So You Want to Live Forever?

2100 words, 9 minute read

If you’ve always craved immortality, your time has come at last…maybe! A group of individuals who call themselves Vitalists believe that death per se is humanity’s core problem. And just like that, I’m back in middle school! 

Influencer Bryan Johnson, for example, speaks of plans to create a new religion in which “the (human) body is God.” At last, God made in our image and likeness! “Who’s a thunk it?” (Hairspray)

Recently, Johnson added psychedelics to his “God is us” tool lit. No, it’s not psilocybin or LSD; it’s venom from the Bufo Toad.  And you don’t smoke it, snort it, or shoot it; you lick it! Right off of the back of your new favorite amphibian. How fun is that! 

Caveat: The licked frog does not turn into a member of the royal family. “A lick is not a kiss,” apparently. However, you may find yourself living in a palace…or you may find that your current residence is in fact already a palace. Ain’t life grand…sometimes.

Molecule 5-MeO-DMT, the ‘active ingredient’ in the venom, is a potential double bagger for Johnson: it reveals our spiritual divinity and it promotes our physical immortality.           

12

f(x) = -------- - 4

4-x

This is how it looks on a graph.   

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And Vitalism is gaining ground worldwide! A popup city in Montenegro (Zuzalu, 2023) was created by people who wanted to establish a “longevity state”—a jurisdiction dedicated to lifespan extension, which would also facilitate access to unproven but potentially life-extending drugs. 

A similar effort in Próspera, Honduras, has created a permissive environment for biotech companies to perform unusual clinical trials. ZuVillage in Georgia (the country, not the state); and Zelar City in Berlin (Germany, not NH), offer their own spin on the original formula. And every May, ‘Vitalist Bay’ pops up somewhere in the SF area.

Putting the dubious science of immortality to one side for now, does the more realistic goal of ‘life extension’ make sense? “Of course it does,” you say. “Who doesn’t want to live as long as possible?” Well, you do, apparently; but most people don’t – but that’s another subject for another day.

Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem. The problem? We don’t heed our own advice. We behave as though prior results do guarantee future performance. At 20 we cannot be convinced that we will not live forever. And who can blame us? The first twenty years went by so slowly that 80/20 → ∞. Subjectively, time seems inexhaustible. But even the first 20 years can be misleading: the second 10 years go by faster than the first. 

20 years of adult living corrects our perspective: 80/40 = 2, but then 80/50 = 1 and 80/80 → 0. Believe it or not, this bizarre scenario can be expressed by a very simple mathematical function (where f(x) = subjective life span and x = the ratio of ‘average life span’ to ‘years lived’):

12

f(x) = ---------- - 4

4 - x

This is what it looks like on a graph.

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Riddle me this: What do you and I have in common with every other human being who’s ever lived? Don’t say ‘death’ because death is not something we have; in fact death is defined precisely as the absence of an I (or we). I don’t have my own death, and I certainly don’t have yours. 

According to Pop Wisdom, death is one stage in the process we call ‘life’. It isn’t! Death is the limit of life, not an aspect of it. Just as Achilles is forever infinitesimally short of the finish line, so you are always short of being dead. You cannot ‘be dead’ and be you; therefore you cannot experience death. The sentence ‘I am dead’ (or even ‘I will die’) is oxymoronic. So your 20 year old self was right after all.

For Achilles to break the tape, or for you to be dead, it is necessary to employ a computational trick called Calculus. Fortunately, the real world doesn’t obey the conventions of arithmetic. Less fortunately, when I explained this to Sister Mary Martha in 3rd grade, I got something other than the Fields medal I was expecting. 

No, the correct answer is not death. Give up then? Ok, here goes: “Every human being who’s ever lived had, has, or will have a lifespan of one day…or less.”  No, not all at the same time!

Someday it will happen that you will have a lifespan of one day or less (of course you almost certainly won’t know it at the time). Most of us believe we have lifespans of more than one day. But no one born alive fails to have a life span of ‘one day…or less’ at some point in the course of their lives.

Of course, by now you’ve realized that there’s nothing sacrosanct about one day: it’s just a placeholder. It would be equally true to say that every human being has a life span of ‘one second or less’…or ‘one millennium or less’. Whatever, it’s always true!

When it suits us, we think of periods of time as if they were beads on a string, one day following the next ad nauseum. But time is more like the Tower of Babel: each floor rests on the floor beneath it. Your top floor penthouse is essentially the sum of all the floors (and their occupants) below. “Enjoy…and don’t worry about all the folks you had to climb over to get to the top.”  

Although the circumstances of our births may differ, O Prince, the being born of it is the same for both of us…and for every other human being that ever lives. We diverge from a shared singularity into a solitary multiplicity, from undifferentiated potentiality into unique actuality. I am other than others. I am not not! YHWH (Exodus 3: 14): “I am what am” = “I am not what’s not.”

The circumstances of our deaths may differ too. You may die, surrounded by loved ones with flights of angels singing you to your rest; I may bleed out in a ditch somewhere, waiting in vain for a good Samaritan to rescue me. Regardless, in the end we will once again be equal, identical, one. The becoming dead of it is the same for both of us.  

So ‘being born’ we diverge and live out our respective lifespans in perfect isolation only to remerge when ‘becoming dead’. Being born and becoming dead are limits and we all converge toward those limits, i.e. that common singularity. Shorter lifespans continually succeed longer ones; gradually, lifespan differentials (actually all identifying differentials) collapse as we approach singularity. 

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My life is defined by its limits: I am by I am not. What is ‘being’ but not-not-being? Once upon a time I did not exist and someday I will exist no longer. You too! In between our birth day and our death day we will each have what we call ‘a life’, and every such life is radically unique (i.e. no elements in common). But, as our respective lifespans shorten, our common fate begins to eclipse our unique experience.

Two prayers are at the foundation of Roman Catholic spirituality: the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. In the latter, we pray to ‘Mary, Mother of God’, asking her to ‘pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’. 

The hour of our death is always now and every now is that hour. Nothing else matters. What is not that hour lies in the past; the present is always the hour. Everything else, every other ‘then or when’, is just so much window dressing. 

There is but one birth and one death and every human being (certain mystical figures potentially excepted) approaches both as her limit. At the end of all process (doxa) is identity (Aletheia) – Parmenides. 

At the beginning and at the end we are not just equal, we are identical (but of course we are no longer we); and if we are identical, then we are one, i.e. a single entity. The limit of every unique ‘I’ is a common ‘not-I’. There is but one ‘not-I’ but every ‘not-not-I’ is unique.

You and I are entangled organisms (like ‘entangled particles’ in Bell’s Quantum Mechanics). Birth is like Big Bang, death Big Crunch (or Big Freeze). Between these universal Bigs, each of us lives ‘my so-called life’. No two lives are the same. In fact, no two lives have even a single element (event) in common, but all lives diverge from and converge toward a common limit. Exception: God is an element of every life.

The Intellectual History of Planet Earth consists primarily of the search for analogies across individual lives…and of course analogies abound - they form the basis of language, art, and culture - but there are no identities (other than being born and becoming dead).

So you and I are the same; in fact we are disjoint projections of a single noumenon. Yet we have nothing in common; we do not intersect, i.e. we share no experiences. From the moment of birth each of us lives out a totally unique, subjectively isolated life…right up to the moment of death, comforted – and alienated - by our reflection as seen in the billions of surrounding mirrors we call ‘other people’. 

All of which makes the contemporary Vitalist movement especially perplexing. I mean, life extension to what end? Live an hour or less, live a century or more, ultimately you share a common (albeit infinitesimal, i.e. instantaneous) lifespan with every other human being who has ever lived. 

The arrow of mortality goes in one direction only. Shorter lifespans continually replace longer ones as all lifespans converge toward non-entity. All of our experiences converge at a featureless infinitesimal point at the cusp of death, i.e. on the event horizon of the singularity.

And what of our ‘lives’? Do they count for nothing? Just so…unless you believe that experience somehow transcends death. No matter how varied our lives may have been, dying is the ultimate leveler. The limit of self is not-self (or ‘other’). My life is different from yours only in so far as my differentiating experiences survive. 

Any experience, by definition, must differ from an alternative (real or imagined). Those aspects of being that are common to all (e.g. mortality) are not ‘experienced’; they are simply the human condition. Difference is a prerequisite for experience.

But suppose Being is democratic and flat, as Nietzsche theorized: “One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…but nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols) 

Nothing exists apart from the whole! Then any differences are ephemeral and we are not just entangled but virtual as well. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Dreams can be complex experiences, crammed full of action and emotion and inter-personal relationships, yet within a second of waking up, all that has vanished without consequence and often without memory. If being is ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson) then dreams do not necessarily meet that criterion…and neither do lives!

So life extension? What’s to extend? Dream time? Unless events transcend spacetime, they are nothing but ‘ice cream castles in the air’. All dreams are the same at the moment we awaken; likewise all lives converge at the moment of death…unless they don’t!

If you were a precocious preschooler, some well-meaning buttinsky might have tried to comfort you following the death of a loved one (or pet) by analogizing: “Now we are caterpillars, but when we die, we become butterflies!”

Exactly so! Caterpillars (generally) do not ‘grow’ into butterflies; their genetic material totally reorganizes. They undergo the equivalent of a phase change. They both are, and are not, what they were. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, but nothing is the same. But does the butterfly know that once upon a time it was a caterpillar? 

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John Everett Millais’s 1851-1852 masterpiece depicts the tragic death of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, showing her drifting in a river just before she drowns. The painting is renowned for its incredible botanical precision, as Millais spent months outdoors capturing the specific symbolic flowers and lush vegetation of the English countryside. By portraying Ophelia with an expression of weary surrender, the work captures a hauntingly beautiful moment of transition between life and death.