Age Old, Old Age

When I was in fifth grade, I was challenged to come up with the meaning of life.  Maybe that’s not how you imagine an elementary school playground, but that’s what happened.  My response, after a few weeks, was to assert that the meaning of life is death, and my fifth-grade reasoning was that all actions and decisions are ultimately motivated by the urge to survive, which is itself an anticipation of the demise which awaits us all.  Fifth grade me did not consider this reasoning particularly morbid, but a logical application of evolutionary concepts and my nascent understanding of neurology.

This highly end-state driven answer evolved once I began reading philosophy, and I no longer have the hubris to believe I can reduce the meaning of life to a pithy answer.  I’m not even sure that it’s a meaningful question.  In hindsight, though, perhaps my early answer was prophetic, not of my own views or experiences, but of a growing perception in society at large.  In the last year or so, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in attention, through news articles and the like, on human longevity.

A couple years after I developed my first answer to the meaning of life, I read a scientific paper about telomeres.  The paper claimed shortening telomeres are the primary cause of aging and explored the development of a potential treatment to lengthen telomeres.  It was accompanied by a feature on the scientists involved in the project, who routinely ran hundred mile or longer races, and insisted that anyone alive and healthy in 2050 would have a good chance of living to at least 150.  As outlandish as the claim itself may seem, it was not the prediction which suggested to me these were somewhat fringe scientists devoted to a fringe cause.  Rather, it was how they devoted themselves to specifically studying aging with a kind of religious fervor.

Now, it seems, they have a great deal of company.  I see dozens of headlines in mainstream sources talking about longevity treatments, the secrets to living longer, even longevity competitions.  Trying to live longer, it seems, has never been trendier.  Whether or not any of these efforts will prove effective, which vary from the semi-scientific, to the pseudo-scientific, to the practically superstitious, seems to be of little importance.

There isn’t always a logic to how topics emerge (and often end up resubmerged) into the cultural consciousness.  A little less than a decade ago, I remember all of sudden there was talk every other week about the potential to hit the “technology singularity” in the next few decades, until that idea stopped being trendy and some other took its place.  Longevity’s trendiness could be just the most recent example, but I do wonder if it is a symptom of underlying factors.  The most obvious is a preoccupation with personal health following the world’s overreaction to SARS-CoV-9, but I think there’s more at play.  Longevity as a goal is trending up at the same time when religiosity and belief in various kinds of continued existence after we shuffle off this mortal coil is trending down.  It is drawing attention while we are increasingly pursuing freedom from instead of freedom for in a kind of radical, collectivist individualism.  In this view, an obsession with trying to live longer is another symptom of our hedonic silk slippers of history.

Sure, that’s a lot to infer from a certain popularity of wanting to live longer, and none of it can be proven.  It’s just supposition, ruminations on possible correlations perceived from my perspective.  Who wouldn’t want to live longer, after all?  If we can stay healthy and capable for more years, even I wouldn’t consider that a negative.  It would give me more time to write the stories I want to write, solve the engineering problems I want to solve, learn the things I want to learn.  My concern is not with longevity, but with making longevity a goal in and of itself.

Contrary to my fifth grade understanding of the meaning of life, longer life, even with health and vigor, is not valuable in itself.  As Gandalf says, what is important is what we do with the time we are given.  Perhaps this is one of those optimal illusions, where we are maximizing the time we have, rather than maximizing what we do with our time.  I no longer think I know the meaning of life, but I think there’s more to it than the motivation of inevitable death.