, perhaps resulting from observation of the physical world around us, is that things naturally tend to have an arc to their existence, a start and an end. We have a hard time grasping the concept of infinity. It is difficult for us to fathom that the universe could be, in fact, infinite. It’s equally challenging to start thinking in terms of infinite existence for us as individual beings.
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However, if we were to retool our mindset, what would be the tactics to do so?

Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscience researcher, expresses strong opinions on what death means to him (recent Lex Fridman podcast). His views paint a novel way of thinking about death. “We die every day when we go to sleep, if I was a loner, lived in Alaska and one day did not wake up, would there be any pain in the world from that? Certainly I wouldn’t have noticed it.” The point here being is that if we think of death as occurring every day as we go to sleep, wake up the next morning then repeat this cycle ad infinitum we start to frame death not as final end but rather as part of the process of living, forever. That may help our lizard brain escape the notion of thinking of death as an absolute end. 
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Different way of reframing our thought process around death is to think of an irregular shape with a boundary delineating inside surface area from the outside. Inside denoting the limited, finite lives we live today. The area outside being all the potential but never fully realized lives. “The cost of lives never lived” as Samo Burja frames it in his talk [source]. “The cost of lives, never lived, exceptional lives, incredible lives. The cost of Roman Empire fall to Dark Age is that there were never Romans visiting and sailing around the world and that there was never a lively discussion between Greek philosophers and Confucian scholars.”
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Therefore, it is reframing death not as an inevitable, a blessing, a source of meaning to our lives, but as a tragedy, loss of infinite potential of a human life. In this frame of thinking the recent passing of physicist, thinker and brilliant writer Freeman Dyson equates to tragic loss of an infinite number of books yet to be written by his hand.
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One can also stipulate that what we grapple with is the belief in the belief of death. Not the process of dying itself, for the most part. A parallel can be drawn to religion, where it is hard to discern whether someone believes in god or simply believes in the belief of god and that is what drives their actions. The individual wants to be seen as a believer of god. It is virtue signaling to society that they are a good person. Daniel Dennett illustrates this well in his talk [source]. 
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Could we then perhaps believe in the belief of death mostly because it is the right, socially accepted thing to do?

It is worth touching on the concept of transcendence as it is prevalent in religious views but also in some scientific views, particularly that of Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine.
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He contends the physical reality that we observe is just an interface that we construct in real time for the purpose of communicating with other conscious agents. This reality as we experience it doesn’t really exist, it’s just a facade, a language in which conscious agents communicate with each other where space and time do not exist. Basis to that theory lie in Quantum Mechanics. That is a novel way of reframing what it means to die, however it does not connect the dots on how to maintain continuity of an individual's conscious experience and memories across the boundaries of dying and being reborn. The same applies to the concept of transcendence in various religious views. How does one maintain conscious continuity in the physical reality across boundaries?

However, extending Hoffman's line of thinking, if it’s all a simulation what stops an individual conscious agent from experiencing it indefinitely?
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Hoffman further states: “There's no evolutionary selection pressures for us to know that we don't see the truth.” [source] This principle can also apply to our thinking about death. There are no good evolutionary reasons for us to not believe in death. Death is useful because it allows for natural selection to occur. We are going up against the evolutionary order of things, in a sense, if we start believing and acting as if death is no longer a given. Perhaps this is the crux of why we naturally accept it.
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Finally we have the potential of psychedelics to reframe our thinking about death. Mind altering substances, after a period of being a taboo subject, are seeing an emergence in research activities [source].

Psilocybin, ketamine treatments, LSD, so far, all turn out to be very low in toxicity (significantly below that of caffeine or alcohol and much lower than nicotine) [source] and yet appear to have profound effects on our psyche. More medical studies are being done because it’s still too early to gauge full spectrum of effects on the brain of such treatments, but for terminally ill patients studies show significant lowering of anxiety and fear of death.

We’ve touched on coping with and potentially reframing the meaning of death from an individual's perspective. A separate class of questions forms around the compounding effects it would have on civilization and human existence on earth as a whole. We’ll tackle those questions in Dematerialization and further upcoming articles.
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If you are still reading and have 30 more minutes to spare, here's what the future might look like trillions and trillions years away: