Life Extension

If there ever was a gathering worthy of some philosophical shaping it would be the two-day Longevity Investors Conference (Inside the billion-dollar meeting for the rich who want to live forever).

“Here’s to drinking wine well into our hundreds,” went the toast to the 150 mega-rich participants seeking to cheat mortality by extending their natural lifespan – presumably like that of the one 67-year-old man announcing his biological age had reversed and was now 49 years. Remember the simpler days when a man’s denial of the natural aging process was a bad comb over?

There’s certainly big bucks in longevity research. Much of the $4.5 billion over the past five years has been targeted to the aging process at the cellular level. Then there are all the other “anti-aging treatments” (er, “geroscience”) such as inhaling low-oxygen air and/or taking a vast array of supplements like NMN to help provide cells with energy, along with various non-medicinal boosters outside FDA purview. Sponsor note: the club offers freshly squeezed organic celery juice.

Others in the upcoming session may be in a position to better expand on the specifics of longevity science. Our discussion, however, will center around a matter we left off with in our MM 4/10/23 Existential Question session i.e. the denial of one’s mortality must rank as one of life’s most notable absurdities. Central to our pondering will be what we addressed in MM 10/29/18 It's About Time i.e. comparing the idea of time, as found in other philosophical traditions, as a cyclical phenomenon – so-called pattern thinking – versus the western notion of time as linear, always ascendant.

Wait ! – before you change the channel – just consider for a moment other perspectives as you seek your own optimal path given your remaining time, energy, and resources. Would it really be the extension of life for its own sake, a logical deduction given a western mindset that features an existential dread of death and modern medicine’s whack-a-mole treatment where death itself is seen as some kind of failure? May we look beyond the hubris of our own culture as we tap into the wisdom of other times and places.

We might start all the way back to classical antiquity with a fundamental precept through the invitation by the Stoics to always consider, meditate on, and remember how ephemeral all mortal things are – memento mori – with the inevitability of death the great equalizer.

Japanese culture likewise reflects an appreciation for the transitory nature of life as celebrated by the annual blooming of the cherry trees, their beauty enhanced in part by recognizing the display lasts only three days. Contrast that with ikinokori, the phrase that literally means life leftovers.

A young author has captured an appreciation for the meaning of time with her recent book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock ("Saving Time" by Jenny Odell, interview), making the case that a more fruitful approach to time is less a matter of living more, in the literal sense, than it is to be more alive in any given moment i.e. an elongation of the present

Now consider that, you conference attendees. You may reflect on flipping the tautology of the aphorism Time Is Money and ask yourself, after a lifetime of working the clock, might you have missed the blooming as the cost of purchasing ikinokori?