When evaluating potential interventions in many sectors (health, environment, autonomous vehicles, etc) it is necessary to directly quantitatively compare being dead with various states of life. Other times, especially when looking at the far future and catastrophic risk, it is necessary to compare nonexistence with various states of existence. I will discuss several ideas relating to these issues, including the possibility of privileging the current state of the world (introducing an asymmetry into the social welfare function). I will also discuss some old and new survey data regarding how people view these tradeoffs, ending with implications for discounting.