Immortality and Stagnation

I am fascinated with stories about life extension, human enhancement, and immortality. I think in the future people will be virtually immortal. They will certainly die if they get hit by a bus, but they will no longer grow old or get diseases that finish us off in our current times. Science can take care of the mechanics of these things. It cannot resolve the philosophical dilemmas that come with life extension. The fact of the matter is that we live too long now. Being immortal may extend our lives, but it does not cure the stagnation of those lives.

This idea first hit me when reading Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. That is an awesome book. I could give a damn for the rest of her work, but that one novel dealt with a lot of weighty stuff that makes the rest of her work just a bunch of crap. The image that I carry in my head from that story was a vampire creating another vampire then immolating himself in a fire in an act of vampire suicide. The message was that immortality was not what it first appears to be. The vampires all become exhausted with life and destroy themselves. The older vampires who had lived many centuries were revered for their strength. They were able to withstand the passing of time. But inevitably, they would kill themselves wanting the whole damn thing to end.

The story is a work of fiction, but we can feel the same despair. Sartre called it "nausée" which we translate literally as "nausea." It is the disgust of life. It is living in a world without meaning or fulfillment. Nothing matters. The fact is that you don't have to be immortal to feel this disgust with life. Some feel it before they even hit 30.

Imagine a man that was given a potion in 1955 that made him immortal and eternally youthful. He then spent the ensuing decades doing the same thing spending the bulk of his time watching television programs. It is the present time, and the guy lives in the same house. The television has been replaced a few times, but nothing else is different. The guy just lives. If this seems like a waste of immortality, he has the rest of his centuries to waste the gift.

I think of creative types like the members of the Beatles who did all their best work before the age of 40 only to spend the rest of their lives in the shadow of those early hits. The fact that John Lennon died at 40 is really a small deal because I doubt he was going to do anything substantial for the rest of his life anyway. When he died, he was in virtual semi-retirement. The fact is that the bulk of those great bands from that era have all stagnated producing nothing memorable or worth a damn since the 60's and 70's.

When you are young, you get compared to your father. As you reach adulthood, you are compared to your siblings, your friends, and your rivals. As time passes, those comparisons end, and you are compared to your earlier self. You can see this in some aging musician and his disgust at having to play an encore of songs written when he was young and dumb. Nobody wants to hear the new shit. They just want that old raw amateurish shit crafted in a time when the guy could barely play his instrument. But that shit was new. It was fresh.

Other art forms are more forgiving than rock and roll. Novelists have it fairly easy. No one is terribly interested in the youthful writings. The accomplished middle aged man seems more in keeping with the finest of prose. Painting is a bit like rock and roll, but artists tend to keep at it and remain on their game for a good while. Architecture is the greatest since the best seem to peak in their 60s and remain there until they die.

The problem with getting older is the stagnation. The reason those various creative endeavors have such different peaking periods is tied directly to length. A three minute song doesn't take much. After three albums worth of material, you have pretty much done every good idea you have. Painting is different as ideas are generated from around the world of the painter. A good novel takes a year or more to write. Architecture involves extensive planning and construction. What is the lesson in all of this? If you had to grant immortality to someone, give it to the architect because he would make better use of it. Immortality for the rock star wouldn't make any difference at all.

The great enemy is not death but stagnation. When great people die young, we feel cheated because of what we expected they would do and accomplish in a normal lifespan. But we don't feel this way over someone dying at 80. Why is this? The answer is obvious. What great things get accomplished after age 80? Or 70? Or 60?

Here's a great episode for the Twilight Zone. A guy is granted eternal life on the sake of one condition. For every year that he lives, he must do something amazing and new. That's it. How long would he live? I think after a decade he would be ready to give it up. The progress would lead to stagnation, and he would be ready to end it.

So, what is the cure for this stagnation? How do we get Sir Paul to write a song today every bit as good as "Hey, Jude?" How does an old man regain the creative vigor of his youth? I don't know the answer to this. I just ponder the question and wonder if we aren't better off letting people die off to make room for the new. I also wonder if I am living in stagnation.

I will revisit this theme again. My goal is to answer this question because I think that before we gain immortality that we know how to live in a way that earns and deserves immortality. Without this answer, immortality is just one long rerun. If every day is the same, an endless number of these days is not heaven but hell. A truly flourishing life is one that you would want to continue forever, and every death should feel like a tragedy and an immense loss. But as one Facebooker remarked about the recent break up of REM, "Broke up? I didn't even know they were still together." That is stagnation.

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