Month: January 2025

The Aging Buddha and the Aging-Resistant Tech Boys

The news in the Sunday NYTimes last weekend was challenging, to say the least.  To make it worse, there was an article on the front page entitled “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.”  Besides the lack of an Oxford comma, the article was just a reminder how hard the tech boys out in Silicon Valley are working to make 90 the new 50, to make their minds outlive their bodies, to challenge nature.  There was an even more alarming article in the New Yorker a few years ago appropriately entitled “The God Pill.”  The tech boys (and this group is mostly male) are treating old age as a disease to be eradicated.  You might think about that.

The death and aging-resistant tech boys seem to be divided into two camps: the Meat Puppets (who think that we can “fix” the biology and thus stay in our bodies) and the Robocops (who think that our “essence” will move to mechanical bodies/brains).  Both methodologies are attracting huge investment from rich people, presumably in lieu of donating money to soup kitchens.

The technology and the money are new (the article says that “any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion”), but the sentiments are not.  People (again, mostly men like Gilgamesh, Ponce de Leon, and Isaac Newton) have been fighting old age for centuries.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  But does warring against the inevitable really change anything?  And at what cost?

The Buddha, that truly enlightened being, grew to be very old – into his eighties we think.  He made adjustments: he taught while lying down because he had a bad back, he had disciples deliver his talks when he wasn’t up to it.  Here is an exchange between the Buddha and his bumbling but lovable assistant Ananda:

Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One, massaged the Blessed One’s limbs with his hand and said, “It’s amazing, lord. It’s astounding, how the Blessed One’s complexion is no longer so clear & bright; his limbs are flabby & wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there’s a discernible change in his faculties — the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body.”  

“That’s the way it is, Ananda. When young, one is subject to aging; when healthy, subject to illness; when alive, subject to death…” (translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

Acceptance that things will change is what the Buddha is preaching.  I recently read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

“The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.”

“Now I’m very happy to …”  This is an acceptance of reality that is graceful and wise.

The Buddha and Mumford have learned one of the most important lessons of life – to live with and adapt to reality.  I have recommended the Buddha’s five daily recollections before, but one of them is that the body is “of the nature to grow old and decay.”  I would guess that the Silicon Valley boys might delay the inevitable, but they are going to be pretty miserable if they don’t accept it at some point.  And even if they manage to live long, they will still outlive their time – think of Swift’s Struldbruggs, who outlived the language and culture around them and became “foreigners in their own country.”  Trying to talk to my grandchildren, I know what that feels like.

None of this means we have to like everything or anything about old age.  The Buddha spoke the following poem (memorized by the monks and later transcribed):

I spit on you, old age —

old age that makes for ugliness.

The bodily image, so charming,

is trampled by old age.

Even those who live to a hundred

are headed — all — to an end in death,

which spares no one,

which tramples all.

And, as for the tech boys, they might want longevity, but they don’t necessarily want everyone to have it (link here): 

“I don’t think we should have people live for a very long time,” Musk says (in a WELT Documentary interview). “It would cause ossification of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind; they just die. And so, if they don’t die, we’ll be stuck with old ideas, and society won’t advance. I think we already have quite a serious issue with the gerontocracy, where the leaders of so many countries are extremely old. Look at the U.S.—its very ancient leadership. It’s just impossible to stay in touch with the people if you’re many generations older than them.”

Like the Struldbruggs.  Or maybe like some of the people Musk has been hanging around with lately.

If you want to know more about the Struldbruggs, try Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X), and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”  I also wrote about them in my blog from a few years ago, “Covid-19 and the Generational Wars.”

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The Afterlife and Psychic Hygiene

Old folks have a reputation for worrying, for longing for the good old days, for catastrophic thinking.  I don’t think I am an overly negative person (my kids might disagree), but these are surely times to try an old lady’s optimism.  I know the stereotype is that elders are backward-looking, but I don’t want to return to the days before vaccines and the Civil Rights Act.  I am, however, searching for something positive to look forward to.

For years, parents could look forward to a better life for our children; upward mobility is not so easy anymore, for economic, environment, and political reasons.  At the founding of the UN, there were hopes for world peace.  We could find comfort that we would leave the world and our loved ones in better shape than we found them.  But no more.   So how can we alleviate our worries, calm our psyches, have the courage to soon leave life behind?

In “The Stages of Life” (recommended), Carl Jung acknowledged that old people needed something good to anticipate, and he suggested that the notion of the “afterlife” could have therapeutic value for us elders, particularly as it could take away some of the fear we face as we begin “transitioning” to death:

I therefore consider that all religions with a supramundane goal are eminently reasonable from the point of view of psychic hygiene.  When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.  From the standpoint of psychotherapy, it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge.

Death as placebo, you say.  Maybe.

It is interesting to note that in the medieval period in Europe there was a general belief that life was getting worse, that mankind was declining from a golden age (Eden?) through silver and brass to iron.   Even earlier, Ovid gave a clear delineation of the ages in the Metamorphoses, from the Golden Age, which “still retained some seed of the celestial force,” through the Age of Silver, when constant springtime was compromised with the addition of the other seasons, to the Age of Bronze, and finally the corrupt Iron Age, when humanity let loose to “Violence and the damned desire of having.”  After this cycle of decline, the population is destroyed in a flood and new men are created out of the earth, and presumably the cycle starts again.  I don’t really know where we are in the current cycle, but “violence and the damned desire of having” sound familiar.  Any rewards or punishments were to be found in another life, in a very real heaven or a very scary hell.  The assumption of “progress” only became common after the Enlightenment.

Americans tend to believe (or say they believe) in an afterlife of some sort (reincarnation counts).  According to a Pew study in 2021, about 73% of Americans believe in heaven but only 62% believe in hell.  There’s optimism for you. More people over 50 believe in heaven and hell than younger people (no surprise there) and more Republicans believe than Democrats.  Maybe that’s why they are not so afraid of an earthly future of global warming and increasing warfare – as they say, “there will be pie in the sky when you die.”

But back to Jung and the idea that believing in an afterlife is an act of psychic hygiene.  Can we make ourselves do it?  As John Lennon inferred, we are past that.   “Imagine there’s no heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us, only sky.”  Not believing in heaven is “easy;” believing has become very difficult – a little like trying to believe in Santa Claus again.  And yet I understand where Jung is coming from.  In his memoir (recommended) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has a chapter entitled “Life After Death,” in which he recalls glimpses of eternity that he got as a child and again cautions against ridiculing the therapeutic comfort that believers receive:

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.  They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries. One has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.  What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

This led me to think about Herman Melville.  In a little-read book Melville titled The Confidence Man (written by the master just after Moby-Dick), one of the characters cautions against forcing old people up against the truth:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you.  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

And that is what facing the truths of our world reminds me of – “a supper too hearty.”  Is a belief in an afterlife an answer?  Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Coming of Age that we all needed a project in old age, we must continue the good fight. Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.”  Yes.  But.  She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.”  And where does that leave us?

In this, as in most things, I land in Spinoza’s camp. Spinoza said that we were thinking about eternity in the wrong way; he says that we think of eternity as a matter of time rather than a matter of the moment, of awareness:

If we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse it with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they believe remains after death. (Ethics V)

Reminding myself of my own mortality (try the Buddhist Five Recollections daily), helps me do this.  William Blake puts it more poetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

For an example of a very old lady’s momentary heaven, you might try my short story, “Like Heaven.”  For a blog on another aspect of this subject, try, “Retirement, Death, and the Land of Cockaigne.”  And try to put into words what it is you do believe.