Philosophy for Us
Part Two · Across Time, Death & Meaning · Series 24

Should You Want to Live Forever?

Of course I'd take the pill — and then what? And then again?

8 episodes ↓ 26 sources ↓ MetaphysicsEthics

The question

A man on a podcast — rich, calm, very certain — said the first person to live to a hundred and fifty is probably alive right now. Maybe in this room. And I noticed I wanted it to be me. Not "I'd consider it." Wanted it — the way you want the doctor to say the lump is nothing. Of course I'd take the pill. Who wouldn't? And then, driving home, a smaller thought, the kind you swat away: of course I'd take the pill … and then what. And then the same again. And then again. For how long? Until when? And I realised I had never once, not for a second, asked myself how long I actually wanted — I had only ever assumed the answer was more, and that more was obviously good, and that wanting anything less than forever would be a kind of giving up. When did "I don't want to die" turn into "I want to never die"? Those aren't the same wish. And I'm not sure I ever chose the second one.

What you practise

You believe two things at once. Dying is bad: it takes your future. And more life is always better, so of course you would take the pill. That feels like one thought. It is two, and the first does not get you the second. Here you learn to hear them apart, in a pitch and in your own head, and to hold serious answers on both questions — whether death harms you, whether endless life would stay good — without grabbing whichever suits your mood. No verdict is handed out. You leave able to say how long you actually want, or to admit the word you were using was never a length.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

  1. 01

    The First to Live to 150

    A man on a podcast claims the first person to live to a hundred and fifty is probably alive already, and the wish to be that person arrives before any deliberation. The first episode separates two claims usually welded together — that death is bad, and that more life is always better — and asks when "I don't want to die" became "I want to never die."

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  2. 02

    Death Is Nothing to Us

    Epicurus held that death is nothing to us — where death is, you are not, so there is no one for it to be bad for. The episode builds his argument as carefully as it can be built, including the symmetry with the time before birth, and sets it against the fear that remains in the room, unimpressed. Neither is declared the winner.

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  3. 03

    What Death Takes

    A man dies at eighty-one, in his sleep, harmed by nothing — and his daughter is devastated. Thomas Nagel's reply to Epicurus holds that death is a real harm because it deprives you of the life you would otherwise have had. The episode also marks the gap in the reply — it shows that death takes something, not that more life is always worth having.

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  4. 04

    Is More Always Better?

    No new thinker this time. The episode asks for a plain number — how many years do you actually want? — and watches every finite figure feel like a loss, until the answer becomes "forever," which turns out to be not the largest number but no number at all, a word standing in for something never once pictured.

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  5. 05

    The 342-Year-Old Woman

    Bernard Williams's case of Elina Makropulos, three hundred and forty-two years old, with nothing left that can move her. Williams argues that an endless life must end either in tedium or in becoming a stranger to yourself, since the categorical desires that give a person reason to stay alive are finite. The claim is built at full strength and left standing.

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  6. 06

    Repeatable Pleasures

    John Martin Fischer replies that not everything runs out — some pleasures renew each time, some work keeps opening, and a self can change without becoming no one. His case against Williams is built until it grips, and the dispute is left unsettled, since the only evidence would be centuries no one has lived.

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  7. 07

    The Horizon, Not the Event

    Martin Heidegger refuses the frame the earlier arguments shared — death weighed as an event, good or bad. On his account death is the horizon against which a life takes its shape, and the limit is what gives the time its weight. The episode tests this on the thing you keep meaning to do, and on why a deadline is what finally gets it done.

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  8. 08

    How Long Do You Want?

    The final episode gathers the two unsettled disputes — Epicurus against Nagel, Williams against Fischer — together with Heidegger's reframing, and offers no verdict. The question is handed back sharper than it arrived — not how long a life can be made to last, but how long you actually want, and what you mean by it.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →

Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

EpicurusLucretiusThomas NagelBernard WilliamsJohn Martin FischerMartin HeideggerJ. David Velleman

Your turn

A friend has signed a contract with a company that sells two things. The first is a subscription: a clinic, drugs, scans, a plan to keep him alive until the cure arrives. The second is the backstop. If he dies first, they freeze his brain and store it, and one day, they say, they will run him again on their machines. He paid for both. He is forty-one, healthy, and happier than you have seen him in years. At the pub he says he has taken death off the table, and asks why you haven't.

  1. Say what you object to. That dying at eighty would be bad for him? Or that four hundred years would be good for him? You can hold the first and drop the second, so which one is doing the work in your objection?
  2. He says he will simply keep finding new things to want. Is that a life that keeps renewing, or a man who has not looked at what he bought? Say what would settle it.
  3. The company tells him not to fear death because it can be fixed. Epicurus told him not to fear it because there will be nobody left for it to hurt. Both want the fear gone. You have it and want out of it. Whose ground are you standing on?

A good answer says which of your two beliefs the objection rests on, and what would have to be true of four hundred years for the other one to hold. "It's his money" is not an answer, and neither is "it will never work".

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

Where to start