Humanity has pondered whether eternal life will allow us to find true happiness. We argue that eternal life runs the risk of raising our standards of happiness too high, leaving us unsatisfied, or causing us to experience cyclical feelings of happiness, and suggest that eternal life may not be the answer to happiness after all.
From ancient times to the present, humans have always sought eternal life. Just as the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang searched for the elixir of life to fulfill his dream of immortality, in the 21st century, even though human life expectancy has increased by decades, we are still studying the aging of the human body and trying to find ways to slow it down. In 2013, Google founded a biotech company, Calico, to conduct research to significantly extend human lifespan. Calico’s goal is to cure age-related diseases and ultimately extend the healthy lifespan of humans as much as possible. While the initial goal of extending human life by 500 years may be an exaggeration, research into extending human life and slowing aging is still very much ongoing. Why does humanity so desperately want eternal life? Perhaps it’s because we all want to be free from the anxiety and fear of the inevitability of death. If we were to achieve the eternal life we so desperately desire, would we be happier than we are now?
To answer this question, we need to think about what happiness is. Eugene Noah Harari said that happiness is an immediate feeling of pleasure or long-term satisfaction with the way your life is going, and it is determined by the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. For example, if a person with a subjective expectation of 100,000 won is given an objective condition of 1 million won, he will feel happy. In this way, human beings set their own standards of happiness and live their lives with events that fulfill them. So, can eternal life provide something that fulfills the different standards of happiness of many people? I think it’s hard to say.
First, it’s possible that an eternal life would raise individual standards of happiness too high. If humans had infinite time, they would probably experience hundreds of times as many things as humans who live around 100 years today. We could live for hundreds or thousands of years, eat an infinite number of delicious foods, travel to every corner of the world, and read an infinite number of books. It’s likely that a human being who lives forever and experiences all of that would become so accustomed to it all that they wouldn’t bat an eye at most things. The many experiences and opportunities that humans will have over the course of many years could lead to events that make us feel happy, but they could also raise the bar for happiness. If happiness is determined by the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations, as Eugene Noah Harari suggests, then immortalized humans will experience a situation where their subjective expectations are so high that no condition can satisfy them, and they will not feel happy. In this way, eternal life might actually lead to a state of dullness in which nothing would make us happy.
We should also consider that humans need periodic stimuli to feel happy in order to be happy. Most feelings of happiness don’t last a lifetime. This is easy to understand if we look at happiness as a product of hormones and electrical signals, as Noah Harari says. In the same way that our body maintains a constant body temperature, our biochemical systems are designed to maintain a certain level of happiness, which means that even if an event causes us to feel happy, our biochemical systems will eventually cause it to fade. From this perspective, we can think of it this way: if we want to be happy over a long period of time, not just in a moment, we need events to happen regularly to make us feel happy. If such events occurred in shorter intervals, we would feel relatively happier because we would feel happiness more often. So, would eternal life make us feel happier more often? It doesn’t. Living longer does not mean that more events happen in the same amount of time. The absolute number of times you’ve felt happy in your entire life may be high, but there’s no guarantee that the number will be higher if you break it down into chunks of time. In other words, eternal life doesn’t directly translate to happiness.
In addition to this, we must also consider what death, which eternal life will take away, means for human life. Heidegger said that only by living with the experience of death can we “exist,” and only by existing can we live happily. In other words, by accepting death, we realize the finitude of time and feel happy by having an attachment to our lives. This can be seen in the happiness of people with terminal cancer or rare diseases who make bucket lists and fulfill them. Despite the fact that they are well aware that their time is short, they find great happiness in doing the things they have always wanted to do. By realizing that life is finite, they have freed themselves from the unnatural things that were holding them captive. But if we were to live forever, we wouldn’t be able to escape the unnatural forever. We will not feel the passing of time at all, so we will simply live as we have been living, as the world has been telling us to live. Can a life lived with the mindset that if I don’t do it today, I can do it tomorrow, next year, or 10 years from now, why do I have to do it today? I would be much happier with a life that is lived fiercely and according to my own desires, even if it is only for 20 years.
Unlike Heidegger, who argued that humanity can feel happiness through the attachment to life that we feel due to the finiteness of time, the Buddhist perspective introduced by Yuval Noah Harari suggests that happiness can only be achieved by letting go of craving for everything. One might think, then, that if eternal life frees us from the constraints of time, we might be able to let go of attachment and become happier. However, Buddhism’s meaning of “freeing oneself from attachment” is not the same as living a sterile life without attachment to oneself. To borrow Heidegger’s phrase, it means to let go of attachment to non-original things and to accept ourselves as we are, which means to live in the present moment instead of daydreaming about something that might have happened. So can eternal life help us let go of our desire for non-original things? Probably not. As I mentioned earlier, if we lose our appreciation for the passing of time, we’ll be in a hurry to chase after what the world thinks is valuable, rather than reflecting on what we think is valuable. In the end, even from a Buddhist perspective, eternal life is not a shortcut to happiness.
Humanity is getting closer to eternal life. Advances in science and medicine have already extended human life expectancy by decades or more. We’ve already discovered that aging at the cellular level is related to telomeres, and we’ll soon have answers about how the human body ages and how to prevent it. But even if we do, there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to live forever, or that we’ll be any happier than we are now. As I said earlier, we may become desensitized to so many stimuli over the course of our long lives that whatever happens to us won’t meet our standards of happiness. There’s also no guarantee that happiness will come more often than it does now. You may lose sight of the preciousness of time and fill your life with meaningless things, or you may end up living a life no different from the one you’re living now in 100 years, unable to let go of your attachment to unnatural things.
In the end, eternal life doesn’t seem to be the answer to the question of how to be happy. It’s not how long we live that matters when it comes to happiness. It depends on how we define happiness and how we live our lives. The same conditions can make us feel happy or unhappy, depending on how we accept them. So, while it’s important to strive for eternal life, isn’t it more important to have a clear set of personal attitudes and values, and to act accordingly?
