Enjoying Life: Curiosity and Fighting Aging

Note: My Three Buckets post is important background for this and basically every other thing you do in life. I’d recommend reading it first if you haven’t already: https://www.johncgreer.com/the-three-buckets/

First off, is aging and death really such a bad thing?

If you’re like most people, you probably think death isn’t such a bad thing, especially at an old age. Sure, it’s sad when grandma dies but we all have to go some time, right?

Why am I so against death?

It’s because I’m incredibly lucky. I’m incredibly lucky to be born at this time in history, in the United States, with the genes that I have. If any of those things would have been different, my life could have been drastically, abysmally hellish.

There are people who have lives where describing them as miserable would be an understatement. If I had been born before the Industrial Revolution, or in a different place (say North Korea or Somalia), my life could have just completely sucked. Plenty of people’s lives suck right here in the US of A. Many smart people are working on changing that and I fully support them. I don’t want anyone to suffer, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working on fighting aging.

When people’s lives become worth living, death becomes non-optimal. It’s pretty simple to me:

life worth living = continue living

life not worth living (and it’s not going to get better) = accept death as an end to suffering

My life is enjoyable so I want it to keep going.

Exploration and Curiosity

Don’t you just love finding out how a really good story ends? Or listening to a new album by your favorite artist or discovering a new one?

I was listening to this interview with Larry King: 

and I loved hearing his description of curiosity, loving life, and not wanting to die (42:48 mark):

Larry King: “I love the whole ball of wax. And I don’t want to die.”

Interviewer: “You don’t want to die?”

Larry King: “Oh yeah. My wife said if I were frozen, cryonic, you come back in two hundred years. She said, ‘You wouldn’t know anybody.’ I said, ‘I’ll make new friends.’ I like living. Because of curiosity. Who’s gonna win the World Series? Who’s the next football champion? How’s Kevin Durant going to do in Golden State? Can the Pittsburgh Penguins repeat in hockey? Who’s gonna win the election? If you die, you don’t know. You don’t exist. You don’t exist.”

I remember being really pumped to finally see the finale of Breaking Bad. What was gonna happen??? How were they going to wrap up the story? That feeling is so delicious and delightful.

It got me thinking about how some people were as excited as I was but they weren’t going to end up seeing it because they would die before they got the chance. It’s not anywhere near the most tragic things that happen every day but it was a poignant realization. There was even a terminally ill guy who had a successful social media campaign to see Star Wars 7 before he died.

I don’t want to miss the next Pixar movie. Hell, I don’t want to miss any of them. Maybe it’s the next Studio Ghibli for you. Or some manga by an artist you really love. Or a video game by the indie dev you support on Patreon. Or the last of the Song of Ice and Fire books (good luck).

I was praying nothing would happen to Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci before they finally made The Irishman. I waited for it for over a decade.

When I was a kid, I would stand in Barnes and Noble in the science fiction section staring at shelf after shelf of giant books. A feeling of wonder and excitement would come over me. I’d imagine all the universes I could explore and get lost in.

That feeling of timelessness I had as a kid seems lost now. I don’t have time to wander off on endless explorations. I won’t learn what even a fraction of the great books in the world have in store. I can’t really explore all of the real or virtual worlds I want to, not in one lifetime. Even if I had infinite money and only spent my time reading and traveling, it wouldn’t be worth it because I need to spend that time and money trying to reach longevity escape velocity. It reminds me of Nate Soares’ post about Habitual Productivity. (This is taken out of context so please read it and also his very excellent Replacing Guilt series): 

“When skiing, partying, or generally having a good time, try remembering that this is exactly the type of thing people should have an opportunity to do after we stop everyone from dying.

When doing something transient like watching TV or playing video games, reflect upon how it’s not building any skills that are going to make the world a better place, nor really having a lasting impact on the world.

Notice that if the world is to be saved then it really does need to be you who saves it, because everybody else is busy skiing, partying, reading fantasy, or dying in third world countries.”

I’m often caught between a feeling of despair and powerlessness, and bouts of hope at the progress being made and the progress I make in my own life. I am still finding the balance between working toward my near- and long-term goals and enjoying life while I know I am alive.

Sylvia Plath had some very appropriate quotes:

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” -The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” -The Bell Jar

Linda Holmes wrote a wonderfully depressing analysis on how we’re going to miss it all:

“The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction — you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what’s out there, you’ll have to ignore. (Don’t forget books not written in English! Don’t forget to learn all the other languages!)

Oh, and heaven help your kid, who will either have to throw out maybe 30 years of what you deemed most critical or be even more selective than you had to be.

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television — you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.”

I’ll be having a nice moment with my girlfriend and then suddenly think about how life extension isn’t here and we’re going to die. I constantly worry for her health and try to avoid thinking about something tragically happening to her, or anyone else I care about.

I’ll be watching the Rick and Morty episode with the theme park where you can’t die. They make a big deal about how you don’t want to be out of bounds of the park or have the force field turned off. And then I remember: I’m in the place where the anti-death force field is ALWAYS turned off! What the fuck?! We need to fix this.

I many notice people have a natural resistance because they’re not that happy in their lives now. That’s understandable but things have generally gotten drastically better and are only looking to continue that way.

A common objection is that it can’t be done. Yes, it can. We just need to get there. If it were truly the case we couldn’t overcome it, then the rational thing to do would be to just try to come to peace with it and accept it like “wise” people have suggested for millennia. But we’re finally at a time when we may hit the longevity escape velocity where “life expectancy is being extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which longevity escape velocity would be maintained, technological advances would increase life expectancy more than the year that just went by.” It’s a leapfrog strategy. You have some tech that extends people’s lifespan by twenty years and the technology developed in the next twenty years extends their lives even longer and so on and so forth.

What about accidents, natural disasters, war, etc.? Won’t people still die from those? Yes, which is why there are also smart people working on existential risk (aka x-risk) and addressing other ways people can be hurt. I support them as well. But we still need to do more to change people’s minds about aging and death. I’ve noticed certain objections come up frequently.

Common (and misguided) objections to life extension are:

1. I wouldn’t want to live forever.

Fine, but wouldn’t you want a choice in whether and when you wanted to die? If you actually wanted to die you’d have the option to.

This is different from not wanting to know when you would die, since knowing the exact time might just cause you to ruminate on it. I understand that reasoning. I’m referring to when people say things like: “I want to just roll the dice, and if I die of cancer or stroke or heart disease or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, then so be it.” What?? If you had the option, wouldn’t you rather not develop these diseases? Wouldn’t you rather live as long and as full a life as you wanted?

2. I’d be bored out of my mind.

Really?! Okay, even though I really doubt this given all the books, movies, TV shows, music, places to travel, food to eat, people to meet, and all the crazy future entertainment we’d have, then if you were really that bored you could choose to die.

3. I don’t want to be decrepit and in pain without my wits about me.

Perfectly reasonable and rational! But again, life extension is about rejuvenation where you’re in a “young”, well-functioning body.

4. It’s not possible.

Here are some other impossible things:

“On September 11, 1933, renowned physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with utter confidence, ‘Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.’ On September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction.” -Professor Stuart Russell, AI expert and professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will.”  - Albert Einstein

Even those who would seemingly be in the best position to know if something is possible can be dead wrong. Ernest Rutherford is the father of nuclear physics. And if Einstein has a hard time predicting the future of his own field, maybe you need a more open mind.

Here are some more impossible things:

“We will never make a 32 bit operating system.”  -Bill Gates

“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.”  - T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961. The first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965.

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.”  -Charlie Chaplin, actor, producer, director, and studio founder, 1916

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.”  - Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford’s lawyer Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.

How many people do you know who died of smallpox? Smallpox killed hundreds of millions in its time, but with the dedication of several key people and organizations, it’s been eradicated. Now expand that example to a future in which it would be crazy to imagine someone dying of old age. No one is saying that combating aging is easy. But it’s possible with enough support.

“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth — all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.”  -Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926

Read more here. The point isn’t that these people were dumb. It’s that even the smartest people in supposedly the most authoritative positions have been wrong. Predicting the future is hard. Bad predictions can go the other way too. Flying cars anyone? But look at how much society has changed in the last twenty years, let alone 50 or 100 or 1000. Technological innovation can take a long time and be immensely challenging. That said, there’s no reason we should think developing life extension is impossible.

5. We would have overpopulation!

This could be a concern but is a low-level one. There are many natural things that would adjust, such as people having fewer children, better resource management, and eventually some super sci-fi off-planet colonization. And I don’t hear the same people saying we shouldn’t save people in the hospital or from natural disasters in order to stop overpopulation.

6. People wouldn’t be motivated to do anything and they’d procrastinate.

The rise of automation and AI that can do even creative tasks better than humans can will probably create a post-scarcity society where none of that will matter anymore (or we won’t solve the AI safety problem and we’ll die). Even setting that aside, this is a silly argument. I love how Eliezer Yudkowsky put it:

“A man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don’t recall exactly what. And I said: “You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn’t being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.” –https://www.readthesequences.com/How-To-Seem-And-Be-Deep

7. Some religious hangup. 

Life extension and your religion don’t conflict! Don’t take my word for it. There are prominent Christian and Mormon life extension supporters: https://www.christiantranshumanism.org/

If God has a plan, and we die when we’re meant to die, then living longer doesn’t conflict with that. For the most part, religious people don’t tell the paramedics to stop CPR because it’s interfering with God’s plan, or tell Grandpa to stop taking his heart medication because that wasn’t around for the Israelites. No one is stopping Alzheimer or Parkinson research. This research would help us avoid all these other tragic problems our loved ones experience.

8. It would only benefit the rich!

It can seem like only the rich benefit from new developments but that’s not the case. New technology is more expensive in the beginning and gets cheaper as time goes on. Take cell phones, for example.

Before: “Cell phone? Must be a rich stockbroker.”

Now: 

The kids at St. Jude Hospital would be stuck with prayer with this kind of mindset. No treatments, no medical devices, nothing.

Supporting rejuvenation research helps save EVERYONE.

9. There are more important things to work on right now like extreme poverty! 

I agree there are other very important causes, but I don’t hear people arguing that we shouldn’t spend time and money to treat mothers with breast cancer in America because children in Somalia are dying.

Also, targeting aging addresses the underlying issue rather than each downstream problem that arises as a result, like dementia or cancer. Imagine the money and resources that are currently spent on these diseases that would be freed up.

For more rigorous, effective-altruism-style analysis, check out Emanuele Ascani and Sarah Constantin’s posts:

A general framework for evaluating aging research. Part 1: reasoning with Longevity Escape Velocity

Cost-Effectiveness of Aging Research

Aging research and population ethics

Impact of aging research besides LEV

10. Any other downside

There are downsides to CPR. If done correctly, it usually breaks your ribs. Does that mean you shouldn’t do it?

I’m not saying that there no benefits to death. However, many people have status quo bias, i.e. they argue that one or two things that may actually have some upside are enough to justify keeping things the way they are, but fail to consider that if they were starting from first principles they probably wouldn’t have chosen that option to begin with.

For example, if everyone were already immortal, that would mean that dictators would live forever. Oh no! But the solution to dictators living forever is not to kill everybody in the world at random. For any problems that death has solved in the past, like getting rid of dictators, humans will come up with new solutions if they become a real issue.

What to do next? 

This is a tough question. There are three options I see.

1. If you have available funds, the answer is simple. Donate it to the people who can do the work. 

Aubrey de Grey is the big name in the life extension movement. Most people know him for his long beard and British accent. He’s one of the few people who are my personal heroes. I really respect people who identify what’s important, figure out what their comparative advantages are and how they can be most impactful, and then just do it. Aubrey is one of those people. I also like him because he’s forthright. He’s blunt and he speaks plainly about what he thinks people are doing right and what they’re doing wrong. He also has “skin in the game” (as everyone is saying after Taleb’s latest book) and puts his money where his mouth is. When he inherited an £11 million estate from his mother, he donated £9 million to the SENS Research Foundation.

If that’s not enough, crypto wunderkind Vitalik Buterin donated $2.4 million worth of Ethereum to SENS, and the Pineapple Fund person donated $1 million worth of Bitcoin!

The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) is doing some great work on the promotional side by writing articles and collaborating with popular YouTubers (which I think is particularly valuable), greatly increasing exposure to and support for the concept of life extension.

2. If you have the capability to develop the relevant skills, work in the field yourself. 

Laura Deming has a nice guide to getting started:

How to help work on longevity

It might also be worth understanding machine learning and applying it to relevant issues or finding other novel ways of approaching problems. I know less about this but the next step would probably be to reach out to one of the people in the field and talk to them about it. 

3. Convince other people to donate money or work directly in the sector.

Join these groups:

Ending aging: SENS, SENS Foundation, Aubrey de Grey

Effective Altruism & Life Extension

r/longevity

Check out already persuasive content:

Eliezer Yudkowsky famously wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to see if he could write a really popular fan-fiction to introduce people to rationality and save humanity from death. It worked! When you’ve read it, you’ll be in a good position to recommend it to other people and to think about what you could do to get people to join the good fight. It’s available for free here:

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

These YouTube videos are my favorite intros to life extension:

Brainstorm ideas for how to bring more talent and funds to the cause

What are your ideas for how to get more people on board for life extension? Let me know in the comments!

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