tossyturny

Naive approach: Figuring out the science of death

In a previous post, I explained that in my younger years I had endeavoured to overcome death. I had become painfully aware of death, and it overwhelmed every other priority I had in life back then. Back then, I had not yet grown to appreciate that there are things that were more important than staying alive.

So for most of the big decisions that were made in my life, I based them around the fact that I was going to die. I don’t think that this is a bad attitude to adopt towards life, but I was going about it with the wrong approach.

Initially I wanted to study a biology to eventually become a doctor. I had no grand aspirations to save the sick and ailing from their illness. I wanted to save myself from death. I read that there were cases where doctors with medical degrees spent most of their time conducting medical research, in order to advance new frontiers in cutting edge medicine. I wanted to be one such doctor, specialising in the sickness of aging.

Around the time I was 13 or 14 years old, the school I was in required us to choose which science subjects we would be taking. We were offered the choice to pick 2 amongst biology, chemistry and physics to focus on. As per my original intentions, I wanted to pick biology. However, my parents had urged me to take physics instead, as they saw it as the more practical science. They managed to convince me that, if I were still interested in life sciences later in life, I could always study it in college. I listened to them, and this would come to be a good decision later on, as physics was especially intuitive to me.

By the time I was old enough to apply for college, ideas of overcoming death were not forgotten. However, my perspective on the fastest path to curing aging changed. I was 18 and had begun to understand a little more about the practical aspects of life. I saw that my mother, who held a Phd in biology, had little power or control over her own life. Part of this is because the salaries paid for academic work was simply too little for it to be invested in anything other than survival. You can publish papers in reputable academic journals such as Nature, but it wouldn’t give you enough authority to accomplish something like stopping aging. The most it would do is help make applying for research grants easier, and getting cushy professorship tenures easier. Real power and capital was only accessible to those in private industries.

A rich businessman can do more than a professional ever will

I realised that in our world today, it is more important to accumulate as much power as possible if there is something I want to accomplish, especially if it is something grand and resource intensive like defying death. Rich businessmen, with their resources, can accomplish more than any professional in their industry can hope to accomplish. And so as I was preparing to choose my field of study for college, I decided to go for the degree that will provide me with the most scalable set of skills. I decided to study computer science.

There was no concrete course of action that I had planned. But I reasoned that software companies can impact the largest amount of people in the world if executed well, and thus going in that direction would maximise my chances of becoming rich. Building a good software product is much less resource intensive than building something mechanical, and a stroke of genius by one individual often changes the landscape of the whole industry. I thought that if I worked in tech, becoming somebody important to many people was possible, and once I was rich and powerful, I can then channel my resources and connections towards defying death.

Funnily enough, there is a man today doing exactly what I wanted to do when I was 18. Bryan Johnson is a entrepreneur and venture capitalist, who worked on a payment product Venmo, which is commonly used in US for peer to peer transactions. He has sold Venmo to Paypal for 800 million US dollars, and now spends his days taking multiple drug cocktails and other procedures to rejuvenate himself.

Death of the body or death of the soul

After some time I had observed this about myself. I was not living “true to my myself”. The child in me that had wanted to be an astronaut had long since died. The child that enjoyed painting, calligraphy and writing had been sacrificed in preparation for an efficient and pragmatic career in tech. I was so obsessed with the death of the body that without noticing, my soul had withered away. Aside from whether a decision was logical financially, I had no real core values. Or rather, there were things that were important to me but I had somehow lost the ability to feel their importance. Solving the problem of death outweighed every other pursuit when using my simple cost benefit analysis model of decision making.

My decisions had brought me comfort initially, because I somehow deluded myself into thinking that if I were to choose the most efficient path towards deathlessness, then maybe in the future everything would work out alright. Before I knew it, the future had arrived, and I was pretty miserable. Living in fear of death, I had forgotten how to live.

Experiences that defy death.

I learnt very quickly that there are things that are worth dying for. The human experiences seeks a certain kind of beauty that is death defying. There is beauty in certain moments of life that stretch out to infinity, even though they pass by with a blink of an eye. A sunset can be so beautiful that it seems to last forever, but if you look again that feeling is gone. Yet, the lingering appreciation of that beauty can fill up the entire day or even week with joy. This beauty exists in many things. It can momentarily show in a flower, or a happy dog, or a smiling child. These things have the power to make you think “even if I have to die someday, it’ll be alright”.

Love is also one of such things. Falling in love makes the tragedy of being born with the certainty of death worth it. There is an element of infinity within love that transcends time and death. A human being is able to experience the intensity of love at a larger magnitude than his lifespan. A moments love can be intense enough and abundant enough to fill up a lifetime.

I had experienced some of these things and with them realised that I could not betray my human nature. Continuing to evaluate my life’s decision by whether it can help me become immortal, was ironically having the opposite effect of making me miss out on life’s essential experiences. There is no meaning in walking a path towards immortality, if that path is not decorated with love and beautiful things.

I decided that instead of walking towards agelessness, I wanted to walk towards meaning.

The next few chapters of my life was a lot of exploration and experimentation on my part, in order to discover what it means to live a good life.

I had to practice developing an ego, developing a value judgement system that was more than just “will this help me live forever”. I had to be in touch with my emotions and develop an intuition. I had to learn to live and unlearn how not to die.