There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing. Something very deep within me just says "no, absolutely not", and I've been trying to figure out why.
I did some digging, assuming the pro-longevity people have a term for this, or arguments against it. I wanted to understand - and so far, it's only left me more sure of my convictions.
To be clear before I go further - I'm not against living longer. If humans gradually trended toward lifespans of 120, 150, even 200 years, I don't think that's a problem. What I'm pushing back against is the removal of the horizon entirely. Death doesn't need to come at any particular time, but it does need to exist, looming just around the corner.
Aubrey de Grey calls this push back against immortality the "pro-aging trance." He argues that we've developed coping mechanisms around death (which were once adaptive, and are now maladaptive), because for all of human history we couldn't do anything about it. And now that maybe we can, our collective coping mechanisms are getting in the way.
So when de Grey says our resistance to immortality is "maladaptive" - maybe he's right. But that doesn't mean it's wrong. He'd probably say my values themselves are downstream of the cope - that I only believe what I believe because I've never known anything else... perhaps. But I think the coping mechanism is pointing at something fundamental about what we actually value, not just defending against pain.
I keep coming back to my own experience with limits. I've recently made a real effort to be more earnest, more sincere, transparent. I think some people find this genuinely offputting, funnily enough. I'm making a trade off - many people may not like it, but to the people that do, it will be even more magnetizing since I am fully embodying the thing they like, the thing that is me. It's choosing depth over breadth. You could call this "maladaptive" - it can be lonely, it sometimes turns people off. But I've accepted it as my nature.
The same is true with how I work. I do my best work the night before the deadline. Not because I'm lazy, but because constraints create a kind of attention that infinite time never could. My high school teachers would probably agree with de Grey on this part: Cope. But I've accepted this too, as part of my nature.
What I'm realizing is that both of these are the same thing. Being fully yourself requires accepting limits - who you are, how much time you have. You can't be everything to everyone, and you can't be forever. The constraint is part of what makes you, you. Choices that cost nothing aren't really choices.
In that same vein - your choices being what you really are - Bernard Williams wrote this essay in 1973 arguing that immortality would actually be bad for us. His argument is precise: the desires that give you reason to keep living (he calls them categorical desires) would either eventually exhaust themselves, leaving you in a state of "boredom, indifference and coldness", or they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway. Either way, the You that wanted immortality doesn't get it. You just die from a lack of Self rather than through physical mortality.
But I think it goes deeper than Williams suggests. It's not simply that we'd run out of desires or become someone else. It's that the striving itself, the journey toward what we want, is where the meaning lives. Not in the having, not in the arriving. This is why people who climb Everest, win Academy Awards, or achieve similar ambitions often face depression afterward. The reward wasn't the point. The pursuit was.
And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows? Just as you "remember your death" to really live life, perhaps we need the deadline to do the work at all. Death is what pulls us out of pure consumption and into pursuit. You could call it "just a deadline", but I disagree. It's what makes us begin.
You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working. The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was providing something that leisure alone can't replace. People who stop pursuing things often just... decline.
Bryan Johnson is an interesting case here. If you take the longevity project to its logical end, you get someone who's stopped living in order to keep living - for the most part not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous, all in service of more years. But if the optimization itself is his striving, if the process genuinely fascinates him, then maybe he's not caught in the trap. He's just an edge case. The danger is everyone else thinking they should live that way without his genuine obsession with the work.
When everything is possible, and nothing is urgent, with no real consequences for time misspent, what do you even care about?
