The Case for Choosing Death, Not Immortality

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There are very few axioms of human life. One is that everybody dies; a second that everybody ages. But depending on your circle and social-media bubble, you wouldn’t be blamed for believing that both will soon become optional.

Especially in Silicon Valley milieus, modern science and technology—gene editing, cryonics, AI—have led many to believe that living forever, or at least for much longer, is a plausible and laudable goal. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and other billionaires have poured small fortunes into anti-aging ventures, and “biohacking” has been in vogue for years. Perhaps most prominent among today’s immortality evangelists is Bryan Johnson, a tech centimillionaire in his 40s who claims to, through diet, exercise, and experimental medicine, have reduced his age by several years. Johnson’s goal, as I learned when I spent a day with him earlier this year, is to reorient all of society around the one thing he believes everybody can agree on: “not dying.”

That might all sound ridiculous, but anxiety about death is ancient. Perhaps a third axiom is that humans obsess over our only common fate. The Atlantic’s writers have been doing so since December 1857, when the magazine published a review in its second-ever issue lampooning a book of supposedly homeopathic medicines, noting that “quackery is immortal.” More than a decade later, the magazine printed a three-part essay documenting how the human life span had increased and asserting that it would continue doing so. What happened to the soul after the body perishes was a frequently visited topic. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in these pages, in 1862, that “the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous.”

At first glance, it might appear that Emerson, the towering transcendentalist, and Johnson, a contemporary transhumanist, are in some sort of bizarre alliance. But none of these 19th- and early 20th-century authors thought death was escapable, and they likely would not choose to not die. Even if old age is detrimental “from the point of sensuous experience,” the eve of life brings wisdom and serenity, Emerson wrote. A “capital advantage of age [is] that a success more or less signifies nothing.” Accomplishments from youth and society’s reverence for the elderly free them of the need to prove anything—a need that caused  “a load of anxieties that once degraded” life. Old age should conjure Socrates, Archimedes, Galileo, he went on: “the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand.”

So begins a lineage of Atlantic writers who did not treat aging as a tragedy, instead celebrating the body’s decay as an essential aspect of its growth and dynamism. “I begin by considering the common assumption that one would prefer to be young rather than old,” wrote Vida D. Scudder in February 1933. “And, for myself, I deny it.” To Scudder, then 71 years old, age provided escape from the “fetish of Efficiency.” Above all, she explained, old age makes the remaining years more vibrant, as the “thought of the glories I can no longer hope to see surrounds the modest loveliness still mine to behold, like an aura, a halo of reflected light.” A life is a finite moment in a world of infinite wonder. Even the accumulation that those limited years bring—of beauty and hardships alike—can be generative. Some of the finest art and writing are products of age, Rollo Walter Brown wrote in December 1950: “The graying man is a crucified person, for he has known ridicule, he has known failure, he has known suffering. He is quite certain to express himself with less fanfare, with deeper humility, with an elemental kind of refining.”

Only in this century have Atlantic writers had to seriously engage with death as a problem with a technological solution. One article noted a new obsession with life-extending science in July 2001, and roughly two years later, Atlantic editor-at-large Cullen Murphy wrote that, while a “‘posthuman future’ … is at once exciting and terrifying,” his beliefs lay elsewhere: “Enhancement arrives with the audacity of Napoleon; the body responds with the inertial resistance of those two great Russian generals, January and February.”

More than 20 years later, humans still all succumb to a Russian winter. And perhaps the contemporary obsession with preserving the body leads people to ignore, more and more, the fleeting world each body is here to experience—looking at sunlight glaring off an emerald sea, then looking away; a hot blush at a cold touch; a fellow human struggling to live now, rather than forever. As Fred Lewis Pattee wrote in a poem for this magazine in 1907, when he “mused on death and immortality … with eyes afar / I missed the beggar piteous at my door.”