🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #31

"The promise of eternal life has conventionally been the dangled carrot of religion. It is now the holy grail of Silicon Valley," writes novelist Lionel Shriver in a recent National Review cover essay. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Lionel joins me to discuss why some tech billionaires are chasing after immortality and the serious challenges that would accompany extended human lifespans. Lionel is a columnist for Britain's Spectator magazine. Her books include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Should We Stay or Should We Go. Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. In This Episode * The promise and peril of immortality (1:11) * Storytelling and optimism (6:44) * Lifespan vs. healthspan (12:23) * Post-humanity (19:19) Below is an edited transcript of our conversation The promise and peril of immortality James Pethokoukis: In the National Review essay, you make it clear you are not a medical expert, you're not a research scientist; you're a writer of fiction. Of all the things you could have written about, both as an essay and also in your book, Should We Stay or Should We Go, what originally created your interest in this topic of longevity? Lionel Shriver: I should also clarify that, for someone who's writing about life extension, I am not immortal either. So I have no qualifications for this aside from having applied myself to it imaginatively. The book you mentioned, Should We Stay or Should We Go, is a novel about a couple that has vowed to kill themselves once they both reach the age of 80 because they don't want to fall apart. They don't want to burden others with their own crumbling. It's a parallel universe book that explores any number of different futures for this couple. And one of those futures is why I suspect I was approached to write this essay for National Review, and it's one in which there's a cure for aging. Basically, my characters live forever. Everyone in the world looks 25 and they never look any older. I have addressed myself to what that future might look like and not just look like, but feel like. What would it feel like to address yourself to a future that was potentially infinite? In the novel, it starts out great. It was exhilarating to watch your spouse, rather than get older and older, get younger and younger and return to the age when you fell in love. And everyone is healthy. There are no limitations anymore. And all your choices are also potentially infinite. You can try out every profession. It's no longer a matter of, what are you going to be when you grow up? You can be whatever you want, and then you can change your mind. It'd be something else. You can move to any city. All your choices are just this kind of smorgasbord of what you might sample. And that seems fun to begin with. That sounds like a near-utopian scenario. Yeah. The trouble is that when you think about it, one of the things that gives our lives urgency is finitude, that our decisions matter because you can't undecide them. The way we choose to spend our time matters because there's a limited amount of it. There's no redo. And effectively with eternal life, there is a redo. There's infinite redo. You can just go back and do something else. You can just go in a different direction. If you marry the wrong person, you can just marry someone else and you won't have given them, say, 10 years of your precious life. I mean, yes, but there are so many years left that it doesn't matter. And the trouble is that once you remove that, then nothing seems to matter. And that is depressing. When you remove that urgency, you also potentially remove meaning. And everything becomes arbitrary. One of the things that happens to my characters is their characters start to decay. In some ways, they trade places in terms of what kind of person they are. The wife has always been the more optimistic and reflective and joyous, whereas her husband was more programmatic and more of an ideologue. And as the hundreds of years go by, he becomes much more himself reflective and philosophical and she becomes impatient and misanthropic. Because character itself becomes arbitrary. In the essay, I'm trying to look in a nonfiction sense at, what would it really be like both emotionally and practically to have a permanent human population? And that raises huge practical problems, too. Like, you don't have any children anymore. You can't. Storytelling and optimism Is it easier for you to come up with the more dystopian scenarios? Oftentimes, I'll criticize sci-fi writing, television, books as overly focused on the dystopian. It’s almost like a lack of effort. In this case, is that basically justified: that it's very hard to write a scenario where everything kind of turns out okay if people are living forever? It is hard to write. It's always hard to write positively. It's hard for me even to write characters that are purely lovable. Since I don't know any. And it's hard to write happy endings. I do write happy endings, but they're hard to get there. And I feel you have to earn them. You can't just have happily ever after and that's it. There is one chapter in Should We Stay or Should We Go which is purely positive. It’s called “Once Upon a Time in Lambeth,” which is the neighborhood in London where they live. And it's the perfect old age. It's what we would all want. They grow only more physically beautiful as they age until people are stopping on them on the street wanting to take their pictures or paint their portraits because they're so striking. They grow only more in love and they have only a better sex life. It gets more and more rich and imaginative and exciting. Young people admire them because they both started second careers and had become hugely successful. And young people flock around their dinner table and want to hear their wisdom. Meanwhile, outside in the rest of the world, the Israeli-Palestinian problem is solved at last, Africa is a thriving economic power, etc. The thing is that there's a point only a few pages into this particular chapter that you get it: This is a satire. This is the one scenario that won't happen. It’s almost so ridiculously… It's ridiculous. In fact, it's hilarious. Optimism can be funny. And in some ways, it's also an illustration of kind of a fictional problem. Because without bad things happening, there is no story. And what makes that particular chapter a story is your growing consciousness that this is not possible. That this is ridiculous. That you are being made fun of, basically, because this is what you want and, you know, give us a break. You're never going to get it. This is hilarity at your expense. I am sympathetic with your frustration with science fiction. And it's not just science fiction. Literary fiction has a lot of unhappy endings and tragedy and dysfunction in it. That's the nature of story. It's a requirement. No badness, no story. The genres vary in terms of what that scale of badness is going to be and whether or not it's eventually going to resolve into something more palatable. But fiction is by its nature about disaster. Would your critique be the same if instead of talking about living hundreds of years, our lifespan was doubled? Instead of everyone living to be at least, on average, 75, 80, 85, it was 150, 175. To a degree. Though I think that issue of urgency, of how you spend your time, once you bring it down to, for argument’s sake let's say 150 years, that's probably less of an issue. But the practical problems do become more intrusive. If we're all living to 150, then we are going to have a huge elderly population and hardly any young people. And that poses a lot of economic issues. One of the things that I posit in the essay is that living substantially longer means the end of retirement. You can't live to 150 and retire at 65. It's economically impossible. So that means working for a long time. And the irony of this whole discus… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe