If you had no limit on the number of years in this lifetime, what would you do...?
Alot of tech investors, scientists, and thought leaders have been working in the direction of making this a reasonable question. With cats like Ray Kurzweil leading the Singularity movement, Aubrey deGrey growing his SENS Foundation to uncover the secrets of anti-aging science, a whole tribe of transhumanists seeking to merge man with machine, create AI nanobots and 3D-printed biological parts to provide solutions to all kinds of disease and reverse the aging process - alot of brilliant minds are concluding that the human species is on the brink of greatly increasing its lifespan - if not unlocking the codes to achieving outright immortality.
No folks, this isn't science fiction. This is going down.
Time will tell whether we reach the actual immortality part - though with the rapid exponential acceleration of technology development underway, we shall soonly be living longer, higher-quality lives soon enough. And while alot of this - like any new technology in its early states - might be a bit on the costly side, inevitably the prices of many of these solutions could likely be predicted to decrease such that any of us reading this could live well into our hundreds - if not thousands.
That's an interesting thought, really.
And while I've been reading bits and pieces about this type of stuff here and there for a while, I came across this article today - "If you’re alive in 30 years, it’s likely you will be alive in 1000 years" - and it got me thinking:
What would I do with this life, were it to last that long...?
I mean... let's consider this for a moment...
Life is pretty friggin' awesome.
There are so many beautiful places to see in this world. Tons of amazing foods to eat, wines & spirits to taste... massages to be enjoyed... music to listen to and create...
There are thousands upon thousands of awesome books to read... ridiculous amounts of art to discover and appreciate... all kinds of great conversations to have... all kinds of creative business projects to engage in to create value for the world... so many things to learn, skills to develop...
Would there actually come a point where it got tiring...?
Maybe. Maybe not.
And then again, can any of us really accurate predict what the world would be like hundreds of years from now, such that we could make an accurate call right now as to whether that'd be a world we'd even want to live in?
Technology is accelerating fast. And who knows how radically different every aspect of our society might be down the road. Sure, there'd be some cool stuff to experience. But who knows - maybe we'd end up getting tired of all the change at some point. Maybe it'd become so unfamiliar, and we'd have experienced so much in a lifetime, that the desire to keep up and keep going just wasn't there anymore.
It's kinda impossible to say.
Sometimes, it's depressing to think of how little time we actually have to accomplish and experience everything we might want to in this lifetime. Perhaps no time limit could be a huge blessing, allowing us to pack our lives with as much richness as we wanted to without restrictions.
Or maybe that's naive thinking. Maybe such wouldn't take into account the potential for the loss of lovers, family, friends, or some drastic world events causing some major heartbreak that drained our will to carry on. Maybe the influence & presence of technology in our lives would take over to such a huge degree that our souls would feel starved for a humanness lost somewhere along the way.
Maybe it'd be thrilling to constantly be expanding our creative potentials, experiencing new lovers, having new adventures. Until we repeated the cycles so many times all the joys lost their charm, each new high slightly less exciting. Maybe the curiosity and anticipation for the new would be fated to decline, as nothing might no longer come as a surprise, having seen and been through so much.
Maybe the older we got, the less important alot of the things and goals we once valued would seem.
Maybe financial freedom would become inevitable. And with that time freedom, maybe all the things we wanted to do without the stress of money wouldn't seem as idealistic as they once did. Maybe our enthusiasm and passion to make a difference in the world would find itself in a rather uncomfortable place, as we discovered the world sorting itself all out - the problems we once wanted to help solve, being worked out before we got to them.
I just happened to be listening to this song on Spotify while writing that last paragraph, and it felt to go quite well with the subject - thus adding it in here. The entire Bonobo album, Migration, is actually a damn good fitting soundtrack for this exploration.
As I look back over the last 15 years of my life, since leaving high school - it went by pretty scarily fast. In honesty, I wish I had done alot more in that time than I had, and the prospect of life extension to make up for it - and knowing how fast time does fly - seems somewhat relieving.
In that time, I've enjoyed living in different places, countries, undertaking different adventures and projects. I'm not sure I'd be happy settling down in one place for the rest of my life - and it could actually be pretty cool to spend a few years in places all over the globe, taking in different cultures, finding nuggets of gold through routines of afternoon coffee-shop writing sessions in Italy, Hong Kong, New York, Dubai, Australia - accumulating a wealth of experience while connecting with brilliant minds, artists, entrepreneurs, creating amazing magic.
Though, at what point would the non-stop movement begin getting old?
Maybe new technologies would provide an unlimited supply of energy to fuel the next adventure. But, would it ever get tiring...?
Fucked if I know.
Maybe there's only one way to really find out.
Yet, we can't exactly live as though such a route is a concrete possibility.
At this point, life does have a time limit. The tech may be on its way to extend our lives, but where we're at now, we could still be taken out well-before it arrives.
As such, balancing that question of what would we do if we could live forever maybe requires asking its opposite: what are we doing now, with the limited time we have NOW?
Perhaps we could live indefinitely. And maybe we would get bored. Maybe we'd get tired of the ceaseless change. Maybe we'd tire of the endless adventures and excitement...
And if that were the case - what from all those hundreds of years might we want to condense into a jam-packed 70 or 80, that we could begin working on living out right here and now...?
"The Singularity IS near."
And we're about to dive into a vortex of accelerated growth unlike mankind has ever experienced.
Maybe eternal life is the outcome.
Maybe extinction is - perhaps we'll become the victims of our own hunger for the ultimate control.
None of us can know.
Though, we do each have control over how we manage the time and energy of this day - laying the bricks of the path in the direction we choose to go in this unfolding chapter.
Maybe a nuclear holocaust shall come out of nowhere and blow it to smithereens. Maybe an earthquake hits and swallows it up whole with us. Maybe a meteorite will strike earth and it's game over.
Nonetheless, these foundational bricks we lay are forming the road that's moving us forward - whether that road carries on for another 50 years, five, five thousand, or anywhere in between or more.
I suppose the question, then, is... what type of path do we choose to lay, in what direction...?
And that is a question each of us can only answer for our own...
