Eternal Life is Possible

When I was a kid I remember hearing about Qin Shi Huang who was believed to have died from drinking mercury while chasing immortality. The pharaohs of Egypt were given monuments to their existence and servants to go with them into the eternal afterlife. Modern religions teach about their own version of the afterlife and the billionaires of today make news headlines when they talk about their own quest for immortality. For millennia, the influential sectors of the human race have been talking about the quest to live forever. This leads to the creation of diet plans and skin care to keep our faces youthful. This leads to exercise plans and advancements in medical technology that delay the onset of broken bodies and the effects of mutant cells.

I get it, Death sucks. Both my parents have punched their timecards and bother times were awful, grief-filled experiences that I wouldn’t want to repeat. Death is so final and there is always something you want to ask later or a set of stories that dies along with them. Those lost stories end up being a bee-sting-like reminder that they are gone. Death is terrible and I haven’t even mentioned our own mortality. Experiencing the loss of a loved one is 1 out of 5 stars, don’t recommend it. Our own death is 0 out of 5 stars but there are no reviews, so take that with a grain of salt.

Why don’t we find a way to beat death?

Tom Scott released a video that made me think about this and the meaning of death. Tom Scott didn’t want to get into the ethics of this discussion because he says he isn’t a philosopher, but I pretend to be one on Philosophy Phridays so why not explore this idea?

I think we are so preoccupied with the end of our lives that we forget what we are supposed to do with our lives in the present. The procedure in the video requires a $200,000 payment at the “end” of the subject’s life. The names of those mentioned in the first paragraph are not the kind of names that were worried about a mortgage payment or where their next meal was coming from. Eternal life is a rich person’s game and it has a trickle-down effect on everyone else. It has an effect because we like to consume the stories of those who live forever or live for a long time. Vampires, trips to the “undying lands”, pirates looking for eternal fountains, and fantasy characters that live for hundreds if not thousands of years demonstrate that we like to consume stories about long lifetimes.

In the real world, there are trickle-down effects on how regular people spend their money in their own pursuit of eternal life. The longevity industry is expected to be a $420b industry before the end of the decade. I see that dollar figure and I wonder, are the memories we can build during our life worth more than the dollar spent on trying to delay hair loss, crow’s feet, disease, or the ultimate, death?

While we are busy trying to keep our physical bodies alive and “presentable” for as long as possible, are we missing out on a better form of immortality?

Eternal life is much more achievable if we approach life trying to make the most of the time we have vs trying to extend the latter years of the time we’ve got. I would posit that this is what the ownership class would prefer from the masses. When the masses look at the end of their lives as the thing they want to extend, this comes with the implication they have spent a lifetime working and adding value to society. Youth and prime years of life are paid to the chase for education, income, growing families, and the search for a place in the world.

Eternal Life is possible if we build a memorable life for ourselves and the people we build connections. Achilles had the right idea when he was chasing immortality. No one will remember the boy who doesn’t want to fight and make a name for himself. I’m not suggesting it takes violence to be remembered. I’m suggesting that the thing that makes us immortal is our story and the way it is told. We have the opportunity during our lifetime to tell our own story and influence the way it will be told after we are gone.

I watch the cryogenics video and it plucks the string of disappointment in humanity. What are those people chasing? Sadly, I think it comes down to spending more time with the stuff and the money they were able to accumulate over the course of their lives. If their families want to visit them, children and grandchildren are faced with a cold steel drum. Sure, there are those who want to spend another afternoon with their loved ones, but this gets to where I ultimately want to go with this essay, leaving your loved ones behind will be painful, but we should strive to leave them behind with the stories of a life well lived rather than the chase for a life we think wasn’t good enough to call complete.

There are lots of ways to leave behind our own stories. How you choose to do so is up to you and the means to which you have access. This is the meaning of being present at all times in your life. What are the moments of joy you experience? What are the lessons you gain throughout the journey of life and how are you documenting those lessons? How do you teach the next generation to find those moments of joy you once experienced yourself?

I journal my experience of life and what it feels like to be living in this time of the world’s history. I asked my Dad once what it was like for those living in England during the Blitz in World War II. He wasn’t yet alive but he had an insight I had never considered as a kid. “When you’re fighting for your home, life-risking decisions are easier to make.” I think about that often about the idea that the world we experience has a big role in the way we make our decisions and how we see the world.

To use a modern example, I took notes on what it was like to watch a global pandemic be the only thing on the news before there was a vaccine and compare that to how I felt when I watched the movie Outbreak. The first 12 seconds of this video lived rent-free in my mind for most of 2020. I don’t know what eternity has in store for my story but I believe immortality is possible in forms that are more meaningful than physical presence.

I don’t want to end on a somber note; this essay is long enough and let’s be honest, we are talking about the end of our lives. Death is a sad event. Think of this as the initial shift in the way we view the story that carries on. There may be a future where our physical self does not age. Since that is not, as Tom Scott notes in his video, the case today, maybe we should look at alternatives in the chase of Eternal Life?