I am ashamed to admit that I’m acquainted with Silicon Valley, a place where two obsessions currently dominate. One is escaping the permanent underclass that technology has been ruthlessly creating, and not only because of AI—2010s data science sufficed for capitalism’s surveillance needs just fine. The other is physical immortality. Men like Bryan Johnson and Peter Thiel have become literal vampires, attempting in vain to use young blood to forestall the inevitable. Imperial people have always believed their empires would last forever; if only their bodies could as well.
It is possible that technologies will be developed to extend human life to hundreds or thousands of years. I would not want this fate for myself, nor would I wish it on anyone else. It’s not that I dislike life; on the whole, I don’t. I simply understand life well enough to know that it cannot remain tolerable forever. There is an upper limit of psychological and moral acceptability, and I don’t intend to find out what it is.
1: trauma accumulates
I am often stunned by how much time has passed since a traumatic event. The worst things I’ve experienced still feel like they happened yesterday, even if they’re ten or twenty years in the past. Good days, although more numerous than bad ones, become copies of copies until they fade into a general impression. Trauma lives in the body, and forever. We wouldn’t be able to make a 500-year lifespan tolerable without addressing traumatic buildup, and I am not sure how to do so without radically altering the human experience.
Biologically, this may be a solvable problem. A future technology may make full erasure of unwanted memories possible, but once this capability exists and we begin using it—and we will have to use it, if we want to remain psychologically intact for centuries—we will lose the ability to trust our memories as true accounts. If we’re allowed to have whatever histories we want, how can we be sure who we once were?
2: our fear of death will grow
The death of a young person is shocking and seems to stop the world. The death of an old person is sad and it provokes grief, but it doesn’t have the same brutal effect, because death is understood to be the natural culmination of the aging process. A hundred billion people and trillions of animals have died—no one escapes it.
If we develop technological means to halt and reverse aging, our maximum lifespan could extend to thousands of years, but this doesn’t mean people will stop dying. Pathogens will still exist, and will still evolve. The Threes—three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food—will all still be there. Humans will still have to pay bills, but we’ll now have thousands of years of bills to fret instead of a few decades, so all those consequences of bill-paying—wars, drug abuse, dangerous jobs—will still be there. We might be able to reduce the per-year probability of death to one in ten thousand, or even one in a million, but this will only be achieved through increasingly unnatural circumstances, and there is a good chance that our hatred and fear of death will increase—we will all die “too young”—as it becomes rarer. Even those of us who believe there is nothing to fear from death might not be able to sustain such cognitive stability over millennia1.
3: pleasure is limited, and suffering is not
Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, that every day of life can be rated on a numerical scale. Zero represents a day that gives as much as it costs—the displeasure of errands and traffic is equally matched to the joys. Then most days for most people are positive in value. I’m often pessimistic, but this I truly believe: an ordinary day for an ordinary person exceeds zero, though quite a few days go negative. There’s also an upper limit. Call it 100; this is the maximum sustainable happiness, and going above it requires an agent of delusion—drug abuse, extreme sexuality, physical danger-seeking, power over other humans—that is unsustainable, unreliable, or hurtful; when such a ceiling-breaker is used, the brain adapts to the new ceiling, and regular life becomes intolerable. What I don’t know is if there’s a bottom. Negative 1000 definitely exists; I’ve been there. I am sure people have seen -10,000; there may be a -100,000. Heaven, for humans who live in human societies, can’t exist for very long. Hell can.
We don’t know what hedonic adaption does over thousands of years, because most people don’t get much decent adult life. Decent adult life, in our society, is sequestered to two-week vacations and, if one’s bosses are dumb enough to overpay and one’s landlords are dumb enough to undercharge and one’s health holds up, a few good years in retirement before one’s body quits. Local hedonic adaptation (boredom) is something we experience in hobbies, causing us to find new ones; global hedonic burnout (ennui) is something only the wealthy experience, but as someone who’s observed that moral and mental degeneration firsthand, I don’t envy those who have the problem.
The ugly truth is that most people who are born into the resources to get fifty or sixty years of decent adult life do not actually do so—the Demiurge outsmarts them, one way or another; they become miserable. A poor person has something to do, and has reasons to believe life can become better, even if it seldom does. A rich person knows that, inexorably, the days will become worse and worse, and while this is blamed on senescence because it is an obvious contributor, I don’t consider it to be the only one. Pleasure requires novelty and surprise. Misery can stay exactly the same and remain miserable.
Life is good, in part, because it ends before it would get bad.
4: we live among humans
Billionaires fantasize about immortality because in compound interest they trust. They possess immense wealth, and they get paid more simply for having it; they turn money into power and power back into money, and they always seem to end up winning. This can continue for fifty years. A few families have done so for five hundred, although usually with severe moral compromise2 as well as luck. We are unlikely to see it done by anyone for thousands. Consider:
that money is an abstraction, reifying esteem by society, that only matters in conditions of stability.
that humans who hold high social status are inevitably torn down; the only reason people escaped it in the past is that they died.
that all empires fall, and their successors feel no obligations to the elites of the old ones.
The billionaire fantasy involves diffuse investment across hundreds of nations and thousands of corporations, in order to be taken care of no matter who wins. This strategy was never flawless; it relies on one’s next host society forgetting what one does in this one. It relies on facile movement of capital and people; these conditions might hold for another hundred years, but a thousand is unlikely. Remove a nest of invisible legal and cultural machinery that numbs people into obedience, and billions of people realize at once that the people who have “money” only have it because they say they do, and that the rich and powerful are no more than uglier-than-average mammals—just as vulnerable to bullets and knives and sharp rocks as us—shouting orders.
Their bunkers are a vain expense. They won’t be used. The poor play the lottery to fantasize about financial windfalls and liberation. The rich build bunkers to fantasize about being able to protect their resented ones in concrete coffins while the rest of the world starves. What the billionaires aren’t thinking about—it would ruin the fantasy—is withdrawal. They are addicted to high social status and power over others. It would not take six months for them to be bored sick of old films and mediocre food; the temptation to go out into the world and reassert their prior standing would turn into a compulsion. And once they did, they’d be surrounded by people who’d remember what they did to the world when they owned it.
A billionaire can fantasize about immortality because a high-status life becomes boring, but not intolerable, over time. A bland century can be slept through, living on interest. The idea of falling into the bill-paying classes, of working in an open-plan office, is never considered possible by them. In the very long run, though, wealth and power and status are not immune to erosion. And a life among humans in which one’s social status is low or middling, because of the financial stresses such a life involves, is not even tolerable for one century, let alone several.
5: the hereafter
I won’t claim to know what happens after we die, and I don’t see any value in trying to convince others of any particular belief. Modern debates tend to focus on two possibilities:
life is meaningful and existence continues after death; in the afterlife, this life’s meaning is revealed.
life has no external meaning, and there’s no afterlife—you exist for a while, and then you don’t. This can lead to nihilism (nothing matters, since nothing lasts) or positive existentialism (make meaning how you will, as no one afterward will tell you you were wrong).
I can tolerate either of these. I wouldn’t like it if I were to find out that there’s no existence after death; but, if that is the case, I will not know. I tend to structure it like this. If tolerable eternal existence is possible, it can only exist in the hereafter; then if there is none, there also never was one, so there is no loss to be mourned. If the material world—which is limited, and tolerable for a finite duration—is the best it gets, we never have to find that out.There’s a dismal third possibility. Some other time, I’ll argue for why I consider it unlikely. It would be: existence is eternal, but also meaningless. What if the afterlife exists, but it’s pernicious hierarchies and open-plan offices?That’s what the billionaires would create for us if they discovered immortality. Eternal life would come with conditions and costs. All the things in the human world that are shitty today would still be there because, from a billionaire’s perspective, the shittiness works—it gets done the labor they want done. Automation will eliminate some of the need for human labor, but it won’t remove the emotional labor (especially of the sexual kind) that billionaires require from humans.
I’d rather take my chances on natural aging and death.
6: what it’s all really about
Walter White makes a cameo in Better Call Saul in which he scoffs at Saul’s hypothetical question about a time machine, saying that it’s silly to ask about a scientifically implausible technology when the real matter of discussion is regret. And I think that understanding the Silicon Valley would-be immortal requires us to consider the real issue at play, which is a combination of trauma and ambiguous regret.
These men, for the most part, were unsuccessful with women in their formative years. I don’t want to stigmatize that; it’s shockingly common, and our society is extremely unsympathetic to it—in our aggressively anti-religious world, men and women both despise sexually inexperienced men. So, a few men who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to amass fortunes do so, in order to offset the trauma of early sociosexual rejection; as quinquagenarian billionaires, they leave their wives for 25-year-old B-listers under an alchemical belief that such a dalliance can edit the past. (It can’t.) These men don’t just want to be young again; they want to be young and get it right. But what will satisfy them? The wound of early failure won’t heal; it never fully does.
Sweeping memory edits may become possible with future technology. We could pursue cosmetic surgery on our personal histories to remove all memories that interfere with confidence and charisma. This solves the problems of traumatic accumulation and hedonic adaptation—we can erase the parts of our selves and pasts we find humiliating, or that we’d like to experience again, or that just take up too much space. The catch is that this would make it meaningless, even if it were possible, to live for 5,000 years—you’d remember an increasingly fragmented set of highlights. If we can “go back to age 18 and fix it” and we can edit our memories arbitrarily, then why go out and seek experiences at all, when we could simply have them written into us? And wouldn’t this turn into a high-tech version of drug abuse or pornography? It would do nothing for the deep spiritual issues these longings mask.
7: the long distance
Last of all, so many of my favorite people (and animals) have died. My mother is dead. My childhood cat is dead; my first adulthood cat is dead. More of my favorite people will die in the years to come. I can handle being fifty years away from them. I don’t want to be a thousand years away from them. If I can accept that death has come to saints, artists, and heroes… I should surely accept that it will come to me.
I don’t want it today. I probably won’t want it tomorrow. If a doctor presented to me the choice of taking a pill to live ten more years, or not taking it and dying today, I’d probably take the pill. A thousand years, though, is far too much; I know what life in human society does to people, and I know that senescence isn’t the only concern.
Or even minutes. Intellectually, I don’t fear death. And yet I am still as biologically capable as anyone is of having an overwhelming, demoralizing panic attack.
The Devil is sometimes invoked. I don’t know that I believe in the Devil per se; an incompetent Demiurge seems more on-it than a malevolent antigod. If demons exist, I am sure they are behind the lasting dominance of wealthy families, but it’s also possible that secular causes suffice. Human societies always glorify the Devil; it’s bad if the Devil exists and it’s bad in an equal but different way if he doesn’t.
Fabulous article. I retired early at 59 and the last decade has been extraordinary even with fewer financial resources. I read this while sitting with my 97-year-old mother in her high end assisted living. She’s lovely even with diminished memory ( she has all the good ones from last century fyi). Shes still mobile and enjoys company. Lately she taken to humming hymns and I think she’s leaning hard to whatever is next. Good thinking mama.
If I outlive her I’ll miss her terribly. I wouldn’t mind another decade or decade and a half while I’m still in great health and enjoying each day. Beyond that I don’t have much interest.
Life is grand and living it one day at a time has brought me immeasurable joy.
Keep writing.
I've been watching Peter Diamandis' podcast for research. He's a tech investor, extreme accelerationist, Star Trek nerd, longevity enthusiast and AI fanatic. He is clever but deeply unwise. He would risk the future of all humanity for his own dreams of immortality, nanotech instant Ferraris and a holiday home orbiting Alpha Centauri. Quote: 'The problem is life', referring to biological life as too slow. He went on to mock oak trees. He has a position of power and influence in Silicon Valley.