If you could live forever, would you? Modern medicine has allowed us to drastically increase our lifespans, and science doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Some in Silicon Valley have embarked on a “quest for immortality” in the hope that advances in medicine and technology will make eternal life possible. But if immortality became possible, would it necessarily be desirable? Philosopher Todd May argues that we should not hope to be immortal since it would make our lives shapeless, aimless, and boring.

I like a good slice of pizza.  A lot.  Not that stuff you get from chain pizza places like Papa Johns or Domino’s.  No, a serious slice from a local place, preferably a little grungy looking, that doesn’t have another franchise down the block or even in another city.

I could eat a good slice or two on most days.  And I could do that for many years.  But how many years?  Could I do it for three hundred years?  Probably.  Three thousand?  Maybe.  How about twenty thousand or thirty thousand?  At some point, I think, I’ll have had enough pizza to last…well, you get the idea.

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Immortality is not something that most of us – probably any of us – would want.

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Currently there are a number of folks in privileged positions, many of them living and working in Silicon Valley, that are keen on the possibility of living forever.  Among their various goals, such as making people hate one another through social media and then replacing them with artificial intelligence, is that of gracing our planet with their presence forever.  And among the rest of us there might be many who would envy them, should they succeed.  Well, let me spend this short essay convincing you that you shouldn’t.  Immortality is not something that most of us – probably any of us – would want.

SUGGESTED READING 5 philosophers on how to face death By Steven Luper The great writer Jorge Luis Borges once penned a story called “The Immortal.”  In it, a man finds himself in a land where everyone lives forever, the City of the Immortals.  He’s surprised to find the place is utterly neglected.  The immortals live only in their thoughts.  The physical world means nothing to them, and, in fact, their thoughts mean little more.  There is nothing that needs to be done, because there is time for everything.  Literally, everything.  One of the immortals, the poet Homer as it turns out, explains that, although he “composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.”  There is no need to fix or do anything, because there’s always time to fix it or to do it.

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By removing our lives from their mortal trajectory, we wind up making them shapeless.  Because there is time for everything, nothing has any urgency.

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