This thing has been on my mind for a while now, and I keep encountering it here and there, so I’m writing this post to share my thoughts on it and hopefully get it somewhat out of my head.
The idea of an infinite life (in some form or another) has been expressed in many of the world’s religions. It is an old topic, but still the subject of many a debate today, especially when it comes to “life’s meaning” (whatever that means).
Nowadays, there’s another reason to consider this concept:
With the progressing advancement of medicine, it becomes ever more believable that we could one day stop or even reverse aging itself, which would in theory allow one to live forever.
In fact, age reversal has already been achieved on lab mice.1
There’s also been a new party running for EU parliament that made their whole point about just this.
All that is to say, it’s a very relevant topic.
Let me begin this section by clearly stating my opinion: I’d love to be able to live forever. Note the “be able to”, meaning I don’t want to be unable to die, I just don’t want to be forced to die. I want to live as long as I want, and then possibly die if I feel I’ve lived long enough.
When reading that, maybe you thought the following, which is a common retort to this sort of sentiment:
Living forever would suck, because your time would be meaningless.
You would just throw your time away, since you have an infinite amount of it anyway.
It’s the finitude of life that makes it meaningful, forcing you to appreciate every single moment.
No. I’m having none of that.
I’ll start with addressing the last sentence, which is a complete non-sequitur. Why would something being finite make me appreciate it more? I don’t get it. Maybe there is actually an implicit argument underlying this, which I just don’t know of, in which case please tell me and I’ll make an amendment to this post. But if there isn’t, this is just saying one thing and then saying another thing, which is not convincing at all.
Next, even if the argument held up, I would still be against it. See the word “force” there? Yeah, I don’t want to be forced to appreciate every moment, I want to be able to waste time without having to feel bad about it. This is the sort of sentiment that gives you sentences like “Two minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.” And believe me how much I need to hold back my rage at this sentence in order to make this post not just a rant (Although, arguably, it already is).
You saw me use the phrase “waste time” there, which is good for getting my point across, but I actually hate that one too, for a very similar reason.
When time can be “wasted”, it implies that time is a precious resource that should be efficiently spent. And while you can argue that, due to our finite lives,2 time is a precious resource, it’s insanely stressful to me to think of it that way.
Also, I reject this implicit idea of efficiency, which is somewhat engrained within our society.
I don’t spend my time efficiently, nor do I want to!
For that reason, I also completely reject the second sentence of the quote above.
What’s left to address is the first sentence. I’ll try to steelman it best I can, giving us something like “If you have infinite time, each second, day, year, etc. represents 0% of that, so it becomes meaningless.”
First of all, this presupposes that meaning is either relative or finite: However long your life is, you can only measure a timespan’s meaning relative to that.
On the contrary, I argue that meaning can be created without limit. Living forever would just mean that the total meaningfulness of your life would also be infinite. My reasoning for this is that you always live in the present, and no moment is much different from any other. In particular, what I mean by that is that all moments of your life can have meaning independent of each other. So why would that be lessened by there being more of them; On the contrary: the more the better.
I rest my case.