I've found that I'm often making the same response to people infected with death cult ideology, so I putting them here so that I can refer to them later. This is going to start very rough, so be warned that there will be grammatical errors, non-sequitors, and other flaws of lightly edited proses.
"improvements in palliative care—making people in extreme pain or at the end of their life more comfortable—would much more meaningfully address the problem of death."
Yes, by all means, give dying people the pain meds they need. But I would also prefer that I and everyone I love not become a demented pile of rotting meat.
Imagine that there were virus which was sweeping the globe, infecting everyone in its path, and turning every infected person into a pile of rotted meat by age 30.
Wouldn't we regard the "rotted meat virus" as a public health emergency? And pour massive sums of money into research to stop the virus?
Yet, there currently exists a condition that will turn everyone now alive into a pile of rotted meat by age 135. Globally, approximately 120,000 people die every day from this "rotted meat virus". That's 40 times the number of people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks (3000). Every day!
U.S. government has spent at least $2 trillion dollars fighting the "War on Terror". But only minuscule fraction of that amount addressing the "rotted meat virus".
A few activists have taken up the 'rotted meat virus', including a few wealthy people. But many people are blasé about the "rotted meat virus".
For example:
"Ahh got it. Wanting to live forever is something I will never understand I guess."
In the past, fatalism was an adaptive response to death. Worrying about your inevitable death would've drained you of energy you could've spent on more productive near-term actions (such as hunting, farming, and reproducing).
Now though, we can develop technology to plausibly delay death indefinitely. So fatalism has become maladaptive.
It's a self-correcting problem (fatalists will die out), but it's frustrating in the meantime for us non-fatalists who would like to see much faster results.