Can we live forever?
The hot sand whipped across my face, biting with what felt like a curse, or something else archaic and foreboding. An ancient warning perhaps. Something I’d read long ago. A reminder of our futility. Vanity. I winced toward the sun, seeking respite, or at least a brief reprieve. It stared back, unrelenting. Narrowing my eyes against that vast expanse of the Taklamakan Desert, I was lost in the harsh earth stretching, stretching into the past. From my vantage point on the precipice of an ancient watchtower in the forgotten city of Gaochang, I felt the weight of a certain history. This was once a great city, an oasis on an arid steppe amassing wealth from the commerce of the Silk Road. It was now a desolate remnant of stone jutting out of the desert. An under-visited tourist site in the Uyghur-concentrated region of Western China. Greatness, now dust. Prominence, now ruin.
To what end do we toil? For what purpose do we strive? (This post will get happier, I promise.)
Too often, at least in the West, we crave our own manufactured version of eternity amid the material world. This is often called, legacy. Now, it’s important that I state up front the value in working hard, striving for success, passing on as much financial security to your children as possible, and making a positive mark on your respective field of expertise. But there is an insidious danger in these otherwise good pursuits. It worms its way into our justification for overworking or obsessing over financial or physical security. It burrows into the heart of our neurotic monitoring of our stock portfolios and 401k performance. It feeds on an innate fear of losing control and ultimately, life. Eventually, it can reach the point of convincing us of the possibility of immortality.
Often wrapped up in our otherwise noble pursuits of good and safety is our attempt to manufacture eternity. Whether an obsession with jellyfish or a $40,000 annual gym membership, our modern, enlightened, educated human is consumed with living forever. And when we realize that we can’t in fact live forever, we seek to extend our imprint on the world through our legacies.
Again, striving hard to do well in work and take care of your family and not look forward to death are all good things! Eating well, working out, taking care of yourself to live long and healthy are good things! It is the motivation and often the method of longevity and legacy efforts masking a pursuit of immortality that is both tragic and futile.
Like Gaochang, built 2,100 years ago. Even though it was great and strong and prosperous, most of my readers will be unfamiliar with its name, with its region, and will likely be unable to even point to its vicinity on a map. This isn’t solely because our history teachers were limited or myopic in their lessons. This is because it’s been largely lost to time and violence. Two hundred years before Leonardo di Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, Mongols attacked and wiped out Gaochang. In fact, when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Gaochang’s demise was more recent to those English theater goers, than George Washington’s birth is to us today. In other words, or more precisely, in the words of Geoffrey Chaucer, “Time and tide wait for no man.” Time moves on and with it is carried away our earthly remnant.
So what is the answer? Do we just give up? Do we lay down in that mortal surf and relinquish ourselves to the endless sea? No. Of course not. But I’ll come back to this.
While the pursuit of our own immortality is extremely problematic, it is rooted in something very good and very natural. I’m reminded of a CS Lewis quote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” As you can see, I’m not the first Christian to highlight the hope we have in the eternity of our souls; of the belief that heaven - whatever that actually is - is a state of eternal communion with our Father. While not everyone opts into this trajectory, it is possible. And, crucially, it has nothing to do with our efforts, intelligence, gym habits, or inherent merit. Thankfully, we cannot earn our immortality. But we can accept it. We can enjoy it.
Yet even with the hope of eternity, fixating on it is not the point of our lives either. In fact, it runs counter to it. We were created to exist in the present. We were made to enjoy life from a unique, singular perspective that is un-replicable and unrepeatable. Five minutes ago will never be again. And we will never actually stand in five minutes from now. We will only ever be in this moment. Another favorite quote of mine, this one from Heraclitus, jumps to mind, “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” And that is a remarkable gift. We are constantly, for the entirety of our lives, encountering brand new, never-before-lived moments with innumerable possibilities. What a remarkable, divinely artistic way to have conceived the gift of human consciousness. While we can have security for our afterlives, may we not focus on that at the expense of all we have to enjoy and relish in our present lives.