Increased Longevity and Lost Motivation

Of all the concerns and objections, the idea that healthy longevity would deprive us of motivation in life is unique. While this is an uncommon concern, it does occasionally come up in debate.

The argument in a nutshell

If aging were completely defeated, then there wouldn’t be a definite upper limit to the duration of our lives. Depending on your luck and ability to minimise risks from other causes of death, in principle, you might live until the end of the universe. Therefore, according to this argument, you would lose your motivation to be alive.

The logic behind this argument is that the perceived inevitability of death puts a certain pressure on you; as the reasoning goes, you’ve only got so much time, so you’d better use it to get something done; without this pressure, you’d end up consistently postponing to tomorrow what could be done today.

This is a needlessly complicated way of saying that interest, passion, necessity, generosity, etc, are not sufficient conditions to get people to do anything; unless you’re in a rush because your biological clock is ticking, laziness would take over.

Even accomplished scientists sometimes think this way, which is rather surprising, as a scientist would presumably love nothing more than having potentially unlimited time to dedicate to a field; more importantly, a scientist who is truly passionate about such a field should need no other motivator to get out of bed in the morning and conduct science, regardless of life expectancy.

If you keep postponing doing something just because you don’t have to do it right now, then perhaps you’re not so into it after all. If you love it, why wait?

The meaning of meaning

This argument has a few variations and forks, such as the boredom argument and the “death gives life meaning” argument. The counterargument to such things is this: meaning is not an intrinsic property, neither of life nor anything else. Meaning depends on an observer who attributes it to something.

It’s not an absolute, and there are no things that confer meaning to other things by default for everyone. In other words, you decide what gives your life meaning, and if it so happened that you could live a few centuries as opposed to a few decades, this wouldn’t necessarily and automatically make it meaningless.

The idea of not being able to properly appreciate or understand a concept or a feeling without its opposite has some merit, but it can’t be over-generalized or extended too much without leading to nonsense.

For example, it’s true that we often take good things for granted until we lose them, such as health, but this is no reason to say that we should lose good things just to remind ourselves that they’re good and that we should be appreciative of them. Would you say you can’t properly appreciate not having cancer until you’ve had cancer and ascertained that it’s no fun, and therefore you should have it at some point? Not quite everything must be tried at least once.

Similarly, you don’t need misery to appreciate happiness. Knowing what misery is like might help you make a clearer distinction between misery and happiness, but it’s not like any unrealistically lucky people out there who’ve somehow never been miserable have necessarily never been happy either.

After all, emotions such as happiness and sadness are ultimately the product of chemical reactions going on in your brain and more generally your body, and they don’t really need you to know what their opposite is like before they can happen. The first time you’ve felt anything in your life, you had no way of comparing that feeling to any other, but, for example, if it was misery, you surely felt miserable anyway.

You don’t need the bad things in life to appreciate the good

You don’t need death, or the idea that one day you’ll certainly die, to be motivated or appreciate the good things in your life. There’s no reason to think that a good thing inevitably turns bad if you can enjoy it forever. Do you value all the relationships in your life because you’re reasonably sure that, one day, such people won’t be around anymore, or do you value them because they’re good people?

Would you value your friendships less if you knew for a fact you would never lose your friends?

What about health? Do you think a day will ever come when you’ll be sick of being healthy? If you fill your life with good things, which you appreciate because they’re good regardless of how long they’ll last, is there any reason why you would need or want life to be finite?

However minuscule the odds, it might happen that one day you’ll run out of good things to fill your life with. It’s better to wait for that to happen before rushing into any decisions that involve shortening your lifespan.