Suspended animation/hibernation: would you use it if it were available?

If I could just use it whenever I want without side effects I'd love to take a week or month off here and there, increasing usage as I grow older. If it's more of a one shot thing I'm not sure. Right now I think I can actively contribute to advancing the cutting edge but if in 10-20 years we're not seeing the kind of progress I hope for I'd consider long-term suspension so I can wake up in a world that has caught up to my ambitions.

A small practical thing.... if it were very cheap and safe, it could be used to skip rotten weather on a culture-wide basis.

If it was just about me with human-like life time at stake, I'd not even hesitate to jump at it. In fact, I'd in that case I'd do much riskier and more costly things for much lesser rewards. To the point of desperation-induced stupidity probably.

However, I am bound by morals to stay here in hell and try to futilely help slightly increase the probability of good outcomes for others, because these abstract numbers say I don't matter.

(at least that's the narrative...)

Suspended Animation sounds to me like an attempt to escape the problems in the current world, in the hope that a future world might be better. To me, this seems irresponsible. Putting yourself in Suspended Animation seems to me like an attempt to escape responsibility for creating a better future. You're just leaving it to the people who don't take it. I want us to create a future world that is significantly better than our current one, but in order to do that, there have to be people that will actually suffer through our current world in order to make it happen, and I can't justify putting that responsibility on others if I'm not willing to accept it myself.

My greatest fear about long-term suspended animation is waking up in a dystopia, and spending the rest of my life wondering if I could have prevented this dystopian future in the counterfactual world where I did not enter suspended animation.

I think I wouldn't. I would strongly consider it- set up a trust fund, fast forward a hundred years to massive 'inherited' wealth plus superior tech level- but most of happiness has to do with social things, and I imagine that I have a much better shot of inventing cool things if I'm competing with my contemporaries rather than people 100 years from now. They'll probably be cleverer and more familiar with new tech.

If it were cheap and had no side effects, it could be used through evenings and days off work to minimize the cost-of-living overheard involved in earning money. An unemployed person might spend most of their time in hibernation with a mechanism set to wake them if they got a call regarding potential employment.

Costs? Side effects? Safety? Who will pay the rent? What will employer attitudes to you spending the last 5 years on ice be?

It would probably depend significantly on a number of factors, such as the cost, safety, number of adopters, the politics involved and how various friends and family members felt about it.

In general, I would say the uncertain risks of being an early adopter of an entirely new branch of technology for uncertain rewards are probably not for me at this time. But there are other times in my life where I would have pressed that button without a second thought. Certainly I'm not going to deride anyone else who wants to take the first steps towards guaranteeing a technologies usability for other people. I appreciate their efforts to help grant this field a chance.

It would also be a very useful field to have. Specifically if you have suspended animation, you have probably solved one of the key difficult problems of sending people to distant planets. So if it seemed like someone was making real progress in the field, I would probably be happy to help invest money even if I wasn't willing to take the risks of suspension myself.

I'd rather stick around on Earth unless I was terminally ill. I think I can do some good in the world, and I'd rather be doing it than sitting around suspended. Also, my life will worth living for the foreseeable future, so if I live until some form of immortality/life extension is developed I get more total years of worthwhile life if I don't de-animate.