The Meaning of Life and Happiness from the Finitude of Time

I don’t believe that eternal life leads to happiness. Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, let’s look at how eternal life, which changes the paradigm of time, prevents humanity from living a happy life.

 

Ancient humans longed for eternal life, so much so that they identified and worshiped beings who never died as gods. This desire continues to this day. The only difference is the form. We undergo skin treatments to smooth out growing wrinkles and plastic surgery to achieve childlike features, such as a convex forehead and chubby cheekbones, as the standard of beauty. Today, we struggle to stay young while avoiding the oncoming aging process. In fact, the human life cycle moves from youth to aging to death, so the desire to hold on to youth and the desire to avoid death are one in the same. Amazingly, today we are on the verge of developing technologies that will allow us to live a lifetime without aging or dying. Genetic engineering has a lot to do with this. The study of epigenetics, the concept of regulating not only the genome we inherit but also the expression of those genes, has led to efforts to control the genes involved in aging and longevity. One such effort is to express telomerase, an enzyme that prevents damage to chromosomes due to DNA replication, in somatic cells. If we define eternal life as staying young for a lifetime without dying, will we be happy if eternal life through these technologies is realized and humanity is freed from death? I disagree with the idea that eternal life leads to happiness. There are many practical reasons for this, but I’ll explain why through the philosophy of human life and happiness.
Eternal life, which eliminates the finitude of time, prevents us from living a meaningful life. Let’s take a common definition of happiness as the overall satisfaction we feel with our lives. The philosopher Heidegger says that we can be happy through “existence”. Being present is very different from just existing. According to Heidegger, in modern society, humans have given up being free beings and live like mindless objects. A life of shallow curiosity, always in search of new stimuli, is filled with emptiness, and the reason for this is the way people treat death. Instead of accepting death as something that will inevitably happen in the future, they treat it as someone else’s business. The lives of people who are blind to the obvious end of their lives, who do not realize the value of the time they have now, who seek the stimulation of the moment as if they will live forever, are shallow and distracted. Such a life is “unoriginal” because it is far from the life of a truly human being. But what about those who live an “authentic” life? Instead of chasing after momentary stimuli like an object, they make meaning out of the world according to their own interests and purposes. This is existence, living an original life that is faithful to the original meaning of freedom. Heidegger says that in order to “exist,” we must realize the true meaning of time. The first step is to experience death as the future. When we don’t try to avoid it and accept it as a natural fate, we recognize the finitude of time and become anxious. But this anxiety can lead us to an existential decision. We realize that we must use our precious life, which will one day end, exclusively for ourselves. Once you realize the value of time, you can pursue your existential values without being constrained by values you don’t want or that don’t have much to do with you.
But what if eternal life becomes a reality and death disappears? Suddenly, our lives, and the time we spend in them, lose their value. It is questionable whether there will be a sense of urgency to live in a life that never ends. With thousands or tens of thousands of years to go, we might think it’s a hardship to make existential choices while ignoring the stimuli around us. A life devoid of the value of finitude is very likely to lead to a regression to a non-original existence. This is far from happiness.
Let’s listen to those who argue against this position based on Epicurus’ “immobility” and the Buddha’s “liberation”. In Epicurean philosophy, the purpose of life is pleasure. Since our lives are continuous, we should seek continuous pleasure, and for him, the greatest pleasure is “immobility,” a tranquil state of mind achieved by being free from all suffering and desire. Buddhist “liberation” is a state of mind in which one surrenders oneself to the source of all desires and is free from the emotions that cause them to fluctuate, and it is similar to Epicurus’ immobility in that it involves being free of desire and remaining still. If you are a person who aims for immobility and liberation, it is difficult to understand why people live their lives in anxiety, imagining death as a future event that is painful to imagine. Worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet is a whirlwind for a still mind. From their point of view, eternal life is sufficiently connected to a happy life, because eternal life is the optimal condition for maintaining an immobile and liberated mind.
However, there are some problems with Epicurean philosophy that make it difficult to argue that eternal life leads to happiness. There are two main things we can say. First, there is the problem of simplifying the anxiety that comes from actively embracing death as an emotion that is antithetical to pleasure. This is because confronting death forces us to value the life we still have. I myself had a very early experience that didn’t involve death, but made me feel very present in the moment. I was in kindergarten. I was running late for a performance, holding my mom’s hand and running hard, but she didn’t see the red light and we crossed the street, and there was a police officer standing on the side of the road. Thanks to my kindergarten teacher’s education, I was convinced that my mom was going to be caught by the policeman and put in jail. When I thought that I had only a few minutes left with my mom, I suddenly became desperate for the remaining moments. In that moment, I didn’t apologize to the policeman or run away. I hugged my mom as hard as I could. I think it was because I experienced my life without her in the future and realized the importance of the close relationship I have with her now and the moments we have together. I don’t think it’s right to categorize a process that gives us a direction for how to live our lives as something that is a little unpleasant just because it’s a little painful.
Furthermore, it’s a mistake to think that a life of daily gratification is happier than an existential life. This is because the continuation of an unconventional life does not lead to lasting happiness. A good example of this is how we feel during the transition from childhood to adulthood. With many of the restrictions of adulthood gone, newcomers are free to meet new people, drink as much as they want, and stay out as late as they want. I loved this new world at first, but as time went on, I questioned whether I was living it right. I’m an honors student, so I don’t have any academic pressure. I wondered how the time I was wasting would help shape the person I would become. As I talked to my friends, they all felt the same way. They all had the same problem: they found themselves living a blurry and light life and were confused. At that moment, my friends and I did the things we hated so much in high school: studying, exploring careers, volunteering, and working. The unnatural life is light and flies away as easily as it comes. It would be impossible to continue living an unconventional life and be happy, especially if we were given infinite time.
Based on Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, we have seen how eternal life, which changes the paradigm of time, prevents humanity from living a happy life. In a world where the finiteness of time has disappeared, people do not realize the preciousness of the moments they live, and they pass the years lightly and distractedly, intoxicated by the stimuli of the moment. Those who embrace the finitude of time, on the other hand, live a life of self-discovery, knowing that they have the power to shape the precious time they have left. Eternal life, which takes away the awareness of death, which is the motivation for this valuable self-exploration and realization, can never be a source of happiness. Let us look back on our past lives with nostalgia. How many of us long for past lives, wishing they could be repeated? Most of us probably regret the choices we made, saying, “I would have done that then,” as we wasted those years. Perhaps what we want from eternal life is not just a longer life, but a truly meaningful life. While it is great to continue researching life extension, I wonder if we should prioritize the search for existence by focusing on the life we have now.