I’ve watched with fascination as Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die movement has taken off globally. I agree with most of it, and I agree with most of what Bryan says and stands for. I try to be as healthy as I can, and I’m at an age where I already see enormous benefits from things like sleeping well, eating well, and regular exercise. I’m all for staying young as long as we can.
But there’s a difference between being healthy and staying young, and aiming for immortality!
I recently had a conversation with several proponents of the Don’t Die mentality who tried to convince me to not want to die. Their arguments were fairly compelling, but they didn’t change my mind. Here’s my response.
Thing #1: Meaning 🧩
“To be dead, to be really dead, it must be glorious… There are far worse things… than death.” - Dracula (1931)
Put simply, death gives meaning to life. And without death, life has no meaning.
This is a favorite trope in fiction: to cite but a few examples that come to mind, Dracula, Gulliver’s Travels, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Borges, Doctor Who, The Twilight Zone, Highlander, and Groundhog Day. What all these stories have in common is that they describe immortality as marked by an initial bout of hedonism followed eventually by loneliness, suffering and perpetual grief, spiritual decay, and loss of a sense of purpose.
These authors and these stories are trying to warn us of something, and we should pay attention to it. As ChatGPT put it in summary, “Immortals lose all sense of urgency and curiosity; with infinite time, they cease to create, strive, or love.” Urgency, curiosity, and risk, not to mention creation, striving, and love: these are precisely the things that gives life meaning, and I for one cannot conceive of a life void of these things.
The usual response the Don’t Die types offer to this is, well, you can still die if you want to. In other words, their goal is not to eliminate death entirely, but rather to make it optional and to allow us to choose when it happens. It seems that their aim is to become like Tolkien’s elves, who are nearly but not truly immortal. They age very slowly, and may eventually yearn to go gracefully into the Earthly Paradise.
I grant that this is a compelling vision, but it doesn’t work for me because death isn’t meant to be optional. Death is designed to be something beyond our control, and something that very often happens when we least expect it. Beyond very specific, extreme circumstances, such as people who are suffering from truly horrible, incurable diseases, death is something that we should avoid as long as we can, and ultimately embrace, but it’s not something that we should schedule as we do a haircut.
Here, too, there are countless explanatory examples from the realm of fiction. My personal favorite is the anime series Death Note, where the Shinigami can see everyone’s remaining lifespan, and where the owner of the Death Note notebook can precisely schedule the time and manner of anyone’s death, including their own.
To know or schedule exactly how much time one has left might feel somehow practical or useful, but I find the idea appalling. It’s precisely the fact that I have no idea when I’m going to die that allows me to appreciate every moment to its fullest, to constantly remind the people around me how much I love them, because I truly don’t know which moment is going to be my last, and because my death could come at any time.
It’s precisely this uncertainty and lack of control that gives me the urgency, the fierce, burning passion and drive to live my life to its fullest: to do the best work I can, while I can, to create, to build, to share, to travel, to love, to be the absolute most and best that I can in the limited time I have. If I knew that I still had another 100 years, sure, in theory I might put all of those years to good use. But in reality I suspect that it might make me lazy, and I shudder to think of the impact it would have on someone who doesn’t have the same drive and will to live and create that I do.
I’m also just unwilling to believe that, given the option to postpone death indefinitely, most people would opt into it at all, fictional warnings notwithstanding. Which brings us to our next thing.
Thing #2: Space 🈳
“Science progresses one funeral at a time.” - Planck's principle
Death is nature’s way of making space.
Imagine an old growth forest, massive trees towering high above the undergrowth. Those trees have been there for decades, or in some cases, centuries. They’re an important part of the forest ecosystem: many types of plants and animals can only survive by sharing space and coexisting with the old growth trees.
But the reality is that those massive old growth trees also starve younger trees and other smaller plants of resources. They quite literally block the light and consume a huge amount of water and other resources that as a result aren’t available to smaller, younger competitors. If this sounds a little like how the economy operates, that’s because it should. Massive incumbent firms that have been around for a long time also block the light, figuratively speaking, and make it very difficult for upstart rivals to enter the same space.
One of the most important modern economic principles is creative destruction: the idea that the old, once it’s no longer competitive, must make space for the new in order for the economy to prosper and society to thrive. Places that make it relatively easy for upstart competitors to challenge incumbents are the places that’ll be the most prosperous and most successful. They do this, for example, by making it relatively easy, cheap, and fast to start new businesses, by not placing massive regulatory or reporting burdens on small firms, by not requiring unnecessary licenses or charters to operate, etc.
As in business, in life. If the mechanism for creating space in the economy is creative destruction, death is the primary biological mechanism by which the same thing is accomplished in nature. Death not only frees up resources for the younger, it also creates opportunities.
There’s a limited number of positions in firms, institutions, governments, and academies. Hence Planck’s principle, as described by the above quote: we’re often only able to make progress when the old incumbents, the old growth trees, retire or pass away. This is true in the straightforward, practical sense: a firm literally only has one CEO, an institution one director, so generational change takes time and requires someone resigning or being fired. But it’s also true in a deeper sense, a sense in which the senior members of any community tend to exert a lot of authority over what members of that community believe. There are plenty of examples from science where respected, senior researchers in a field simply don’t subscribe to novel ideas, because they’re unwilling or unable, and the field has to collectively hold its breath and bide its time until they release their grip in order to make progress.
Now imagine the old growth forest if those massive old trees were effectively immortal. The forest would never evolve. There’d be literally no room for new species to take root. That might be okay for a forest, for a while, but it’s not okay for human society. Society literally dies out if it’s unable to keep up with the times (and the same is probably true of the forest over a long enough time horizon).
An indefinite lengthening of the lifespan would lead to a massive stagnation of ideas, as powerful, entrenched elites with old fashioned, conservative views never make room for younger people with fresher ideas. This could lead to enormous stagnation politically, culturally, economically, and technologically. Young people in general could find it very hard to advance in their careers, and many would give up trying as a result. There’d be massive political entrenchment, even more than we have today, where heads of state and corporate leaders could remain in power for far longer than is healthy for a dynamic society. And, in general, the inevitably small group that could afford life extension treatment would tend to hoard power and resources, entrenching themselves in positions of power and influence and preventing social mobility for younger, poorer people.
This is one of the most popular themes of the dystopian cyberpunk genre. Consider the tiny class of Meths, short for Methuselah, in Altered Carbon. They’re a perfect (if fictional) example of what powerful life extension would lead to: a tiny coterie of wealthy, powerful, connected elites who live at the top of massive towers, while the other 99.9% live below amidst squalor, crime, and decay.
This frightening outcome feels unavoidable if we continue down this path of extending life as much as possible without considering the consequences.
Thing #3: Trial ⚔️
“He who does not weep, does not see.” - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I witnessed death from a relatively young age. No, I wasn’t in a warzone, nothing like that, but I lost a number of close family members during high school and college, including my last living grandparent and my mother. Then, two years ago, I also lost my father.
I wrote a little bit here about these experiences, but I didn’t really write about the effect they had on me. At the time each of these experiences was traumatic in its own way. I went through the various stages of grief, from disbelief, to denial, to anger, to eventual acceptance and resignation. What I couldn’t see at the time, but I can see now, is that experiencing the death of someone very close to me, and going through all of these stages of grieving, had a profound impact on me—and overall that impact was positive.
Losing my mother was especially hard. I was young, just out of college. She was relatively healthy and it happened suddenly and unexpectedly. But it was my first big lesson in impermanence. She was there one moment, and then suddenly gone the next. It really drove home the idea that life, this existence, is fleeting, and that it could be taken away at any moment, for any reason—an idea that I’ve integrated into my daily life and mindfulness practice via Maraṇasati meditation. At the time, however, I was young, naive, and stupid, and the thought hadn’t even occurred to me that I, or any of the people who are close to me, could be taken away at all, much less for it to happen so immediately and unexpectedly.
Internalizing this lesson and this understanding forced me to grow up very quickly—inevitably the outcome of losing a parent, at any age. It also empowered me to make some dramatic changes in my life. I was living in Hong Kong at the time, enjoying my life, doing work that I thought was meaningful, earning good money and having a lot of fun. I knew that I could do more, and be more, but it would require big, painful changes: leaving my job, moving back home, going back to school, starting a company. I had grown up poor, and leaving my job would also have meant walking away from a lot of money and from the feeling of being financially independent and confident for the first time in my life. I was quite frankly afraid to do those things and to give up all that I had, even though I knew that I wasn’t completely happy or living my best life.
Losing my mom suddenly was the wake up call that I needed to jar me out of my complacency and make all of those hard changes—and, in the years that followed, I did all of those things. Looking back now with the benefit of a decade and a half of hindsight, it’s clear that it was what I needed. I ended up in a much better, much happier place than I had been before.
Losing my father a few years later was also both traumatic, and another opportunity to learn and grow. I miss my parents every single day, but I understand that I am the person that I am today, and I’m capable of the things I’m doing today, not just because of what they taught me and gave me, but also because of the fact that I ultimately had to let both of them go.
Which brings me to the third thing: as painful as it is to witness death and grieve the loss of a loved one, death brings about more than purpose and space. It’s also a necessary trial. I wasn’t a full-grown, fully mature adult until I had experienced the loss of a parent, and I think the same is true for most people. Losing someone we love makes us appreciate and experience life more fully, and a life without loss would be somehow more shallow and less meaningful. In other words, death doesn’t just give meaning to our own lives; the fact that we know we might lose the people around us at any time, and knowing that we eventually will, allows us to appreciate them fully today. I simply don’t believe that would be possible if death were indefinitely postponed.
Coping with death, both preparing for one’s own death and experiencing someone else’s, going through the grieving process, is terrible but it’s also awesome. It’s part of how we grow into fully mature adults. Pain is a critical part of life and of all existence! No one wants to experience pain here and now, but we also wouldn’t want to live in a world without it, or not be able to experience it ourselves.
The Don’t Die folks that I met talked to me about taking away the “unnecessary” suffering that our family and friends will experience when we die, but I think this suffering and grieving plays a crucial role in the human condition. Remove it at your peril.
Well organized. I’ve come around to a similar realization that impermanence is everything in our relationships, perception, and narrative.