We Need to Die

https://willllliam.com/blog/why-we-need-to-die/

by ericzawo • 8 months ago

105 182 8 months ago

ge96• 8 months ago

I'd be a von neumann probe if I could be eg. Bobiverse

joshmarlow3• 8 months ago

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.

I never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds happy as a clam - especially contrasted with his pre-Blueprint podcast with Lex Fridman.

Seems like he's doing something right.

CodingJeebus3• 8 months ago

Perhaps he is happy. In my personal experience, people who aim to tackle these kinds of large problems do so out of an inability to let go and accept life as it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but founders tended to be some of the most unhappy and unsettled people I have known in my life, they were just really good at channeling that lack of acceptance into their work and lives.

My hope for anyone who dedicates their lives to this kind of work are able to let go if they reach their deathbed without a solution, because if they can't, that would be a deeply painful way to leave this world.

dwroberts• 7 months ago

Seems like he's doing something right

He’s going to spend the remainder of his life obsessing over something he cannot control, and then he’s going to die at a normal age (or probably earlier) any way

joshmarlow3• 7 months ago

I suppose I don't see how that's a problem if he's happy in the process - which he certainly appears to be.

WXLCKNO• 7 months ago

Agreed on Bryan Johnson. Before I actually watched a bit of his content, I just thought he had nutjob vibes and looked weird. No offense intended, if possible.

But honestly he just seems like a guy enjoying a fun project. He seems calm and happy in his videos.

Barring any hidden issues with chronic depression, it would be unlikely that he's unhappy. He's very well off financially, has a nice beautiful girlfriend who's with him in his journey, he sleeps a ton, works out, eats well and in general experiments with life.

joshmarlow3• 7 months ago

Agreed! In the Lex Fridman podcast from a few years ago that I referenced, he talked quite a bit about his depression - he was near suicidal for 13 years, IIRC.

He sounds like a different person now.

dartharva2• 7 months ago

People see him living a lifestyle without the "necessary" vices they have gotten accustomed to in their own, and it confuses them. They can't conceive the notion that a man can still be perfectly happy and abundant without those Pavlovian indulgences, because they have never known a world without them.

sweettea• 8 months ago

In sum, the author proclaims that without human death, nothing people do has a time limit so people wouldn't have any incentive to do.

But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only, the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create today which will not be available in the future. You cannot create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits time.

dvt• 8 months ago

I've had this (often drunken) conversation many times, I think mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe. Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die. This memento mori makes every day, ironically, worth living. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is Job 1:21, where he somehow reconciles this tragic finality with trascendent faith:

    “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
        and naked I will depart.
    The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
        may the name of the Lord be praised.”

SoftTalker• 8 months ago

Yes, immortality would be imprisonment. An eternity in this existence with no escape.

It's also the ultimate equalizer. Everyone is born, everyone dies. There's no amount of wealth, luck, work, or misfortune that happens in life that changes this. We all end up as dust.

cyberpunk• 8 months ago

This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order. When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, "A man can dream can't he?"

saulpw• 8 months ago

And it goes beyond humans: everything that arises must cease.

This is one of the three foundations of existential intelligence (or wisdom).

undershirt• 8 months ago

mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe

church fathers say that creation fell because of the fall of man

Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die

deadlines help. the soul is eternal and there is a deadline for the body

[Job] somehow reconciles this tragic finality with transcendent faith

he later falls into despair when things get worse, who wouldn’t, but he is made well after he is humbled. this golden moment of humility forges him into a true person, winning him heaven not death

“If you die before you die, then when you die you won’t die.“ Death to the world is the last true rebellion.[1]

[1] https://deathtotheworld.com

thunkle• 7 months ago

What if you live forever on Earth but miss out on a much better place God has created for those who die.

jonathanlydall• 8 months ago

The author talks about the how the certainty of death ultimately coming to all of us (sooner or later), gives us drive.

In terms socio economic issues of immortality, the Altered Carbon books (or the first season on Netflix), paint a somewhat bleak picture how immortality makes the rich and powerful even more privileged. Not to say it’s all bleak, but I would certainly say it’s dystopian overall.

fellowniusmonk• 8 months ago

One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Cool man, don't try and live forever.

Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of them will get more resources to explore.

I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in arguments against UBI.

It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole line of argument.

How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year research investments makes way more sense to any person who has the chance to see them pay off.

Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound curiosity to explore to their merriment.

JellyBeanThief• 8 months ago

One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But yeah, no one's proposing forced immortality. We have a cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone else, we see people doing it even when they're actually advocating for universal rights to choose.

If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books until age 45,000.

bee_rider4• 8 months ago

Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.

I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

tmsbrg3• 8 months ago

As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years of repetition. I can also imagine some bad spirits trying to break out and influence worldly affairs.

bee_rider4• 8 months ago

Maybe we could set it up so the “spirits” can just talk to the “living” when the latter start the conversation. That seems like a reasonable way of setting things up.

It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.

UtopiaPunk• 8 months ago

Impossible to know if there is something like Sheol after death, so we thought, "why not make our own eternal emptiness?"

credit_guy• 7 months ago

old people need to make way for new generations

The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some people will amass extreme wealth and power while living centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who will not have a fair chance in life.

The much more likely problem will be that old people will not adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and estranged. Especially with more and more people being childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will be at that point in time.

These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.

blargey2• 7 months ago

I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void instead of, like, a gated community.

Arodex3• 8 months ago

But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point.

And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed in their research?

In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's insurance?

weinzierl2• 8 months ago

Me too, definitely. Should I get bored I could always go about and insult every being that ever lived and will live in the entire universe - in alphabetical order.

sph• 8 months ago

I feel that those that would choose immortality are so self-important that they would not get any wiser from their additional time on earth.

kulahan3• 8 months ago

Being stuck in a computer might not be so bad. "Wake up" once a year decade for a few hours, see what happened, go back to "sleep". Immortality on call.

Apocryphon2• 8 months ago

"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice."

didgeoridoo• 7 months ago

Get out of here, Nwabudike. This doesn’t concern you.

wseqyrku• 8 months ago

Put us in computers.

Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.

CodingJeebus3• 8 months ago

Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...

bee_rider4• 8 months ago

Well, thanks I guess. I think it is a cute idea, not a serious one really. At least, I definitely haven’t worked the details.

We’d have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we’d couldn’t be left entirely at rest. Maybe we should be run slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then we don’t have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.

OkayPhysicist• 8 months ago

If my files could beg for their lives to be kept up-to-date with new storage media, I probably wouldn't have lost so many over time.

serf• 7 months ago

whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies that people started experimenting with after exposure to the concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'.

that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.

it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.

riskable• 7 months ago

I think that if no one died of old age, predators would eventually emerge that preyed on the old. It seems like it's an inescapable part of nature.

skandinaff• 7 months ago

It's a fascinating book indeed, just finished the second chapter, and it is surprisingly accurate in many regards of AI representation, given it's from 1994. Will read on, thank you

Antibabelic2• 7 months ago

Put us in computers

I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?

bee_rider4• 7 months ago

Maybe we’re already the simulations, just, this part of our memories is the back-propagation used to figure out where the saved copy came from.

kbelder• 7 months ago

I think it's the opposite. Believing that something special exists in brains that can't in be replicated in a (sufficiently complex) computer is spirituality, a belief in the supernatural.

ForHackernews• 7 months ago

You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might.

How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?

ileonichwiesz3• 7 months ago

Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

palmotea• 7 months ago

I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).

sungho_2• 7 months ago

Contrary to what one might think, if you were to live forever, you might end up taking insane risks and trying anything and everything.

djoldman• 8 months ago

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.

I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then be spurred to action.

Arodex3• 8 months ago

Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance tax, you can imagine they don't intend to give away anything - fortune, position, power - once they become immortal.

And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.

Palomides3• 8 months ago

it's kinda weird that you think modern capitalism/mode of wealth is a harder problem to solve than literal immortality

I'll take eternal life even if Putin gets it, thanks

Arodex3• 8 months ago

"Imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"

euroderf2• 7 months ago

Agreed. Lack of turnover of property (in all forms) is a danger. Monotonically increasing wealth concentration.

Waterluvian• 8 months ago

There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift.

I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place, Sandman, and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.

There's also this PC game called The Coin Game that's just a solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity. There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy to be mortal.

munificent3• 8 months ago

I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.

Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein" explores this feeling.

kulahan3• 8 months ago

What a visual masterpiece that movie was. I love Guillermo so much.

jacksontheel• 8 months ago

Guillermo del Toro's "Pinnochio" actually impressed the dread feeling much more, personally. It's interesting how similar these two movies are, considering the target audience is quite different.

kulahan3• 8 months ago

I'm with you. The idea of being immortal is terrifying to me. Will I still care about nature after seeing millions of extinctions? Will I still care about life when I see trillions of humans doing human things? Will I even still feel part of the universe as the only permanently unchanging thing?

Hard pass. Besides, if we were immortal, we wouldn't have my favorite quote, which feels a bit relevant here. As the great mind of our time, Bill Watterson says: "There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."

ed_mercer• 7 months ago

Will I still care about nature

A society that has the ability to provide infinite life, will for sure have the ability to inject this caring feeling back.

scotty792• 7 months ago

I think people who fear immortality are not aware how much a person forgets evey day, week, month, year, decade. 1000 year life wouldn't be significantly different than 100 year life, becaus that few pound of jello in your skull xan hold only so much internally.

Living through 50 extinctions wouldn't be that much different from reading about 50 extinctions. People remember better seeing photographs of event in their lives than actual experiences from their lives.

wat100002• 8 months ago

It seems absurd to argue that death is necessary or good when there is exactly zero experience with the alternative.

Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build strength.

Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be better to stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If anyone said we should start doing this to all our children, they'd be run out of town.

If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.

WA9ACE2• 8 months ago

Unless such anti-aging style immortality solution was widely available, you would much more likely end up with a situation similar to In Time (2011). The poor fighting for continued survival, while the wealthy live forever.

teeray• 8 months ago

watching The Good Place… I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.

Ah, he saw the time-knife

joegibbs• 7 months ago

Most of those stories are just sour grapes. Dying has been the biggest fear for all of history for most people, and especially back then people were losing their family and friends at young ages.

You have to have some kind of belief in that situation that dying has a special purpose, or something happens after you die so that you’re rewarded.

It’s the same as the suffering of a medieval peasant, which they thought was so important. Nowadays we have eliminated that. Was it really giving them such an important meaning and rich life? No, they just thought it did to cope.

Besides, even if we cured aging it wouldn’t mean we’re trapped living forever, you’d be guaranteed to get killed some other way anyway.

strogonoff2• 7 months ago

There is always a conflict between the benefit of an individual and that of society or wider ecosystem. Faith or ethics is an example of that: it can be considered a survival mechanism of society, which would fall apart if everyone was doing only what is good for themselves.

It is pointless to look at such beliefs (murder is bad, we should be good to others, etc.) from the viewpoint of a standalone individual, and it is fine for humans do not really exist that way. These beliefs stop being “sour grapes” or rationalising failure as soon as you see the anthill behind the individual ants.

The “goodness of death” belief is one of such, indeed part of many religions, and perhaps the ultimate tradeoff. Is it merely a rationalisation of one biological inevitability, or does it reflect a whole set of constraints we operate under? Realistically, it has always been so that individuals go away for the society to continue. Otherwise there quickly would not be enough food, would it? If somebody refused to die, would they have to be exiled or murdered? If we all stopped dying, would we be able to evolve and adapt, or would we be more liable to be wiped out as a species? To get rid of the concept of death and ensure society’s sustainability given constraints, you’d also need to get rid of our drive to reproduce, and already at that point we are looking at something very different to what we are.

Is it merely a vestige? Is it no longer necessary to die for societal benefit today? IMO not really, unfortunately: if society would unravel without death, which I think it would, then the “deathist” belief remains sound.

Getting out of this predicament, in my opinion, requires one of the two: 1) infinite energy and/or other technology that is not yet available and might be unattainable, or 2) by changing a number of things about how we live, ditching the unsustainable (absent infinite energy) idea that the only right direction is constant growth of production, consumption, etc.

I am mildly skeptical about the former (happy to be proved wrong). Regarding the latter, I am curious as to whether humans would slowly achieve extended lifespans naturally, if they eliminated factors that pressure them to fade away. (It does go contrary to the idea that the purpose of all life is energy dissipation. Sustainable peaceful society with long lifespans, likely much lower birth rates, does not strike me as particularly efficient at that.)

mattbettinson• 8 months ago

Nah I’m good. I’ll just hang out with my friends and play video games every day

Legend2440• 8 months ago

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.

Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?

IAmBroom2• 8 months ago

The counterpoint is in all the people who pursue daily goals intensely, at high ages. POTUSes and SCOTUSes, by example, tend to outlive most USians, and tend to stay active with projects or jobs long beyond normal retirement.

ileonichwiesz3• 7 months ago

The people you mentioned are also wealthy and have access to a level of healthcare far beyond the average person.

tmsbrg3• 8 months ago

Not the argument I expected. I'm also against people living forever, but more because it's a way for society to go forward and get rid of old ways of thinking. There's a saying that science advances one death at a time. And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later? Or where the leaders of 1000 years ago were still in charge? Whenever I hear people talk about living forever I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever. No thanks.

orangecat2• 8 months ago

I'm also against people living forever, but more because it's a way for society to go forward and get rid of old ways of thinking.

Well, I'd like to get rid of the old way of thinking that death is good :p

And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later?

Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning countries, and the mortality of individual Kims has not helped the people of North Korea.

I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever.

How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?

tmsbrg3• 8 months ago

Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning countries, and the mortality of individual Kims has not helped the people of North Korea.

I guess you'd say most people in the world don't live in functioning countries then? China, Russia, much of the middle east and Africa are not democratic and sometimes the death of a dictator is the only way to move them forward. USA and many democracies in the west are also backsliding so maybe soon few people will live in a "functioning country".

Counterpoint on Kim: The death of Stalin or Mao Zedong released a death grip on their respective countries. You can't ignore that getting rid of natural death would make individual centralization of power a worse problem.

How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?

Just one example: Trump using sanctions to block the ICC from doing it's job (and thus letting people in Gaza die and blocking steps of justice against Israel). The fact is that the centralization of power in modern times into individual hands is already unprecedented. Old people are already ruling the world and they'd do everything to rule it forever.

photonic34• 8 months ago

Two major counterpoints, the second borrowed from de Grey.

1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality, I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect this is true for at least very many people.

2. The argument doesn’t survive a simple inversion test. Let’s concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring— lack of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?

orangecat2• 8 months ago

Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?

And not only death, but aging. Even if that society decided (wrongly IMO) that nobody should live longer than 100 years, it would be insane to enforce that by making everyone's bodies and minds deteriorate over several decades.

lerp-io• 8 months ago

when you put “we” in title it makes it sound like you think other people should die not just yourself.

IAmBroom2• 8 months ago

Yes...?

wouldbecouldbe• 8 months ago

I don't think there are is an issue with finding ways to extend life. But there is an issue with people clinging to life out of attachment; part of getting older is accepting change & the flow of things.

waldrews• 8 months ago

You might start questioning meaning of life with a billion year time budget. A million years seems reasonable to cover the range of things you could anticipate wanting to learn or experience. A few thousand years, no, that's not enough, you have to start cutting corners, you can barely even visit nearby worlds and only cover a few intellectual disciplines.

netfortius2• 8 months ago

To me the "revelation" came via Emil Cioran's book "The inconvenience of being born" (the actual book's title in English is "The Trouble with Being Born", but I like better the term that's closer to the French original). Excellent justification.

smrtinsert• 8 months ago

I don't see how any sort of immortality can be supported by the infrastructure of the world. It's based on people dying, civilization has factored it in. How could you manage resources for populations that never disappeared? No immortal organism exists, I'm pretty sure Darwin already solved this question for us.

gmuslera• 8 months ago

The punishment for crimes in Altered Carbon was sending you to a far enough future so you know nothing and no one. With age you get alienated in a similar way, maybe adding (lack of) understanding on the mix. Your brain have limits, your adaptability have limits, your physiology have limits, pushing them forward doesn't take them out. Eventually you get tired, bored, or want to get out. At least speaking about most and not special cases (I hope).

And having a simulation of ourselves in a different media is a different game.

TacticalCoder• 8 months ago

Death doesn't need to come at any particular time, but it does need to exist, looming just around the corner.

It always would: fatal accidents would still be a thing. So would:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...

Then there'd always be the risk of a gigantic asteroid hitting the earth.

Stuff like that.

Which makes me wonder: if there was no more aging and no more illness and accidents and terror attacks / crimes were basically the only way to die, how would society deal with those?

I take we'd focus on preventing accidents / safety even more? For at the moment there's definitely some "we're not going to live forever anyway, so it's just bad luck if an accident happens".

And what about suicide? Taking your life when you're going to die anyway is one thing, taking it out when you're near immortal is something else altogether.

Apocryphon2• 8 months ago

Let's say you can rebuild telomeres while curing cancer and keeping arterial walls healthy, and even prevent the physical aspects of dementia or Alzheimer's. Who's to say that an immortal human can retain consciousness, let alone sanity? What would be the psychology of an ancient being? What happens to its memories, how could it recall anything from centuries past? And, as sometimes explored horror and science fiction, how would such a creature retain its humanity rather than becoming a hedonistic, nihilistic misanthrope that considers itself beyond petty morality?

jstummbillig• 8 months ago

Interesting, but I disagree with the main premise. I am currently not motivated not because of my coming death but because I am frustrated when things are bad. More time would give me more time to be frustrated. I simply don't think that things will be great or boring just because a lot of time passes. Things change at a speed that adaption alone can occupy any one of us forever.

mrg3_20133• 8 months ago

This resonates with me. Too much of anything loses value. This includes life. If there's no death, it would take special individuals to make sense out of it.

WA9ACE2• 8 months ago

"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."

-- The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin

CodingJeebus3• 8 months ago

...unless the dictator has kids, which happens all the time throughout history

munificent3• 8 months ago

Derren Brown's book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine" (which is much better than the title might lead you to believe) does a very good job exploring the philosophy behind this.

The choices we make have meaningful and value in large part because we sacrifice a fraction of our finite time and attention in order to do them. But once you have infinite time, then the value of everything you do becomes zero.

Palomides3• 8 months ago

by that logic things done during shorter lives are more valuable, so you should kill everyone as soon as possible to make their lives more meaningful

lotta people in this thread with anti-life beliefs

munificent3• 7 months ago

Having a longer life gives you a greater total capacity to do and create meaningful things. But the meaning of any given fixed-time act is less if the lifespan is shorter.

Spending half your life writing a book makes that book more meaningful than spending a tenth of your life doing it. But you can only write two of the former versus ten of the latter.

Either way, this is a simple and dumb mathematical model, not a literal equation for calculating the actual value of a life's work.

tern3• 8 months ago

For me, the biggest tell was how frequently older people report feeling completely at peace and ready to die.

As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became harder to find, and then less important. Grief became easier, death became lighter.

As I deepened my investigation into the nature of my own experience, I started to realize that "I" do not exist in the way that I originally assumed, and I started to wonder what we're even talking about when we talk about death. Who or what is dying?

The self, time, and consciousness are not well-understood in philosophy, science, or the experience of most people, and as such, most conversations about immortality are really about something else.

Palomides3• 8 months ago

that seems like a circular justification

if my body and mind were falling apart and all my friends/family went before me maybe I'd be ready... but I see that as a huge argument in favor of immortality since I want people I care about to be alive and healthy

tern3• 8 months ago

justification for/of what?

XorNot• 8 months ago

For me, the biggest tell was how frequently older people report feeling completely at peace and ready to die.

That's because it's inevitable and at that point they've been sick or infirm for years to decades.

No one has run the real experiment because they can't: put that person in the body of a healthy 20 year old and see if they still feel that way. Except we already kind of know the answer because we regard being suicidal in your 20s as mental illness.

tern3• 8 months ago

That's because it's inevitable and at that point they've been sick or infirm for years to decades.

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the experiment would be interesting indeed.

bigstrat2003• 8 months ago

As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became harder to find, and then less important. Grief became easier, death became lighter.

This has been my experience as well. When I was 20, I couldn't understand why someone would be ready to die outside of extreme illness or depression. Now, at 40, I am beginning to understand. I'm not ready to die yet, but I can envision myself being there someday. This world is tiring and I can understand how a person would reach the point where they welcome an end to their story.

moralestapia• 8 months ago

There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing.

Tell me you're from the US without telling you're from the US. They're always keen to police over other people's lives, it's so noticeable when you're not from that culture.

As with almost every other "controversial" topic, the answer to this one is: let people who want to die, die, and let people who want to live, live.

drhagen• 8 months ago

A funny thing I realized: immortality is incompatible with spending a nonzero fraction of my life with children.

I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal, this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100% of my life.

You may think I could start again every 100 or 1000 or million years, but if a nonzero fraction of people did that, that would be exponential growth. Even ignoring resource constraints, you cannot sustain exponential growth of any kind in a 3D universe.

A universe with kids necessitates a universe with death.

card_zero• 8 months ago

Yes, but why do people treasure time spent with their kids so much, expressing the feeling in revelatory terms - why this addiction to reproduction, the thing that perpetuates the genes that might cause the feeling? It's suspicious.

tolerance• 8 months ago

I want to see more writing like this in Century 21.5

zebomon• 8 months ago

The author's argument seems to be a practical one and two-part: 1) without death, there's nothing to motivate us to live life well and 2) unless we live life well, there's no point in living.

I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.

Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging, someday there will be children who have never known another world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that permeated the societies of their past.

roxolotl• 8 months ago

I think the point is a bit more nuanced and has to do with the authors conception of the self. He argues that even if you got immortality and lived a great life at some point You would stop being You so you might as well have died anyways. I think it’s a bit silly. But if you believe that enough alteration of the self results in its death, a sort of Self of Theseus, then I think it’s a consistent opinion.

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.

xeonmc• 7 months ago

jmward01• 8 months ago

We need to force change to encourage growth and exploration. "Science advances one funeral at a time" acknowledge this but that doesn't mean actual death is needed. We need to create strong systems that encourage forcing people, and processes, out in everything we do. Term limits, retirement, etc etc. Nothing should have a 'forever' clause to it because nothing is forever.

GMoromisato4• 8 months ago

This is like worrying about the sun going supernova after you've just discovered fire. Yes, eventually Earth will be reduced to a blackened cinder. And yes, if humans managed to live forever, there would be unforeseen (maybe bad) consequences.

If I get to live to 200, I still won't worry about it. If I get to live to 1,000, maybe I might start to think about it. Fortunately, by then, I will have had 1,000 years of experience to maybe come up with better answers than now.

Can you imagine the hubris of telling someone who has lived for 10,000 years that death is good because you can't think of what you'd do with that time?

Moreover no one is talking about making it impossible to die. No one is going to force you to live forever.

And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just don't want other people to live forever. They want to live in a world where other people die.

wat100002• 8 months ago

I'm in favor of improving longevity, but sometimes there is something to be said for other people dying. Imagine a world where Stalin was still alive and would remain so approximately forever.

I don't think this is a reason to avoid research on aging, but immortal dictators could certainly be a downside.

mrg3_20133• 8 months ago

Had a chuckle at the mention of Stalin. Made me think. I would also think, the evils would be the one who would badly want to live forever, if an option was presented.

polivier• 8 months ago

And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just don't want other people to live forever. They want to live in a world where other people die.

If one can make a good argument that people living forever would have too many downsides in the long run, one might reasonably not want others to live forever. This is similar to environmental policies. Even though one may not live through most downsides of current bad environmental policies, one may still want good environmental policies for the sake of their children.

GMoromisato4• 8 months ago

Sure, I agree with that. But at that point it becomes a philosophical/ethical argument: should we allow certain people to die (or even kill them) to benefit others?

There was a time (not even that long ago) when 50% of kids died before the age of 5. I can totally imagine people saying back then that this was the "natural order of things" and that allowing every kid to live would be disastrous to the environment.

My philosophy is that we should allow (and even enable) people to live as long as they want. I wish that were not controversial, but here we are.

Libidinalecon• 7 months ago

This is all such complete nonsense that I don't know why we should confine our imaginations.

My goal is not just death but I want to die and be reborn as an Egyptian pharaoh.

Those damn fools who don't want to die and be reborn as whatever they want to be!

murat124• 8 months ago

Everything that has a beginning has an end. It would be really cool to live until whenever and realize that given our poor capacity to recollect past events we humans are actually the goldfish of the universe. No death means you only remember hash of events that are so distant in your past which is basically how you felt. After some time of life you start to only remember your feelings without recollecting much details about the events.

bryanlarsen• 8 months ago

I think this is almost completely post-hoc rationalization.

It's a lot easier to accept death if you believe it's a natural, necessary, good thing. And since we're all going to die, this post-hoc rationalization makes us feel better.

moribvndvs• 8 months ago

Living long enough to see everything else die while pseudo-immortals try to fight entropy-particularly with the much worse coming consequences of human civilization borrowing heavily against the ecosystem- is a hell I don’t think I would want to see. Like the author, I’m not opposed to extending a bit, but… I suppose that’s a slippery slope. Today “just a little longer” seems reasonable, and then it will be just a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer after that. I suppose at some point after that you risk becoming little more than your dwindling ego, something of a lich lord or revenant jealously draining the world of life because you’re too afraid to admit: you don’t matter (no one does in the grand scheme of things) and the universe wasn’t designed for immortality or to appease your ego. In the more practical and nearer term, I fear life extension will be more a matter of trading quality of life simply to avoid dying, a form of life support. Doesn’t sound good to me.

slibhb• 8 months ago

Why the focus on immortality? I don't want to be immortal but I'd take a few thousand years.

That aside, I think longevity-skepticism is still mostly adaptive. I haven't seen any concrete progress and the people who are true believers are a. getting their hopes up and b. tend to be really gullible/easy to manipulate. We should ideally be skeptical enough to avoid those traps but hopeful enough to pursue genuinely promising research.

username135• 8 months ago

I try to live life by the following lyric:

All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.

Endeavor to touch and see everything. Therein, you'll discover quite a lot about you and all else.

netfortius2• 8 months ago

The part about retirement is total BS. I worked hard to FIRE in my mid 50s as I had already over 300 books still to read by then, min 20 countries I still wanted to visit, two additional languages to learn enough to be able to read in original some of the books not having been translated in the languages I already know, and update my physics and math college knowledge from when I was younger. None of this was possible while working. And quite a few years later I now have over 500 books left (the original ones had tons of references which expanded a lot of books to a few more), still places to see, even in countries which I crossed out from the original list, but I could not completely traverse, or languages not yet mastered to the level I need.

nice_byte• 8 months ago

I've had this experience a couple years ago where I had to go under for a sudden/unplanned surgery. It felt like I should be worried, but I realized that I was 100% ok with not waking up from that.

We already live so much further past what our lifespan "in the wild" would be. Even ~75yrs is already excruciatingly long. I don't understand people who want to prolong it even further.

delichon• 8 months ago

Widespread failure to die would cement culture in place, and the power structure. It necessarily would dramatically slow down cultural evolution, which strongly depends on funerals. Logan's Run had the right idea, just the wrong number. We old geezers must make way for civilization to effectively adapt to a changing environment.

Even if our lifespans become merely 200 years, imagine if the generation of the US Civil War era were still in power. Great age plus health equals social petrification.

alembic_fumes• 8 months ago

This comment section is for some reason filled with truly incredulous takes, with many seemingly all too willingly embracing the inevitability of personal oblivion awaiting us at the end of our lives. I wonder what solace it brings to entertain the paradox of dying as a way to bring life meaning, and where it ranks between whatever the local pastor or suburb's heroin dealer are peddling.

I suspect our education system is at fault. Too many children in the modern western society grow up completely isolated from philosophical thinking and the teachings of both ancient as contemporary philosophers. As a consequence they never get exposure to the various deep, tragic, hilarious, and most-of-all diverse ways that we as humans have tried to build meaning into our fleeting lives, triumphant or struggling.

To me, this quote from the article best showcases the status quo:

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.

If you agree with that, I cannot stop you. But maybe I can shake you just a little with a different, more individualistic viewpoint:

Whatever life you have, in whatever circumstances, is the one and only life that you do have. The way it has been is the only way that it can ever be, but the future is whatever you make of it, and it cannot be anything else.

Whatever you experience in life, is all that there is to experience. If you yourself don't climb a mountain, you will never know what climbing that mountain is like. And if you hear a tree fall in a forest but then forget about it, it no longer has made a sound.

Nobody else can do this experiencing for you: much like you didn't directly experience your parents' lives, your children won't directly experience yours. But as long as you yourself are alive, you get to experience your parents and children through the only single way that you can: through yourself.

And so to accept death for yourself is to accept the end of all experience that has ever been. It is to accept death not only yourself, but also for your parents, children, all the climbed mountains and sounds of fallen trees, and all life and the universe itself. For once the one singular entity in the entire universe that has been capable of experiencing is gone, it's as if nothing had ever existed.

So try to stick around and keep experiencing? There really isn't, and hasn't ever been, anything else.

Post-mortem survivalists may disagree.

trimethylpurine• 7 months ago

If it wasn't necessary it wouldn't have been selected for, having nothing to do with the philosophical or spiritual significance. Those species that didn't age became extinct because their genetic pools were too slow and stagnant to adapt to environmental circumstances or non-adaptive altogether. Both of which are terminal at the species level. Evolution doesn't favor the survival of the fittest individual. It favors the continuation of life, generally.

That's been my concern; that solving mortality for individuals might be a death sentence for the species.

skissane5• 7 months ago

Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?

igor473• 7 months ago

Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in

bluefirebrand3• 7 months ago

That doesn't sound like immortality to me

It might look like immortality to outside observers, but I don't see how it is the same thing

Any process that could theoretically allow me to exist at the same time as my future self must clearly not be me anymore

So any kind if "mind backup" is a copy. A clone with a copy of my memories absolutely cannot be me. We would somehow need to be able to transfer my consciousness into a clone body

It seems very likely to me that consciousness is actually a side effect of a physical network in the brain and cannot actually be separated from the biological brain to move to an artificial brain

mrandish• 7 months ago

it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play

Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup.

People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.

leethargo• 7 months ago

And we know how reliable normies are with the backup of their personal data...

skissane5• 7 months ago

Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species.

Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?”

Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?

roenxi2• 7 months ago

To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity.

Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of it.

strogonoff2• 7 months ago

We don’t know what we don’t know.

sungho_2• 7 months ago

You are confusing ‘thinking it is possible’ with 'being certain of it.'

jmogly• 7 months ago

Eh I’ll take my 78, someone else can have the rest.

summermusic• 7 months ago

If you have an evening to burn, 17776 by Jon Bois[0] is a surprisingly captivating multimedia story/project about this topic. It speculates about a future Earth where people have been immortal for thousands of years and explores what happens through the lens of absurd football games. Previously discussed on HN in 2017[1].

[0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714607

npodbielski4• 7 months ago

they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.

How is that a bad thing? Are you the same person you were when you were 15? Of course not. Is it the case for when you were 20 or 30? No. The whole point of living is to learn, gather new experiences and grow. Would you stop doing that because you are immortal? No.

I think author is caught too much in his work whatever it is. Me, personnally would love to meet my grandkids and their kids. Learn and try do new things for dozens of years.

Would this be bad to see the wolrd or even other worlds if we could be able to visit other planets?

I think the main problem is that people are getting old and unhealthy. My grandpa was living for 92 years and I saw that he is miserable. He was fine mentally but his body was failing him. Imagine getting up in the morning and everything hurts. You try to go to the bathroom but your hand are shaking. That is the problem.

At some point you just do not want to live anymore. Because it is just suffering.

Paratoner2• 7 months ago

for dozens of years

Yeah, that's not eternity. And if you read the article at all you'd know the argument is not against life extension, it's about having constraints, horizons, and deadlines to give meaning and urgency to things.

npodbielski4• 7 months ago

I read it. And this argument is plain silly. Does a kid feels urgency of immediate death? Did you when you were sixteen?

Like the only thing keeping people all around the world going would be though that they are going to die and they need to do as much as they can before that. This is just radicoulous.

If people would be immortal they would just lie down and die because there is no point in leaving! People die on their retirement because they have nothing to work on! And author need the deadline to actually do some work! Those arguments sounds like rants of workaholic with procrastination problems. By the gods! If I would live forever I would live for 200 hundred years in one place and build water mile and garden. The move to some beach and learn surfing. And then maybe I would built a boat and move to another continent. Learn climbing. And then fencing. And then maybe I would join university and become math proffesor. Or join rock band. Or just knit some socks for grandkids. Possibilities are endless.

spongebobism• 7 months ago

> they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.
How is that a bad thing?

The point isn't that it's bad, but that it's equivalent to dying and then someone else taking your place. So if it's OK for your character to change fundametally over the span of your life, then it must also be OK for you to die at some point and yield the stage to the next generation.

npodbielski4• 7 months ago

This is like arguing that you die in your sleep and in the morning you are another person.

lencastre• 7 months ago

the 1973 essay can’t be found on that link, maybe provide an alternative :-/

_nobody_ needs to die, even assuming quality of living is maintained with age, and that one can live 1000s of years, that decision belongs to the self /jk

srsly, how is this an issue if everything in the Universe eventually dies, why wouldn’t we?

mock-possum• 7 months ago

What do you mean ‘we’

I don’t identify with anything written here.

Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?

because I want to. Don’t you have things you want to do? Don’t you have desires? I don’t want to do it tomorrow, I want to do it now.

When everything is possible, and nothing is urgent, with no real consequences for time misspent, what do you even care about?

Same thing I care about now - seeking pleasure. There are so many positive, enjoyable, pleasant, pleasureable, exciting, thrilling, gratifying, enlightening, edifying, joyful, enriching, uplifting experiences - I could spend a lifetime pursuing them and never even come close to enjoying them all. Even if I had a thousand lifetimes, by the time I finally finished off the list I started with, there would be exponentially more that had been added since I started.

In all honesty, reading this, I think something is wrong with the author. He does not love life the way he ought to, and that’s a shame, and I resent that he’d project that weakness, as if it’s somehow insightful or laudable or applicable to me.

blargey2• 7 months ago

The headline argument hinges on the size of infinities to assert that you'll run out of goals to live for eventually, and thus will eventually become vacuous and despondent over an infinite timeline. But this reliance on infinities is also why they cannot propose a concrete age limit for the Logan's Run Law their gut so desires. May that remain the case for infinity.

Some counter-shower-thoughts:

Are children's lives vacuous and despondent? They have no sense of mortality, no sense of limits, no comprehension even of the fleeting nature of their childhood, and honestly they aren't really striving for a goal the way an Everest climber, or even the average salaried worker, is. Maybe there's more to the meaning of life than striving towards a lofty-yet-grounded-and-pinpoint goal?

Are dogs and cats given longer legal lifespans than humans because they seem happy enough without this vaunted sense of mortality and strife?

Why are Everest summiters or retirees left without goals to strive for, when they've only achieved one or less? That's tangential to Williams' proposition! Is it not because they have too little time left before their "dead"line to forge and pursue a new one, particularly given the toll of aging on mind and body? That seems like the opposite of the point the author's trying to prove.

_zagj• 7 months ago

Reminds me of the "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size" nonsense that went right out the window as soon as Ozempic became widely available. You can bet these people will, hypocritically, show no less eagerness than anyone else to use the first treatments to slow or reverse aging when they arrive.

And notice, these aging apologia are always written from the perspective of someone who hasn't had to actually deal first-hand with the worst consequences aging has to offer. It's never a chronically sleep-deprived caregiver tending to a parent with a neurodegenerative disease who needs assistance with basic tasks like getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, and dressing themselves. This guy, from his bio, did a few startups, and now does market research, and impudently thinks he has "wisdom" or "life lessons" to give.

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?

Caregivers have already deferred everything indefinitely, because they have no choice. And the "deadlines" of aging he celebrates are easily just as demotivating; e.g., after a certain point, why bother going back to college for that PhD, or learning Mandarin? You'll be too old by the time you're done.

Lorin• 7 months ago

Anyone else see the irony of someone named Grey being pro immortality?

tim333• 7 months ago

Why We Need to Die
[because without death], we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?

is a pretty lame reason for everyone to die. Maybe the author is depressed and wants the threat of death to get stuff done but I like doing things.

Garlef• 7 months ago

About as deep as the lyrics of the highlander theme song. But with more fancy words.

poulpy123• 7 months ago

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.

Sorry but that's hilariously wrong. If it was true life expectancy would have decreased with the lowering of age of retirement, but we saw the reverse over the last century.

Mortality spikes after retirement because we are reaching our end of life after retirement,

As for the main thesis, I actually changed my mind over the years. While I wanted (and sometimes felt !) to be immortal when I was young, now that I'm old, sick and tired and that a lot of family and some friends are already dead, I'm much less eager to live eternally.

pastapliiats• 7 months ago

Anybody who isn't a dweeb like Johnson could probably enjoy an infinite life

ismailmaj• 7 months ago

I find it a bit too introspective, living in a specific period creates urgency, there is still a (opportunity) deadline.

My concerns are more practical:

- How do we make sure power-wrestling bad leaders don't halt generations, currently old age gives us a soft reset.

- How do we cope with suffering? With no clear end in sight I expect more mental health problems. And I'm unsure we can remove those issues without striping the humanity out of people, I would for sure hate to be turned into a calculator with qualia.

voidmain• 7 months ago

I find these arguments unconvincing. But I do think that as an immortal it would be very difficult and painful to adapt to the changes in society and its values over time as an immortal. Eventually you must either join some isolated group like the Amish or else betray everything you love and believe in, over and over and over again, because whatever you think is important, the future will despise and forget it, while inventing new values incomprehensible to you now. Probably I am too opinionated to happily live even a normal human lifetime, but it's hard to imagine anyone so easygoing that a few thousand years of changes wouldn't leave them homeless.

toss1• 7 months ago

A SciFi book I read decades ago where the premise was that aging had been broken, had insights that still stick with me. The character of a young woman 28 years old who pretended to be 105 to seem more interesting to people. That when people got to be 400-500 years old and had been through a dozen careers, they started getting bored and taking up high-risk activities (skydiving, etc.).

I remember little else (I wish I could to find it and read it again), but those shifts of perspective seem entirely plausible and revealing of how we look at life.

The biggest reason we need to die, or create entirely different power structures, is to ensure no one can amass resources and power to rule forever. However bad a psychotic despot is, at least now, death will come collect him. Imagine an effective eternity with Putin and the oligarchs as your country's leader, just getting better and better at impoverishing the country for their own gain.

coldtea• 7 months ago

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.

There's a popular cope answer to this "that wont be the case with me".

But unless you already have either a concrete footing in enjoying the small things in life just for themselves, or a greater mission that falls outside the line of work you'll retire from (like being an activist, or a hobbyist programmer or musician or something), then it absolutely will be the case.

keycon• 7 months ago

This article says that our limited time on Earth encourages us to be ourselves. That our eventual death is necessary for our ambitions, desires, and accomplishments (which then produce a concept of Self) and that those things are what make life worth living.

I would argue that how you view yourself is not what makes life worth living. Life is enjoyable and peaceful without desire or identity. Wanting to extend your life isn't a maladaptation. Your identity--maybe as a software developer, or as a good romantic partner, or as a virtuous person--is the real maladaptation. It results in attachment and thus eventual suffering. If you get fired from your software developer job, your ego takes a hit. If you get into a fight with your partner, you feel indignant.

You really don't need an identity to love one another or ambition to do hard things. We have an inner drive to be creative completely outside of how we view ourselves. We feel love naturally. You'll enjoy life without desires or Self.

css_apologist• 7 months ago

Similar to knowing when to call it quits as a director, i see lifespan the same

I much prefer a beautiful arc to a drawn out, translucent life

your comment reeks of fear of fear of death, a yearning for permanent enlightenment, and an inability to feel the every day pain of life

port11• 7 months ago

That's the kind of lovely feeling I get out of an acid trip, but that doesn't translate as well into daily life. This view of the ego as the enemy, and Ego Death as the Enlightenment, doesn't get us anywhere other than fighting ourselves, I'm sorry.

estimator7292• 7 months ago

Sounds like someone just entered their midlife crisis and is presently in the nihlism stage of acceptance

qgin• 7 months ago

People who think our short lifespans are important because they give meaning to life never seem to want to shorten their lives in order to maximize meaning.

Never dying ever is definitely a weird thing to consider, but that's not possible even theoretically. Eventually all the energy in the Universe will reach maximum entropy and nothing will be alive.

But I am very suspicious of anyone who is sure that 75 years is the optimal meaning-to-lifespan ratio.

gaigalas• 7 months ago

Memento Mori with extra steps.

(surprising that the text doesn't mention it)

decafninja• 7 months ago

I’m Christian, and believe in the afterlife. Supposedly heaven will be incomprehensible awesome.

However I feel nonetheless there is so much awesomeness to experience here on this earthly realm too, and too little time even in a perfectly “good” life to take it all in. Even if someone’s life starting from birth to death at a ripe old age happens to fall perfectly min-maxed in place served with a silver spoon.

Borrible• 7 months ago

"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

Susan Ertz. Anger in the Sky. Hodder & Stoughton. 1943

dartharva2• 7 months ago

I agree. I feel that the more we start looking into human enhancement and "fighting against death" we will explore hitherto unknown balances and equilibria in our bodies and nature that may prove to be destructive if disturbed.

When we age after reaching peak adulthood, for example, we see that our bodies lose their strength and our brains dull down. We aren't as ambitious and energetic anymore and get more lethargic. This understandably leads to everyone dreading it and getting up in arms against it (as with Bryan Johnson et al), but what if all this "decline" is actually an innate adaptive defense mechanism to handle and cope with the volume of experience we accumulate over the years? What if our bodies deteriorating as we get old actually has a neglected reason behind it that pertains to the individual too, not just nature? If we were to hypothetically make someone immortal, and if that immortal human were left in the real current world to live out without ageing, what if they actually miss something very crucial to help cope with environments that no longer grow in sync with themselves and eventually become something non-human?

Eastern notions of non-duality - especially Laozi and the Dao - could be useful in these thought experiments. They point out that life and death are not opposites but are states of the same being, and if you were to remove one (death), you'll automatically cease the other (life) from existing.

pyuser5832• 7 months ago

It’s so weird people are talking about immorality being bad without discussing the affect on child rearing and family structure.

Are we going to be fertile our entire lives? Interesting the topic doesn’t come up much. But let’s say we are.

My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (etc) are still alive and producing more siblings, aunts/uncles, etc.

The phrase aunt/uncle would no longer have age implications. In terms of caregiving, my wife, mom, and grandmother might all be pregnant and raising kids at the same time.

In practice, the family tree would be flattened.

Organizations would have similar issues. I’d have to compete against developers with 500 years experience. Even with respecialization, some skills transfer.

If Shakespeare were still alive would we have an Oscar Wilde? Would it matter, since Homer is around too?

In that regard, what language would we be speaking? There are quite a few Ancient Greek speakers still kicking I guess. But Enheduanna is still here too, chanting her Babylonian Hymns to Inana on the synth I guess.

scotty792• 7 months ago

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.

We are the sum of the roles we play. It's no wonder that people who reject their roles in search of their authentic self often end up as shriveled version of their inner asshole, now it being the only thing for other people to see.

We Need to Die

Related Stories