But critics fear that longer lifespans will rob us of the urgency that lends life meaning and value and will motivate us to procrastinate more.
Wut?
Urgency is NOT what lends my life meaning. It USUALLY lowers my QoL when there’s more urgent things to do.
And so what if we live longer and slower? Living longer (combined, hopefully with lowering scarcity / post scarcity and smarter population growth) would give us time to stop and smell the roses. If you’re going to live for 500 years, GO AHEAD and spend a month playing through every storyline in Balder’s Gate. Put off rebuilding your porch for ten years and spend time with family and friends.
In the Sun Eater / Sollan Empire books by Christopher Ruocchio, the main character has a lifetime measured in 100s of years, and ship voyages take 100s of years. People go into cold sleep for them, but in one book the main character stays awake for 25 years, wandering around the empty corridors of a city sized warship, reading and writing books, growing plants and doing various hobbies. He grumbles about how he’s really just procrastinating the coming battle and eventually goes into cold sleep, but I couldn’t help but think about how NICE that would be.
In another part of the books, the main character and his lover are under house arrest on some planet that’s basically rural England for 80 years. They live in a mansion together and he talks about it as the happiest time of his life. Again, I remember thinking how NICE that would be, to have a whole 80 years of peaceful, uneventful life, so boring the narrative covers it in two pages, before going back to face the realities of galactic war and politics.
I feel like these “critics” (if they exist outside the author’s mind) are probably the same people who say “nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe!” or “My two hour commute gives me time to align my mind to work and gives me a competitive edge. That’s why I’m a VP (you whiny snowflakes).” Basically, fuck these people. I’m SO ready for my longevity pills and my post scarcity society so I can spend a decade building custom aquariums and playing Stellaris and volunteering at my son’s robotics club. They can get the fuck out of the way.
