Будь вечность мне в удел дана

Had I World Enough, and Time

Say that I knew that medicine had advanced to the point where I could reasonably expect to live to be 350 years old, with the first two decades, of course, going to maturation, and the last two decades resembling our current aging process. What would I do with all of that time?

Aubrey de Grey, Robert Butler, and Leonard Guarente recently sat down to discuss anti-aging medicine. One of the most common critiques of anti-aging (one I didn’t address in my FAQ about aging) is one of existential crisis. The question one must ask is: What would you do with all of that time? Wouldn’t you get bored? What would you do?

I asked myself those questions and realized that right now I feel impossibly rushed. There is so much life to experience, in so many ways that I feel compelled to try and do everything at once. Some people spend their teens and twenties partying and living paycheck to paycheck in a visceral, hedonistic, perpetual Bacchanalia of youth. Others cloister themselves away in libraries and academia to emerge in their late twenties/early thirties as The Next Big Thing in their field, granting them a position of influence for decades to come. Others travel, seeing the world, discovering who they want to be and meeting their fellow human beings. Still others start their careers, steadily moving up the ranks and in the process have the financial stability to settle down and have a family.

Yet for everyone of these potential ways of living comes at a cost of all the others. The very process of aging forces a choice. But what if I didn’t have to choose because I wasn’t aging? What if raising a family didn’t take half of my adult life, but barely a tenth of it? What if I could be a reckless youth, traveling, partying, living on a shoe-string budget and making loads of mistakes, for decades without worrying that I was “too old” or not “preparing for the future.” What if I could work for a couple years, putting most of it into savings, and then, 100 years down the road when I decided to have kids, have an enormous nest egg? There are so many questions we don’t even consider because we frame our lives as windows of time, wherein we get to do somethings but not others, because you only get that one chunk of time once. But what if instead of a couple decades of youth and vigor with another several decades of slow decline and aging, what if a person lived for over three centuries, with nearly all of it in a state of youth akin to a twenty-five year old. What would it be like?