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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