Given the alternative, I find myself quite ready to die
On longevitymaxxing and the tide
I would like to live to one hundred.
That’s the goal.
Maybe a few years more, if I can.
That gives me roughly seventy years from where I stand now, which is a pretty generous amount of time by any historical measure. Most of my ancestors, going back as far as anyone has bothered to record, would have considered seventy years from birth to death to be an absurd bounty.
Well, I want those years.
I am perfectly happy to be aware that the wonderful evening I’ve been having will end, and I’d prefer it end later rather than sooner.
But at the same time, I find myself curiously at peace with the idea that the evening will come to an end, no matter what I do.
I want a long life, but I don’t want an endless one.
Death seems to me a natural feature of the landscape. Like winter and the tide. You can rail against the tide if you want; you can build seawalls, pumps, and elaborate machines to hold back the water. But the tide is inevitable. It comes, and it goes, and your flourishing as a coastal creature depends partly on accepting that rhythm rather than scheming to abolish it.
I think the project of extreme life extension - longevitymaxxing, etc. - rests on an ancient, desperate delusion about what makes life worth living in the first place.
The Ancient Quest and Its Discontents
The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to roughly 2100 BCE and is the oldest substantial literary work we possess, centers on a king who is terrified of death and spends the latter portion of his journey searching for Utnapishtim, the survivor of the great flood, who was granted immortality by the gods. Gilgamesh finds him, and he finds the plant of rejuvenation at the bottom of the sea; then a snake steals it while he is bathing. The story ends with Gilgamesh returning to Uruk, looking at the walls of his city, and seemingly arriving at some kind of acceptance. The text is fragmentary, but the implication is clear enough: the quest for immortality was a lesson, and the lesson was that the quest inevitably fails.
The basic structure of that story and that quest has apparently changed very little in four thousand years. We still have our Gilgameshes. They’re now tech millionaires spending their fortunes on anti-aging research and regimens, rather than kings seeking myths and legends, but the psychology is recognizably the same. There’s the same urgency, the same conviction that death is a technical problem waiting for a technical solution, the same restless energy directed at something that every prior generation has failed to accomplish.
And of course, the same refusal to sit with the discomfort of finitude.
Gilgamesh’s fear of death stems from a genuine love of life and a genuine grief at the loss of his companion, Enkidu. He’s incredibly sympathetic.
And I honestly feel the same sympathy for Bryan Johnson and the other longevity enthusiasts.
They’re afraid of something that is actually, undeniably, quite bloody frightening.
They love something that is genuinely worth loving.
The error is in believing that the appropriate response to the fear of death is to attempt to eliminate it entirely rather than to integrate it into a life lived well.
Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, was obsessed with immortality too. He reportedly consumed mercury pills prepared by his alchemists, which almost certainly accelerated his death. He was searching for the elixir of life and instead found a faster route to buying the farm.
There’s a parable in this that I doubt anyone needs me to spell out.
What Is Wrong With Wanting More Time?
Nothing, obviously.
I want more time.
I want as much time as I can reasonably have.
But the desire for a long life is not the same as the desire for an indefinite life.
I would like to see my kid (hopefully kids, if all goes according to plan) grow old. I would like to finish the work I have started, or at least to fail at finishing it in a more thorough and interesting way. I would like to read more books, walk in more forests, and have more of the long, rambling conversations that seem to be what I value most in this world.
These are all finite goods.
They fit within a lifespan.
But the desire for radical life extension is driven by the sense that death is an insult, an affront, a barbarism that enlightened minds should refuse to tolerate.
Aubrey de Grey, one of the more prominent advocates of extreme longevity research, has framed aging as “the most powerful form of human suffering” and has argued that we should treat it as a medical emergency. Ray Kurzweil takes more supplements per day than I’ll take in a lifetime, and has outlined a timeline for achieving what he calls “longevity escape velocity,” the point at which life-extension technology advances faster than one ages.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of these people.
I do question whether they’ve thought carefully about what they’re actually pursuing.
The philosopher Bernard Williams talked about this in his 1970 essay “The Makropulos Case.” He argued that an immortal life would necessarily become intolerably boring, that the conditions that make a life worth living are bound up with its temporality, and that a life without death would lose the structure that gives it shape.
A meal is good partly because it ends.
A novel is good partly because it has an end.
Strip away the ending, and you change it, all of it, for the worse.
Peace That Is Not Found in Escape
To secure more time, you fritter away the time you’ve got anxiously scheming about how to get more. You eat supplements instead of meals. You track biomarkers rather than have experiences. You treat your body as a machine requiring maintenance rather than as the medium through which you encounter the world.
I’ve met folks whose lives are minutely organized around the project of not dying, and, as far as I can observe, the quality of those lives is not obviously better than that of people who have accepted their mortality. In some cases it’s considerably // unarguably worse.
The longevity maximalists operate on an implicit model in which life is a substance that can be quantified, and more of the substance is always better. But this model gets the meaning of life ass-backward.
Life is not a substance.
It’s a pattern of relationships, commitments, and meanings, and pains, and losses.
Seneca, in his letters to Lucilius, wrote extensively about death and argued that the fear of death was more harmful than death itself. His position was that one should hold life loosely, appreciating it fully while recognizing that its value did not depend on its indefinite continuation.
“You will die not because you are sick,” he wrote,
“but because you are alive.”
i.e., the condition for being alive is that you will eventually not be, and this is not actually a bug. It’s a core feature of such profound importance that removing it would wipe out the whole system beyond recognition.
Montaigne concluded that the way to deal with death was to become so familiar with it that it lost its power to terrify. He practiced this literally, by reflecting on death daily, by spending time in places associated with death, by making the idea so ordinary that it could no longer dominate him...
My Seventy Years
Here’s where I stand. I want seventy more years. I want them eagerly and without apology. I plan to take reasonable care of my body, exercise, eat well, maintain my relationships, and keep my mind active.
But I also hold my wanting lightly.
If I get forty years instead of seventy, I hope I’ll consider those forty years an enormous gift, and I hope I spend them well rather than lament the thirty I may or may not receive. If I get ten, the same principle applies, though I imagine the application will be more difficult.
And if all I get is tomorrow, I hope I can manage the same basic orientation.
Tennyson’s Ulysses, at the end of the poem, speaks of striving, seeking, and not yielding.
There’s something magnificent in that.
The longevity project clouds our relationship with death by promising something it cannot deliver and by making our acceptance of mortality feel like a failure of imagination or will. But accepting mortality is not a failure. It is, on the best evidence I can assemble from philosophy, literature, and my own limited experience, a necessary condition for living well. You cannot be fully present in a life you are trying to escape from, or in a life you are trying to end.
Gilgamesh came back to Uruk, looked at its walls, and found, perhaps for the first time, that they were beautiful. He had been so consumed with the quest for immortality that he had failed to see what was in front of him. The oldest story we have ends with a man learning to see. I suspect the newest stories, when they are finally told, will end the same way.