Why Die?

When do you want to die? The Reaper is busy, but he can fit you in right now. Too soon? Later, perhaps? Future you will keep the appointment? Old and with a life fully lived, perhaps ever so slightly bored and ready?

Now you might think that, but when the appointment whipper-snapper you set comes, it is not in the future because you don't live in the future. You always live in the now. And thus, you always die now. Because the Reaper comes for all eventually. Humans have formed a relationship with death perverse. Like a hostage who grows to love their kidnapper, humans tell themselves the handful of decades the Reaper gives them is just the right length. That living a truly long and healthy life would get boring and would be unnatural. Imagine all the problems if death took a holiday.

And so the Reaper of Age whispers that he is your friend, always near: growing humans bigger, stronger, healthier, and smarter—at first. Then comes his harvest of slow rot. Death is a part of life, he whispers. "Death gives life meaning." This is madness. Misery doesn’t give happiness meaning. Happiness is meaning itself. If you tortured people to make them better appreciate the pleasures of life, you would be a monster. Just like this guy.

No parent would ask the Reaper of Age to wrinkle their child's skin, weaken their bones, dim their vision and their minds, cripple them in a thousand ways over decades to ultimately kill them, "to give their life meaning." But what can you do? The world contains pain and death, and so your brain believes the sweet lies that the horrors you can't avoid are good for you.

And while "Death is a part of life," cholera was a part of life until humans developed wells and sewers to separate water from waste. Shortsightedness is a part of life, until it isn't. Just because a thing is natural doesn’t make it good or necessary. It’s natural to live lives nasty, brutish, and short. And it’s natural for humans to look at what indifferent nature provides as the starting point.

As a to-do list, where humans focus, technology ever improves. And with that, the ability to make lives better ever improves. Just now, some basic tools with real promise to slow or halt the decay are becoming visible on the horizon. This raises the question: Just how strong is the Reaper of Age? With enough time and attention, can humans craft these basic tools into shields and swords to keep him at bay? Possibly indefinitely? Perhaps.

And if so, the first immortal generation may be alive today. A generation that lives a healthy adulthood as long as they wish to. But to make that happen, brains need to be cleared of the millennia of death acceptance. Death is not a solution to future problems imagined. Faced with the changes longer lives will bring, humans will not miss the Reaper and construct one to solve their problems.

Just as with our larger cities, we don’t re-mix the water to bring back cholera. Humans must discard the learned helplessness the Reaper and their own brains have imposed on them. To instead see the rot and decay not as natural and inevitable, but as a degenerative disease to be attacked like all the others. As the degenerative disease that affects 100% of the population and is a source of misery untold. Misery not in your distant future, but in your now.

And how soon we start the project of focusing our attention and shaping our tools against the Reaper matters. For the difference of but a day might determine what side of the future chasm you find yourself on. Journeying forever forward or falling backward into the abyss.