Stockholm Syndrome Is Killing You

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Death is not inevitable. It has been, but that doesn’t mean it has to remain that way. Death is a problem we can fix. We’ve been fixing it, partially, piecemeal, for centuries, through medicine, hygiene, social norms.

But today things are different. We’re working at a different level now. At the level of DNA, of molecules, of individual microscopic biochemical reaction. We’ve hacked the code of nature. And we’ve built highly efficient thinking machines, to crunch through the staggering complexity of it all, ever faster, in ever more detail.

We shouldn’t look to the past for lessons in what is possible, both in terms of scope and pace of medical progress. Most of what we know about the brain we’ve learned in the last ten years. Most of what we know about DNA and proteomics is brand new knowledge. On the most advanced fringes of genetics, most of what humanity knows is still in the heads of a few scientists, hurriedly trying to write papers about it, right as we speak.

What this all means, is that we’re probably one or two Apollo programs away from immortality.

Right now you’re having three knee jerk objections to this argument. Stop! Stop it! It’s these objections that are keeping us from starting such an Apollo program in the first place! It’s because of these objections that thousands more people will die before we conquer death. So stop it already!

No, we won’t overpopulate the earth to starvation. No, life won’t be meaningless without death. No, you won’t be old and in pain forever. It’s not you thinking these thoughts. These thoughts come from your rationalizations for mortality, from ideas you tell yourself in a desperate attempt to make your death more palatable.

On the overpopulation fallacy: No, your death isn’t a generous gift to babies. You’re not dying out of altruism. It’s the other way around: you’re having babies because you know you’re gonna die. It’s a well-known fact that people with longer life expectancy have fewer babies. When we become immortal, we’ll have fewer babies, and we will have the time, and take the time, to figure out ways to feed everybody, not just ourselves.

On the fear of old age: No, immortality doesn’t mean old age and pain go on without respite. Obviously we’re not talking about respirators and heart machines until the end of time. We’re talking about halting and reversing senescence. Get informed.

Finally, on the bogus issue of meaning: what is more meaningless than living for a few decades, then disappearing forever? The only reason you want your life to have “meaning”, in the first place, is to attempt to deny the obvious fact that death will make it meaningless. We tell ourselves sweet deluded tales that being “remembered” somehow negates death… But the people who remember us will also die. Some accumulate wealth and power to build great stone monuments, to be remembered a bit longer. Yet they’re dead all the same. Kheops, Caesar, Napoleon… Your insecurities are showing, and they’re a little tacky.

What will be the point of life when it’s no longer nasty, brutish, and short? I have no idea. But I’m willing to take years, decades, even centuries to find out. There will be time enough for meaning, if meaning still matters.

What I’m not willing to do is play into everybody else’s delusion that the point of life is to accept death. I know we all live in this prison, but what if we rejected Stockholm syndrome as our social norm, and tried freedom instead? Especially now that we know that there are no prison guards, no Great Warden in the sky, and that the bars can, and will be, broken.

What there will also be time enough for, is getting to know you, dear reader. You and I will meet someday, and again and again, throughout the ages. I will have time to devote to you. And I’m genuinely excited about that.

So please, let’s put these fears aside, and get that Apollo program started. Let’s take the time now to give ourselves more time, to give ourselves all of the time.

Let’s not let any more people die. Especially not the people we love, and especially not you and me.