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Had We Time Enough
(Wednesday February 17 2010)
 | One of the most common instinctive (and wrong) objections to engineering far longer healthy lives is the belief that we would become bored of life. But even a few moments of thought, as in this post at the IEET blog, will show how ridiculous an idea that is: "What would you do with all of that time? Wouldn't you get bored? What would you do? I asked myself those questions and realized that right now I feel impossibly rushed. There is so much life to experience, in so many ways that I feel compelled to try and do everything at once. Some people spend their teens and twenties partying and living paycheck to paycheck in a visceral, hedonistic, perpetual Bacchanalia of youth. Others cloister themselves away in libraries and academia to emerge in their late twenties/early thirties as The Next Big Thing in their field, granting them a position of influence for decades to come. Others travel, seeing the world, discovering who they want to be and meeting their fellow human beings. Still others start their careers, steadily moving up the ranks and in the process have the financial stability to settle down and have a family. Yet for everyone of these potential ways of living comes at a cost of all the others. The very process of aging forces a choice. But what if I didn’t have to choose because I wasn't aging? What if raising a family didn't take half of my adult life, but barely a tenth of it?" |
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