Death is the default

We often assume that some acute and looming threat — be it a foreign invader or a domestic demagogue — will be our downfall. But if we were to end, that end is just as likely to come from something far less dramatic: our failure to sustain the work.

One of the worst things any of us can believe is that anything is inevitable. We have a tremendous agency to build the things that help us towards a future we want to live in—whether that’s in consumer products, climate, politics etc The body can reject things it finds foreign.

With the emerging ability to improve the embodied experience for all sentient beings, our species is entering a painful adolescent phase. We must realize it is no longer acceptable to coast along on values and purpose inherited from the past, without needing to exercise agency and responsibility to decide what we will work toward. We have to accept... See more

More than a penchant for suffering, and more than a need to challenge ourselves, humans are a species that can adapt. In times of flux and epochal change, there’s often a peculiar strain of natural law among nervous, conservative minds — the “natural” way of man is right, so don’t meddle with it. This strain was there when we developed immunization... See more

Even as entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and billionaires invest their time, bodies and fortunes in the project of cheating death, they’re also increasingly finding solace in something else: an ancient Greek intellectual tradition that views the natural rhythms of the life cycle—which is to say, dying—as a central fact of being. Which, most would ar

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Try to unlearn the obsessive fear of death (and the anxious quest for death avoidance) that pervades linear thinking in nearly every modern society. The ancients knew that, without periodic decay and death, nature cannot complete its full round of biological and social change. Without plant death, weeds would strangle the forest. Without human deat... See more