Immortality and Hopelessness

What can we say about a world where basic socioeconomic improvements are beyond hoping for, but life-extension drugs are on the horizon?

We live in a time of unprecedented scientific and technological miracles, but they have the character of being pushed on the mass of people from the top down. Steve Jobs even admitted that this was Apple’s design philosophy—that people do not know what they want until Apple tells them. Think about Facebook’s (Meta’s) launch of the metaverse—it has been wildly unpopular, and clearly was not based on a real demand from people. An even more extreme example is the anti-aging drug that can extend the human lifespan significantly, perhaps even indefinitely. Is there a big demand from people to want to live longer? Or to even live forever? No—it’s something that the elites want. The fact that this is happening at the same time as the misery index is rising tells you everything.

As life gets harder for most people—with more of the population forced to live paycheck to paycheck—miracle drugs are being created to extend life. Instead of basic socioeconomic improvements that would make life more bearable for the majority, we get this. Does it make any sense? Well in a way, it does—the elites need a big underclass of slaves to keep society functioning.

The worse life gets for most people, the more we hear about how great it would be if science could make us live longer. This is the cruelty of our current situation. Improving life for the mass of people is out of the question, nobody expects anything to get better—but also, we hear about how great it would be if life was longer. It would be great for the elites who have all the money—but not for the vast majority.

A big reason that they want to live forever is because the longer they live, the richer they get—wealth grows and compounds the longer you have it. Just imagine how rich Jeff Bezos will be 20, 30, 50, or 100 years from now.

So we have this gap between a tiny elite who want to live longer—even forever!—and a miserable underclass who, unless life gets less miserable, hardly want to live at all. It’s grotesque and absurd.

It’s especially awful because the people pushing this anti-aging fetish are mostly Boomers—the most morally bankrupt, spiritually empty people who have ever existed—and for them to want to extend their meaningless lives is just beyond sick and laughable. If the people pushing this life extension ideology had actual values and beliefs, then it would be slightly less sickening—they would want to be alive longer so they could achieve their ideals. But they have no ideals, and they believe in nothing—and this is as awful as it gets, wanting to live longer but without any reason why.

Basically, they want to live longer only because they are afraid of death—not because they enjoy life, or have any meaningful projects or commitments or values in life. Their attachment to life is purely negative—they just are terrified of death and want to use medical science to keep death away as long as possible.

The anti-aging enthusiasts want to live so that they can keep piling up money and because they fear death—they are mostly older, Boomers, though the idea appeals to people from all age groups of course. But by and large, people from younger generations are showing the opposite tendency—they are dropping out of the workforce, they are overdosing on opioids, they are doing mass shootings, they are giving up in so many ways. Most people have no hope, no savings, no prospects—and nothing is being done to improve life for them. Instead, what we get is this idea of extending life as it is—not changing life or fixing the massive problems with it, but just making it longer in its current form.

This is the real heart of the issue—the will or imagination to make socioeconomic changes that would make life less miserable for the masses is totally gone; but something much harder—modifying genetics so that our cells last longer—is on the verge of being achieved. Basic social imagination has no chance in this world—but the most outlandish science fiction is being made real. This is perhaps another manifestation of capitalist realism—the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In this case, it is easier to imagine miracle drugs that change our cells to make us live longer than to imagine a world where basic socioeconomic measures are taken to improve life for the mass of people.

Immortality in a world that nobody in their right mind would want to be part of—this is the hell of our current situation. One of Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity is to take the personality of St. Peter, who he thinks is very boring and dull, and imagine such a character living forever in heaven— “an immortal Peter, who could stand him!” Nietzsche finds such a thought disgusting. In the same way, imagine life for the average person in 2023, and freeze that in immortality—who could stand it?