I was brushing my teeth this morning and thinking about the inevitability of my death. This is pretty normal for me - I think it’s a healthy practice to remind yourself that your life, one way or another, is eventually going to end. Hopefully not anytime soon—I’m not that old, and although day-to-day life can be a bit of a slog at times, I feel like I generally enjoy being alive. I have a spouse I love, a job I don’t hate, family, friends, pets, Breath of the Wild 2 on the horizon… as Joe Walsh once put it, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”
But while memento mori isn’t a new concept to me, the recent flurry of think-pieces, podcasts, and other pontifications about advancements in AI have put a slightly different spin on how I think about it.
I forget who said this (I wanna say a standup comic, but honestly can’t remember) but it was something to the effect of, “Before age 30, no one really believes they’re going to die.” Obviously, this isn’t literally true, but I read that message loud and clear. Prior to turning 30 myself a few years ago, I don’t think I ever truly accepted it.
As a kid, it’s pretty easy to put death out of your mind (even if you’re like me) and focus on your childish interests. I can distinctly remember the first time I grokked the concept of death as a small child. I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and I was sitting on my parents’ couch watching the 1964 kaiju classic Mothra vs. Godzilla on TV. When I got to the scene where (spoilers) Mothra is killed in battle by Godzilla’s atomic breath, I remember feeling very sad. Even at this young age, I think I was basically aware that what I was actually seeing was just Japanese actors in rubber suits, but the realization that something could go from conscious to never conscious again, lights on to lights out, was deeply unsettling, and something I’d never really thought about before then. I was over it a minute later when my dad told me he saw a hawk in the backyard, which I ran to investigate. At that age, not lingering on unpleasant thoughts is easier.
By the time I was in college, death still seemed like a pretty distant concern, and maybe even less of one, as more people were beginning to talk seriously about ideas like the singularity. Suddenly, the possibility of never dying felt slightly less naive. Smart people who I admire think it’s possible! Why worry about it if someday I’ll just be able to upload my consciousness onto a computer and live as long as I like in some kind of eudaimonia machine? As the now-classic Black Mirror episode would eventually suggest, heaven might not exist yet, but it could!
Later in my 20s, I began to realize that I was still being childish and naive in thinking this way. Even if uploading my consciousness is eventually possible, whatever vessel I upload my “self” onto is not going to be me. It might be a convincing replica, but this sack of meat that I currently inhabit still has an expiration date.
One obvious problem I struggled to grapple with was the fact that a machine can never really replicate the experience of existing in a human body. Even though I already knew by the time I was in college that my personality and temperament were at least partially determined by factors outside of my brain (my gut microbiome, the environment I live in, how financially secure I am), I pretty much just conveniently ignored these things because the possibility of living forever felt so damn good. Motivating reasoning is a hell of a drug. And even if we’re talking about transporting my consciousness into a flesh-and-bone biological copy of my body (which is cool as shit to think about), that still wouldn’t be me, or at least not the version of me that’s writing this right now. This me is ultimately going to die, and I’ve only just begun living with that certainty.
So what difference does that make? How has coming to terms with my own mortality changed the way I think about life?
Well to start, I sure as hell appreciate it more. Knowing that this could well be the one and only shot I get at doing this makes it feel a whole lot more valuable. I never understood the argument that without a belief in deities or afterlives, life would be rendered meaningless. If I truly believed that I had an infinite amount of time to be conscious and would eventually experience some kind of eternal bliss, my ambition to actually do things here and now would quickly dwindle. Needless to say, I strongly agree with the perspective that life’s impermanence is what gives it meaning.
On the other hand, it’s also helped me take my own life a bit less seriously. While I can hopefully have a long and meaningful existence full of fun experiences and rich relationships with others, I realize that in the grand cosmic scheme of things, what I do here on earth doesn’t really amount to a whole hill of beans. This has taken a great deal of pressure off of me to “be something” or achieve some kind of prestige that I never really wanted but was conditioned to believe I should be pursuing at all times. If I were going to leave any sort of mark on the world after I’m gone, all I’d really want it to be is something like, “You know, that Chris was a swell guy. I enjoyed interacting with him.” At this point in time, I struggle to think of anything more meaningful than that.
Finally, I think accepting my own mortality has helped me become a more pragmatic, intellectually humble version of myself. When I was younger, I was a more ideological person than I am today. Moreover, I could be fairly smug and arrogant about my own views and values (plenty of college students go through this phase, though I’d say mine was slightly longer and stronger than average). I used to think that my own personal ideology really mattered. Here’s essentially how I feel about that sentiment today.
As such, I’ve grown into more of a meliorist worldview. I now tend to think the goal of politics and statecraft should simply be to maximize human flourishing, rather than pursuing one amorphous moral value (equality, tradition, freedom, security) at the expense of all others. If only I’d watched Legend of Kora when it first debuted, or actually done my homework when I was assigned a reading from the Tao te Ching in college, I might have learned this lesson sooner. But then again, maybe not. Motivated reasoning, yada yada.
In any case, I’ll leave you with this from my childhood hero. I always found this performance pretty stirring, but it definitely hits different now.