Today, in most of the world, you can live your whole life relatively secure that the forces that kil

Today, in most of the world, you can live your whole life relatively secure that the forces that killed men and women in ancient times (invasions, hunger, disease, brigands) probably won’t get you. Your biggest risks come from heart disease (which, to an extent, is a disease of plenty) and car collisions (which is definitely a disease of plenty).

Living without the big risks is no recipe for happiness, precisely, but it is a recipe for contentment. 

And the whole point of the prologue seems to be that it’s better to die suddenly from living alive than to live a long time in a slow death.

So Zarathustra comes down off his mountain and tries to tell that to people and they laugh at him and make fun of them.

Of course they do. No one wants to hear that they are living life wrong.