In this blog post, we deeply contemplate whether what we truly desire is eternal life or a meaningful life.
Throughout history, humanity has always pursued eternal life. Just as China’s Emperor Qin Shi Huang searched for the elixir of immortality to fulfill his dream of eternal youth, even in the 21st century, despite human life expectancy increasing by several decades, we continue to study the aging of the human body and strive to find ways to slow it down. Google established the biotech company Calico in 2013 to conduct research aimed at significantly extending human lifespan. Calico’s goal is to treat diseases related to aging and ultimately maximize human healthspan. While its initial goal of extending human lifespan to 500 years may be an exaggeration, research into extending human life and slowing aging remains actively underway. Why does humanity so desperately desire immortality? It is likely because everyone wants to escape the anxiety and fear surrounding ‘death,’ an inevitability for all humans. If humanity were to achieve the immortality it so fervently desires, would it become happier than it is now?
To answer this question, we must consider what happiness is. Yuval Noah Harari stated that happiness is the immediate feeling of joy or long-term satisfaction we derive from how our lives unfold, determined by the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. For example, a person with a subjective expectation of 100,000 won who receives an objective condition of 1 million won will feel happy. Thus, humanity establishes its own standards for happiness and lives feeling joy through events that meet those standards. So, can eternal life truly provide something that satisfies the diverse happiness standards of countless individuals? I find it difficult to say definitively that it can.
First, living eternally could cause individuals’ standards for happiness to become excessively high. If humans gained infinite time, they would likely experience hundreds of times more than what a person living roughly 100 years experiences now. Living hundreds or thousands of years, they could eat delicious food countless times over, travel to every corner of the world to the point of having nowhere left to go, and read an incalculable number of books. Humans who experience such things while living forever would likely become so accustomed to everything that they wouldn’t bat an eye at most things, becoming desensitized. While the vast experiences and opportunities afforded to humans over such long periods could act as events that induce happiness, they could simultaneously raise the bar for what constitutes happiness. As Yuval Noah Harari noted, if happiness is determined by the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations, then immortal humanity would face a situation where subjective expectations become excessively high, rendering any condition incapable of satisfying them and thus preventing the feeling of happiness. Immortality could thus turn humans into beings incapable of feeling happiness about anything, leaving them in a dull, lifeless state.
Furthermore, we must consider that humans require periodic stimuli capable of inducing happiness to feel it. Most feelings of happiness do not last a lifetime. This becomes easier to understand if we view happiness, as Yuval Noah Harari suggests, as a product of hormones and electrical signals. Just as our bodies maintain a constant temperature, our body’s biochemical systems are designed to keep the level of happiness relatively constant. This means that even if we feel happiness from an event, that feeling will eventually fade due to our biochemical systems. From this perspective, to be happy not just in a single moment but over a long period, we can conclude that events capable of inducing happiness must occur periodically. If such events occur at shorter intervals, we would feel happiness more frequently and thus feel relatively happier. But can immortality truly make us feel happiness more often? No, it cannot. Living longer does not mean more events occur within the same amount of time. While the total number of times one feels happiness over a lifetime might be greater, it cannot be guaranteed that the frequency per unit of time will increase. In other words, eternal life does not directly equate to happiness.
Furthermore, we must consider the meaning death holds in human life, which eternal life would eliminate. Heidegger stated that only living while experiencing death constitutes ‘existence,’ and that one can live happily only by existing. That is, by accepting death, one realizes the finiteness of time, and by developing an attachment to one’s own life, one feels happiness. This can be seen in how terminal cancer patients or those with rare diseases create bucket lists and find happiness by fulfilling them. Despite knowing their time is short, they find great happiness doing what they always wanted. Realizing life’s finitude frees them from the inauthentic constraints that bound them. However, if we were to live forever, we would never escape these inauthentic constraints. Because the time flowing by now feels utterly devoid of urgency, we would simply continue living as we always have, following whatever the world dictates. Can a life trapped in the mindset of “Why must I do it today? I can do it tomorrow, next year, ten years from now” truly be called happy? Even if I only lived twenty years, a life lived fiercely according to my own desires would be far happier.
Unlike Heidegger, who argued that humanity can feel happiness through the attachment to life felt due to the finiteness of time, from the Buddhist perspective introduced by Yuval Noah Harari, happiness can only be attained by abandoning all craving. One might then think that if humanity were freed from the constraints of time through immortality, it could abandon attachment and become happier. However, the Buddhist meaning of “freeing oneself from attachment” is not about abandoning attachment to oneself and living a dull, colorless life. To borrow Heidegger’s expression, it means letting go of attachment to inauthentic things and accepting oneself as one is. That is, living in the present moment instead of fantasizing about something that might have happened. So, can immortality help us abandon our desires for inauthentic things? Probably not. As mentioned earlier, forgetting the preciousness of fleeting time, humanity will likely become preoccupied with chasing what the world deems valuable, rather than contemplating what I personally find meaningful. Ultimately, even from Buddhism’s perspective on happiness, immortality is not a shortcut to happiness for humanity.
Humanity is steadily approaching immortality. Advances in science and medicine have already extended human life expectancy by several decades. We have already discovered that cellular aging is related to telomeres, and it is clear that we will soon find answers regarding human aging and how to prevent it. However, even if we achieve eternal life through such efforts, we cannot guarantee that we will be happier than we are now. As mentioned earlier, living for a long time may desensitize us to countless stimuli, making it possible that no matter what happens, it may fail to meet our standards for happiness. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that feelings of happiness will occur more frequently than they do now. We might forget the preciousness of time flowing by and instead fill our lives with meaningless pursuits. We might live a life no different from our current one, unable to let go of attachments to things that are not essential, even if we live for a hundred years.
Ultimately, eternal life does not seem to be the answer to the question, ‘How can we become happy?’ What matters for happiness is not how long we live. A happy life depends on what standards we set for happiness and how we live by them. Even under identical circumstances, whether we feel happy or unhappy depends entirely on our mindset in accepting them. Therefore, while striving for eternal life is important, wouldn’t establishing clear personal values and acting accordingly be a more direct path to greater happiness?
