Living forever so sounds unbearably dull. Who waits forever anyway? TL;DR immortality would be a terrible power

Drafted 2025-11-18, whoopsie I wanted to write something else. Recently, I have become a “fan” of arguably one of the most important people in the zeitgeist not enough people talk about: PayPal and Palantir founder, major Facebook investor, venture capitalist, and Antichrist hater Peter Thiel. One thing people smarter than I and to a lesser extent I have heard from his interviews and secret lectures about the Antichrist (Yes, that is a real thing) is that Peter, among many of the winners of Silicon Valley, is terrified of Death.

I remember 1999 or 2000, when we were running PayPal, one of my co-founders, Luke Nosek — he was into Alcor and cryonics and that people should freeze themselves. And we had one day where we took the whole company to a freezing party. You know a Tupperware party? [...] But in retrospect, [cryonics] [i]s also a symptom of the decline, because in 1999 this was not a mainstream view, but there was still a fringe boomer view where they still believed they could live forever. And that was the last generation. So I’m always anti-boomer, but maybe there’s something we’ve lost even in this fringe boomer narcissism, where there were at least a few boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who’s a millennial believes that anymore.

Excerpt from “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist”, The New York Times

Thiel, like many billionaires, has also donated “millions of [his] fortune to immortality research”. While money may allow you to cheat nearly everything up to and arguably including the law, one thing it cannot allow you to cheat is the great gig in the sky, currently doing business as death. This is also nothing new. First emperor of China Qin Shi Huang, was so terrified of death he searched for an immortality elixir. While his true cause of death has never been known and has been long lost to the sands of time, one popular theory is that one of these so-called “elixirs” contained a fatal amount of mercury. While the veracity of that claim will likely never be known, a man searching for immortality dying because of this journey has a certain irony to it. The search for immortality goes beyond history and branches into myth and story as well. The most famous of these is arguably one of the earliest known stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh. To spoil a nearly four thousand year old epic, Gilgamesh spends nearly half of the story searching in vain for a path to eternal life. Cheating death is a universal experience.

When you have an effectively infinite amount of money, you have basically conquered life in the modern age. Anything you want or need is yours. Food? Have far too much of. Housing? You need it, someone will provide anywhere. Health? You bet. All of it, yours. Someone will do something for you if you give them some money. Even a lot of money. You can spare a few million of your local currency, most certainly a dollar. There is still one thing, though, that has yet to be conquered. While someone extremely wealthy can and has conquered life, they will die just like anyone else.

There is nothing more unifying of people than that of death. It does not matter who you were. It does not matter what you did. It does not matter who you know. It does not matter what you did not know. It does not matter if you are filthy rich. It does not matter if you are dirt poor. You and everyone you know, have known or will know will die one day. This naturally terrifies the people that have beaten life. Can they ever beat death? As of right now, no, they cannot. But they damn well will try.

Who benefits if some rich guy figures out how to cheat Death? They will. Do you really think that someone like Peter Thiel would share his discovery with the masses? I, personally, doubt any of the neo-robber barons would share anything unless it made them even more money that they do not need. All wannabe tech-dictators need to have their thousand year Reich of losers is eliminate succession issues by becoming functionally immortal.

If you wanted to know my opinion on this, sure, Death looks like it is scary, but what can you do about it? Would you actually like living forever? I doubt it would be cool or flashy, especially if it was exclusively you. Imagine everyone you know. They will grow old and die while you remain you. Would you actually want that or would you be like Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen and flee to Mars since, somehow becoming immortal, you are probably extremely rich. Few stories last forever, and those that do usually become absolutely nothing when rehashed for the fortieth year. Movies cannot last forever. Games, despite trying, cannot last forever. Nothing does. Why should anyone?

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Part 94 of #100DaysToOffload

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