Is It Good to Grow Old?
“I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” — Albert Einstein
It was in Einstein’s mid seventies when doctors attempted to commit him to a second surgery addressing an aortic rupture, and he staunchly defended his desire to die with that quote. To many of us, that’s an astonishing request, and something which I imagine very few of us would make. To live as long as possible, as healthily as possible, is society’s overarching goal. We argue and fight and struggle, generally speaking, to live.
So it was with an eyebrow raised that I read the story of Laura Demingwhile perusing the Thiel Fellowship. Her aim? To Cure Aging, at the very least, to extend our youthful lifespan by a hundred or two hundred years. It’s pretty brilliant, actually: We face rampant heart disease and cancer as we get older, so the solution is to just not get older, at least and especially until we find solutions for those and other problems—but by then, why age at all?
While this sounds like a really great thing on the surface—who doesn’t want to live longer in the flower of youth?—I’ve begun to develop two concerns to this, which I want to work through: 1) If people rarely have to cope with either the idea of Death or Aging as it relates to them, or Death and Aging around them, relegating it to the arena of fable, what does that do to the human soul? And 2) How might society actually deal with the phenomenon of having people continue to give birth by normal standards (in their twenties to forties), but live for at least ten times longer?
Curing aging does not necessarily mean Not Dying, so I’ll address both: the need to experience the loss associated with aging, and the need to feel, see, understand, and edge ever-closer to Death, until we ourselves experience it.
“While we live, let us live.” — Catullus
Let’s go ahead and imagine a world in which your average man lives for a few hundred years or more. (The argument that someone can still die, if not by aging, holds, but tenuously, considering how far we’ve come as far as safety is concerned, so I think we can reasonably assume that Death is a pipe dream for the paranoid. And, regarding the issue of war, we’ll assume, due to the overwhelming force of the weaponry in this future, and the continued nature of a volunteer army, that war is an activity of M.A.D, and few will see it or be exposed to it, so it, too, is for the paranoid.) What does a man like that have to look forward to?
Well, if his mentality is becoming of what we see today, then we can expect more apathy. It is a well-known fact that people prefer to do what is easiest, and not what makes them happy. With the average television in the US on six hours and forty seven minutes a day as of 2013, and the use of Facebook, Tumblr, etc. growing ever higher, it seems safe to say that with time in equal demand, but in far greater supply, things will pretty much stay as they are. (Perhaps people will either go insane from the monotony or finally force themselves to do something great. Either option is better than the couch potato.)
The pressure of “not having lived life to the fullest” is what compels our desire to be better, it seems to me. If I can just be better ‘tomorrow’ (as many believe, and just as many end up being deceived about today), why not wait? All objects are naturally inclined towards maintaining uniform motion, human habit included. And what a thought!—what are the effects of a habit which is three hundred fifty years old? How can you possibly argue with a Republican, or a Democrat, who believes what he’s believed for more than three centuries?
But suppose you’re a thoughtful, caring individual who would genuinely rejoice at every new day you get, every new great-great-great-grandchild born, every new world event watched with tremendous interest: would not we—and the world—benefit from having us live for many years longer? Perhaps; but I wonder if even we would begin to lose perception of our days, of their meaning, of what we can really do in this life. It turns out, time moves faster for us the older we get, so moving through the years will render us apparently incapable of processing what’s going on in the way that we can in our youth or middle-age today. How much novelty can we experience in a life-time before novelty itself begins to lose its power and meaning, even for us? And how long before our minds become cluttered with old memories, with history, with facts, such that we’ll no longer be able to see the new as if it’s fresh. We’ll be stuck in the past, with our friends who are also stuck in the past, making no new headway.
But there’s something else: those of us who are thoughtful owe it to ourselves to experience, understand, and reflect upon loss, especially upon our own mortality, not just as an intellectual exercise, which we’re perfectly capable of doing, but on a truly deep level, so that we can fully discover who we are. It’s impossible to access, I believe, the deepest parts of ourselves without aging, without seeing our faculties slowly exit. Reflection is a tool you use or lose, and the urgency of certain experiences forces us to gaze at those things which are painful to us in a really important way. And the only thing, it seems to me, which is ultimately painful to begin with, and ultimately worth understanding, is non-being. We fear being rejected because that’s a sort of death for us, but if we live for many years, rejections feel transient, so we don’t have to cope with them or understand them on the same level. That is, assuming that we eventually learn to be emotionally healthy in the way a two hundred year old man ought to be, whatever that looks like.
I feel reluctant to say, in truth, that we’ll be able to really grow and relish life if we live as long as Laura would like us to. What about Society? How would it deal?
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” — Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
I’d like to ask if you can imagine Henry Ford still around running Ford, or Andrew Jackson still running for President today, or Rockefeller still keeping hold on oil. How would the new generations, who attempt to change the way things are, do in those attempts? It’s too easy to imagine each new generation, trying their hand in the fight to improve the world as they see it, descending quickly into apathy, innovation suppressed, and struggles silenced. How can it be otherwise? The only way to fix such an absurd, insane situation is,—death, but in this case by artificial means. If it can’t be done legally, or naturally, then it will be done illegally. Yes,—I am proposing that society will resort to a much grander black market than currently exists, which deals only with Death.
If that sounds as crazy to you as it does to me, I say only that I can’t imagine another way. If the duality of nature can’t be met naturally, then it’ll be done by artificial means. This alone is more than enough for us to push the idea of two hundred years of life away. But what about the culture of such a city? I haven’t quite thought that aspect of it through, especially since it’s such a big question and I didn’t intend for this to be so comprehensive, so if and when I think of something, I’ll come back to expand this part. Suffice it to say that it can’t be that great. There’s a reason why every major religion has spoken out against the idea of eternal life.
I’m aware that against both aging and dying, especially as we begin to experience the former and see the latter, we have a visceral, emotional reaction: That, whatever my reason dictates, it bows before the tyrannical desire to live within me; and yet, I have this hunch that to die is the right thing, that we were not designed to live forever, or be young forever, or even stay as we are for a hundred or two hundred years longer. We have a limit, and artificially lengthening it will create problems which no one today can foresee.
I’d like to believe of us that we’ll be ready for death when it comes, if we’re forced to face it; but what sort of people will we become if we never have to face inevitable, unshakable loss, or our own end? What sort of hubris as a society will we develop? Do we want to be those people? We mock government institutions for having immunity against lawsuits, for not having the pressure put against them in the way a corporation does; do we want to be that, also? Do we really want to be our own sovereign?
If it does turn out that there’s a cure to aging, and a cure to dying, I pray I’ll be brave enough to see what the effects of such a policy on my own life may be, and take the mortal route.