I’ve been thinking a lot about forever recently. “Forever” as a concept is something that often gets abstracted away or cast into something roughly similar to “infinity”. In the (mathematical) sense that infinity is endless, I guess it’s a reasonable comparison. Even with all of my experience with math, that doesn’t really make it any easier for me to understand in the human sense.
I’m at a time of great change in my life. I’ve just moved to San Francisco, I’m setting up who I want to be, the relationships I want to nurture, and the life I want to build. I’m young, but time still exists and it’s something I am keenly aware of. The question of how I want to spend it always feels like a game of trying to balance many, many competing interests. I want to ensure I stay healthy, so I must budget time to exercise every day, whether that be at the gym or running through Golden Gate Park. My workout schedule has always been a source of stability in my life, and I’ve been following it every single day for almost five years. I need to stay emotionally healthy, which is a supercategory of a few things: making time to read books and watch shows and movies I love, going out with friends and meeting new people at various events and volunteer opportunities, taking in the natural and artificial beauty in the world, and ensuring I have a good diet by cooking good food and eating out once in a while. Sometimes I just need to sit outside in a park and watch people go about their days while the warm sun shines on me. I have an innate drive to create that I must satisfy, whether that’s through my work at Era Labs, personal research and creative projects, or helping friends with the small things in life, like fixing a door that won’t close properly by jerry-rigging a cordless drill to act like a CNC machine.
Each group of desires has its own very strong opinion about how I should go about my days, and I am tasked with creating a good compromise amongst them at any given time. When I allocate more to one desire, the others tend to complain loudly. I know I’m not the first person nor will I be the last to wish for more hours in the day, but I also wish I had more mental energy to fully unpack the bags in the corner of my apartment or do more sets at the gym or work more on my personal projects or write more blog posts or do more career-advancing things or go out to cafes and meet someone amazing or prepare my meal for the night or fix that HomePod mini that just refuses to connect to the WiFi. Friends have told me that they are amazed with how much I can get done each day or how much I can always keep track of. I thank them for their kind words, but I never felt like I was doing anything crazy, just going through life with all of these competing desires. I don’t want to kill these desires, they make me who I am and I’m proud of the person I’ve become, but sometimes I wish they would form an orderly queue instead of trying to be the first ones into the time store with a Black Friday sale on attention.
At other times, everything just falls into place. Some days I feel such a serenity it’s hard to describe. Everything just works. Usually it’s a day spent with friends or one where I managed to give each desire the slice of the time pie it wanted. These days are pretty common and I consider myself a very happy individual. I’m doing what I love in the city of my dreams with friends around every corner. But I always wonder: what if I could do even more?
A reasonable follow-up question to asking for more time is “how much?” As people, we tend to want a lot, and time may be the number one hot item. We pay others to spend their time so we don’t have to spend ours. A maid cleans your house, a DoorDasher delivers your food. I won’t make any extensive arguments about the wider state of the economy, but just know that I believe time is involved in pretty much every part of it.
If each day suddenly had 25 hours instead of 24, someone would immediately clamor for 26. There would never be enough. However, things would start to break down if the limits of time were removed entirely.
The Good Place did a great job at representing this problem, and is where I draw a lot of my philosophy on this subject from. Spoiler alert for The Good Place, but it ended in 2020 and you really should’ve seen it by now. When we are first introduced to the show’s namesake location, it’s completely dead. Everyone should be living their best life in eternity, instead they are all braindead versions of their previous selves. Having infinite time with no end turned all of The Good Place’s inhabitants into sensory reaction machines that just existed in a constant state of euphoria while also experiencing the worst emptiness possible.
To clarify the effect, a minimal example: Suppose you now get to live forever. Congratulations! For the sake of argument, let’s assume you accumulate so much capital that you can do anything you want within current technological means. Naturally, you make your life (and hopefully the lives of those around you) a paradise. Eventually, however, you still want more. The problem here is similar to drug addiction: your brain normalizes “great” to “average”; there’s only so much pleasure your body can register, and without a low point in your life (which with infinite capital is unlikely), you will keep seeking higher and higher.
One may counter and say that a poor immortal would not fall victim to this trap, since they would still be exposed to adversity, keeping their mind in check. I assert that any nonzero accumulation of capital over infinite time would still create infinite wealth, leading to the effects described above. I concede that a sufficiently disciplined immortal could refuse this cycle, but that requires permanently fighting the nature of pleasure and addiction, forever.
I am somewhat confused by the growing cohort of those who seek immortality. People who say that the digitization of consciousness or a true way to live forever is right around the corner, and that they want to be first in line. I would love to have a conversation and ask about how they think they would live a life unbounded by the shackles of time. What would they do with forever? You aren’t even living in a paradise like in The Good Place.
That being said, I strongly support longevity research. I hope for the sake of all who live and will live that the best we can do is give everyone a chance to live a long, happy life, free from medical trouble, with a peaceful close at the end. Whether that lifespan is 100, 200, or 500 years, all good things must come to an end, or there was never any good in the first place.
The Good Place solves the forever problem in a way that really struck me: giving a true out. A way to return one’s essence to the universe and end one’s conscious existence, forever. Spend as much time as you’d like in paradise, maybe more time than we could ever perceive, then exit stage left and become one with the universe. Humans may have been meant to live for a lot longer than we currently do, but I personally don’t think that means forever.
At the time of writing, no one has forever, and that’s good. I must learn to know time, and to let it know me. I won’t be able to complete every task on my checklist every single day, but defining myself by checkboxes would never be a good way to live. I’d much rather define myself by the friends I make, the people I love, and what good I am able to put into the world, one day at a time.
Time won’t always be easy on me. I will miss out on things because I overslept, or fail to execute on something due to procrastination. To err is to be human, and I accept that I won’t always have my best day. The most I can do is live as my true self every waking moment and move forward in step with time, rather than be forced into the future by it. It’s impossible to know what tomorrow holds, much less the rest of my life, but who I am now can only continue to grow and evolve. The world is a beautiful place full of amazing things to do, places to go, and people to meet, and knowing I have the time to experience even a portion of it over the course of my life will give me more than forever ever could.