Some day, I will die. So will everyone I know, everyone who has read this post, and everyone they know. I’m probably more than a third of the way there. I’m not especially afraid of it. Actually, I’m curious. Though I don’t subscribe to any religion or believe in anything resembling an anthropomorphic god or gods, I think it’s more likely than not that something interesting will be on the other side. (If I’m wrong, I won’t know.) All that said, I’m going to die some day, and even before that I’ll experience involuntary change (aging). It’s not an easy thing to forget, and it’s not a thing that I should forget. There’s no virtue in ignorance. And, despite not having any specifically religious faith, I’m pretty sure that what a person does in this life matters. Something in me is convinced that the ultimate reality of human existence is somewhere between the dichotomous nihilisms of materialist reductionism (existence ends fully at death, so all will be erased) and mainstream religion (only the next world matters). Perhaps that is why Buddhism (and its tendency toward middle paths on such questions) appeals to me more than the mainstream interpretations of the Abrahamic faiths (in particular, Christianity). The assertion that believing in the existence of a certain being (who left no evidence of his existence) is the key variable in separating people out for eternal bliss or agony is, in truth, far more nihilistic than most atheistic beliefs.
I’m not a nihilist; whatever this life is, it’s not to be thrown away. I conceive of myself, however, as a realist. I’m not immortal, and even though I haven’t really begun to age (I’m only 30) in any painful or even inconvenient way, I’m increasingly aware of the fact that I will die. People who are young and healthy one year are dead in the next. I’ve seen it happen too many times.
I’ve written at length about Silicon Valley’s perverse bubble culture and its obsession with youth. There isn’t a meaningful physiological difference between a 22-year-old and a 35-year-old that has any business importance. I think, however, I understand what Silicon Valley’s youth obsession is actually about: not age, but immortality. No one is immortal, but some people think they are. They haven’t learned the value and price of time yet. Nothing bad has happened to them yet. They still conceive of themselves as invulnerable.
These venture capitalists don’t just want to fund 22-year-old white males. They fund a specific kind of 22-year-old, white males: people who can trick themselves into living outside of time (and, more practically, throwing their time and health away, often at a pace of 100 hours per week, for someone else’s benefit) because they haven’t been reminded yet, by life, that they very much live in time.
The difference between the 35-year-old and the 22-year-old is not personal health but experience. The 35-year-old has had parents, aunts, and uncles get old, get sick, and die. He’s seen college classmates (and more than an unlucky one or two) lose the cancer lottery and die at a ridiculously young age. He realizes that time brings involuntary, unexpected, and sometimes painful change, and that a year of life spent “paying dues” or enriching ingrates is a permanent loss. Most 22-year-olds haven’t learned those lessons yet, and those who have are unfundable in the current Valley.
The “job hopper” stigma and “team player” nonsense of Corporate America, after all, make sense for people who haven’t figured out yet that their time is finite: that the “technological singularity” might not happen in the next 100 years, that “old people” were once as young as them, that they’ll get old and die and that it will always seem too soon. Those who believe themselves to be immortal are appealing to the exploitative overseers. They value the present at zero, convinced of some superior and unending future (one that will never come, except for the politically sacrificial and lucky). They are (for the moment) timeless and therefore without much memory.
I’ve always feared that if humans became technologically immortal, but if we did not succeed in ending scarcity, the first thing that an elite would do would be to create a “zombie” class of people who (like us mortals) lose most or all memory every hundred years or so, lest they acquire the knowledge that enable them to compete with the existing elite. They would continue to die (in effect) but be biologically maintained as peak-of-their-prime adults (to perform work, for others’ behalf) and probably conceive of themselves as immortal. Obviously, that doesn’t exist yet; the technology isn’t there. But culturally, it’s already happening. Of course, indefinite life extension and memory erasure aren’t there. Instead, the old class of immortals (once they become aware of their own mortality, and seek genuine purpose and value, rather than the enrichment of an ingrate elite, out of their work) is discarded and a new one is put in place.
Silicon Valley is for the immortal. If you’ll ever die, don’t apply.
