“Public health fundamentally changed what it means to be human,” S. Jay Olashansky argues in a short video explaining the jump in human life expectancy in the mid-19th Century. For more than 200,000 years, most humans died by 30 and infant mortality was endemic. But over the last two centuries human life expectancy has more than doubled. In the last century the average American life expectancy rose from 47 to 78, largely attributable to improved understanding of personal hygiene, effective treatments for childhood diseases, and shifts toward safer working spaces.
If you accept that it doesn’t inherently mean anything to be human, the extension of life expectancy has expanded the existential vacuum in which human imagination has begun to invent many different meanings for itself with increasingly industrial efficiency. Paradoxically, this drive to fundamentally change what it means to be human has also become a catalyst for deepening categorical differences between people and rationalizing a menagerie of deprivations by making them seem like the statistical inevitabilities of progress. The first fissures of this obsolescence have become visible in the recent distinctions in life expectancy between rich and poor. In the last two decades the life expectancy of the poor has begun falling.Today, college educated white men live to 80, while those who failed to graduate high school live to 67. A white male without a high school diploma will die three years earlier today than he would have two decades ago, according to a 2012 report from Health Affairs. White female high school dropouts will die five years earlier than their counterparts would have in the early 1990s.
The irony of increased life spans is that the majority of that found time ends up being used for work, the one social burden we keep expecting technology to deliver us from. The more time they spend occupying on a job, the more finicky and competitive the labor market becomes, making it difficult it becomes for the young and poor to break through the fog of nepotism and prejudicial eligibility requirements. “The succession of generations could be obstructed by a glut of the able,” bioethicist Leon Kass wrote in a report on aging for The President’s Council on Bioethics. “The old might think less of preparing their replacements, and the young could see before them only layers of their elders blocking the path, and no great reason to hurry in building families or careers-remaining functionally immature ‘young adults’ for decades, neither willing nor able to step into the shoes of their mothers and fathers.”
This widening differential adds new pressure to America’s already strained political and economic structures. According to George Dranitsaris, a healthcare consultant and research scientist, the ideal ratio for an economy is four active workers for every retired person, but this has already dropped to 3.5 workers for every retiree, and could reach three to one within a decade. “As people live longer the data shows they put greater strain on resources,” he told me. “There certainly won’t be enough people working for governments to pay to look after elderly people who won’t be working, especially for countries like the United States, which has a pretty generous social security system.”
Get back to work. Image via Creative Commons/Victor Casale.
Meanwhile, the quest to further lengthen one’s life has created a new cottage industry of speculative research into technology that could further distance the beneficiaries of furthered human life expectancy technology from those whose share of those gains is dwindling. And now that most of the old causes of mortality attributed to pathogens and environmental factors have been theoretically resolved, the project of extending lifespans appears to be reaching a fundamental limit within the body itself. The most basic determinant of aging is thought to be the natural limit on somatic cell division, called the Hayflick Limit after UCSF evolutionary biologist Leonard Hayflick. Cell division that drives human life eventually comes to an end, either because the genetic material in them becomes progressively unstable after each division, or because the mitochondria that provide energy for division eventually oxidize
Ray Kurzweill is perhaps the most famous immortalist, insisting that when described as a series of molecular mechanisms there is no reason to believe death can’t be stopped or reversed, something that would only contribute to overall human productivity. “Our initial reaction to hearing that someone has died is a profound loss of knowledge and skill and talents and relationships,” he said in an interview with Wired. “It’s not the case that there are only a fixed number of positions, and if old people don’t die off, there’s no room for young people to come up with new ideas, because we’re constantly expanding knowledge. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t displace anybody– they created a whole new field.”
Absent from these claims are any practical ideas about how the young should be accommodated. The transition to a knowledge economy as embodied by Page and Brin depends on its ability to command greater profits with significantly smaller operational costs than preceding industries, something that only intensifies the competitive pressure on the young and in-need and worsens their chances at a longer life. Google earned more than twice the net income of General Motors in 2013, and yet it employed less than one-fourth as many people. Apple earns more than six times as much net income than GM and employs less than half as many people. These are economic structures of disenfranchisement, and using the profits sprung from them to rationalize an industry of speculative longevity research is self-abnegation imposed from above.
The conception of death as tragic is, likewise, not wrong but incomplete. Death is also mundane, peaceful, relieving, and in some cases an act of definitively human generosity. Whatever meaning there is in humanity, it lies not in the capacity of the individual to prolong its own encounter with the world, but in the overwhelming number of perpetually regenerating individuals who thrive when driven toward interdependence rather than categorical fragmentation.
Instead of using technology to eliminate death, we might use it to better be able to manage its inevitability for the benefit of the community instead of the individual ego that can’t accept its end. Earlier this year a 70 year-old New York woman, Sandy Bem, invited her family to her home and killed herself. Five years earlier she’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and decided that when she reached the point where she could no longer care for herself she would take her own life. “She talked about it a lot,” her daughter Emily told NPR. “It was just sort of sprinkled throughout life. She would often say, ‘Well, in two years I’m going to do it,’ and then two years would go by and she hadn’t declined enough where it warranted it. Then she would say, ‘Well, two more years.’”
After she turned 70, Bem determined that her time had come, there weren’t any remaining years to be bargained for. So she called her family over one last time. They took a long walk, watched Mary Poppins together spoke among themselves, and then she went into her bedroom and asked for her husband of 49 years to come lie beside her in bed after she’d taken a fatal drug overdose, self-administered to avoid New York’s laws against assisted suicide. And while the event was unquestionably somber Bem’s daughter says she wouldn’t have had it any other way. “It made it less like a grieving process and less like a sort of horrible thing that had happened,” she said, “and more like something that made sense and felt right and actually had some joy to it in its own way.” One of the few studies of the effects of prepared suicide on surviving family members found that in some ways it left loved ones slightly better prepared to deal with the grieving process.
To the victor go the spoils. Image via Creative Commons/Ralph Aichinger.
That we have so effectively insulated ourselves from death should not be mistaken for evidence that death is, or should be, eradicable. The quest for a long life is a distraction of luxury, the uneven distribution of which points to the ways in which our collective schemes for utopian self-improvement smuggle the violent social divisions of our present into each subsequent generation, building up an industry of normalized depravity with empirical battlements of objective data.
There is no secret to immortality. We live in a borderless expanse of immortal matter, in which our alien plumes of consciousness are the anomaly. Everything in us is already bound to an immortal existence save the unreliable ghost of our egos. We will not have solved the problem of death by postponing our ego’s confrontation with it, nor is there a coherent explanation for why death of individual consciousness is a problem. Death produces heartbreak and sorrow, which weigh down life for those left behind, but like hunger sorrow is a need expressed through inarticulate urges, something that should point us to structures of community in the way hunger points us toward food. We don’t answer the need by making its sensory signals imperceptible.
The longer we drive ourselves to live, the more we make a taboo of death, narrowing our ability to think about it in personal, plausible terms. Instead, it becomes a phantom, symbolic of an subjective dread that makes every form of struggle to outpace it seem noble and rational. We define ourselves by the lengths we are willing to go to be anything other than ourselves, and the basis of all such efforts require a baseline population against which to measure our progress, people whose suffering becomes proof that we were right to be afraid and should press onward at any cost, until what it fundamentally means to be human can be claimed as a product of our own making, the distribution of which will depend on the imperial generosity of those who invented it.
Mastering control of the biological arc of death does not mean people will no longer die, but only that some people will have successfully dissociated themselves from all the rest. And as our lives continue to grow longer for no meaningful reason, it’s possible to see how far apart we’ve already grown.
Do Humans Live Too Extended?
