Immortality Sounds Pretty Good, Actually

Responding to some counterarguments

Sexy immortals

You might want to listen to this while reading this brief post.

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I’m going to defend living for as long as possible, but there are some qualifications. Some are boring, so I’ll put them in a footnote¹, but perhaps a more interesting one is that we should worry about involuntary immortality. I’d certainly want to be able to end things if I’m in a situation of continued torment, like if my enemies bury me alive, or trap me in a box at the bottom of the sea, or seal me up inside a wall (based on movies I’ve seen, this shit happens all the time). Or if I outlive the rest of humanity and have to wander around an empty planet, bored and terribly lonely.

Assuming access to an off switch, though, what about sticking around for hundreds more years? Or thousands, tens of thousands, or more? This seems like an easy yes. If you enjoy life right now, why not get more of it? Duh.

It turns out, though, that not everyone agrees. I’ve heard people say that 100 years or so is just right. Or maybe a bit more—but not too much. And some philosophers I respect have made the case against immortality—most famously Bernard Williams.

But I find none of their arguments even close to convincing. Here are three main ones.

The boredom argument. You’d get sick of things. Nothing will be new; you’ll become jaded and filled with ennui and disgust.

One immediate response: If experience makes you bored, shouldn’t old people be bored? Actually, boredom seems to peak in adolescence. Of course, there are bored older people, but often this is because illness, isolation, or depression keeps them from fully enjoying life. I’ve never met a healthy old person who says that they’re sick of existence.

Now one might object that the normal lifespan isn’t long enough for this worry to be serious, but just wait until the age of 500 or 1000 or 5000. Maybe. But the world keeps offering up new things—new entertainments, new friends, new art, new everything. We really can’t run out.

But won’t one get bored with life? I think this objection, and the whole boredom complaint, fails to appreciate how human motivation and human memory work. There are things that we naturally take pleasure in—such as friendship, sex, and Italian food—and while we can become sick of anything if continually exposed to it in large doses, we don’t get tired of these things if they are properly distributed in time. So, yes, someone who likes sex can get bored with sex if their life is a nonstop orgy. But if sexual pleasures are spaced, the satisfaction and interest will never fade. After enough time has passed—we’re talking about immortality, so let’s imagine a 50-year dry spell—the old becomes new again. Actually, if you like sex (or seeing a movie with a friend, or eating fettuccine alfredo) but only indulge once every 50 years, you can do this forever, and never get sick of it.

This lucky fact is because of how memory works. My Italian meal last night was wonderful, but I’m not in the mood for the same dish tonight. (Or if I am, I won’t be after the hundredth repetition.) But what if I last had Italian food last week? Or last month? Or a year ago? Or fifty years ago? Distant memories influence us less. If we assume that immortal brains work the same way as normal human ones, then what it feels like to be 1060 years old won’t be all that different from what it is like to be a non-immortal 60-year-old right now. The 1060-year-old might remember experiences from hundreds of years ago, but the memories would be so faded that reliving these experiences would feel fresh and new—just as you don’t feel bored eating the same delicious meal you had decades ago.

The urgency argument. If you are never going to die, goals and plans lose all meaning, and you’ll fall into a terrible lassitude.

Some goals really are connected to an appreciation that one will die and a rough sense of when that will happen. A good example is the plan to complete the list in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. If I want to satisfy that goal, I had best get a move on, but if I knew I was immortal, I could put it all off until … well, forever.

But when I think about all the goals I have in my life right now—finish this Substack, get the house ready for some visitors, prepare a course for next year, write a paper, etc.—none of it is driven by an appreciation of my mortality. I need to clean the house because I don’t want to live in a dirty house. I want to work on a paper because I’d love to get the ideas out there and also because I don’t want to disappoint my co-author. And so on. Mortality has nothing to do with it.

Keep in mind also that immortality is not the same as invulnerability. Maybe I can’t die—maybe I can’t even be injured—but I can be humiliated; I can suffer because someone I love is suffering; I can be disappointed in myself. And I can also be proud of a job well done, experience the warm feeling of helping a friend, and feel the pull of curiosity about what happens next. All of these factors can motivate me right now, regardless of when (or whether) I will die.

Here’s another way to put it: yes, immortality would abolish one source of urgency. But there are so many others—guests arriving on Thursday, students expecting a course next year, academic enemies who deserve a thrashing, and friendships that need nourishing. That’s quite enough for a full life.

The narrative argument. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end; all good things must come to an end. Nothing lasts forever. Everything has its season.

And so even if you are enjoying life, it’s still important that you die, because, um, that’s how stories work.

As you can probably tell, I find this such a strange argument that I can’t frame it convincingly. Why should we believe that our lives are stories, or that there’s something good about thinking about them in that way? In an essay titled Our Lives Are Not Stories, the philosopher Galen Strawson notes that while some people claim to think of their lives as having a narrative structure, many people, including him, do not.

I’m with Strawson. My life had a beginning, of course, and it contains many extended experiences that I do think have a story-like structure. (And if this structure is needed for activities to be meaningful, then my life, or at least parts of my life, has meaning.) But there’s no overall narrative arc—it’s just been one thing after another. And I’d be perfectly content with a life that was: Beginning, middle, more middle, even more middle, with no end in sight.

1. Nobody wants to get increasingly feeble; the assumption in this hypothetical is that one stops aging and quickly recovers from injury, like vampires, the sword-wielding immortals in Highlander, and the mercenaries in The Old Guard. We’ll ignore the practical problems of explaining away the appearance of eternal youth and having to hide from agents of the government trying to capture and dissect you. We won’t consider literal immortality in the sense of somehow outliving the end of the universe as a disembodied consciousness—that sounds pretty bad. And we’re talking here about individual immortality in a world that is otherwise unchanged, not a world in which everyone becomes immortal.