The Immortality Project
Or a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation
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The more you go on in life, the more you start to think what your end game is.
For a good part of my life, I thought mine was to “live a comfortable life,” succeed in academics and work, and generally abide to a self-projection I had formulated in my mind which incorporated goals the society I was born into deemed as acceptable.
However, the more I experienced life, the more it became hard to reconcile my existential dread with the will to be productive, and the realization that no matter what I do in life, nothing will ever dispel my nihilist view of the world.
Coming to terms with the fact that we are absolutely, without question going to die, and then to live with a full awareness of that fact, is something that I have struggled with for quite some time, and I still do to some extent.
At one point, it became clear to me how “cracking the game” or achieving “financial independence” are just trifle pursuits in the grand scheme of things. I resolved that us human beings really need to find something, a mission, a goal, to help us make sense of a world that is decidedly simpler and more careless than what our overdeveloped brain circuits make us believe.
This constant tension is what anthropologist/philosopher Ernest Becker would call the difference between our ‘symbolic’ and ‘biological’ existence: the first being our ability to contemplate the infinite and create things that are seemingly so meaningful, as opposed to our biological existence that is so obviously fragile and seemingly meaningless.
Becker’s response to this existential conundrum in his “The Denial of Death” is pretty straightforward: human beings cannot function in the world, while also having an awareness of their death constantly haunting them in their minds. It would simply be far too painful to live with this constant existential paradox.
We have been cursed by nature, which has effectively created ‘limited animals with an unlimited horizon.’
To Becker, we don’t just fear death, what we fear is rather the end of life, having been insignificant.
This fear of impermanence and insignificance is what animates and explains basically everything that we do in our lives as human beings.
In my view, our natural, biological instinct drives us to seek a feeling of importance, which we leverage to find a mate, procreate, and continue the species. Pretty much in the same way many birds stretch their feathers to appeal to their bird mates, so human beings buy fancy cars (or NFTs??) and strive for titles that can make them better candidates to the other sex.
This is why artists don’t just set out to create art, but to create art that is then featured in galleries and museums.
This is why people don’t just run and work out, but compete in marathons and Iron Man competitions.
This is why many people don’t just perform their job, but feel like shouting out every success on LinkedIn.
This is what brings writers to wanting to publish their work rather than just being content with knowing they have written a good piece.
Ultimately, spreading our feathers, finding a mate, procreating, are actions that help us leave a legacy, the feeling that our self is continuing through our children, and in so doing we appease our dread of death, of being forgotten, of living a life in which everything is vain.
The terror that stems from the realization of how fragile our biological existence is, coupled with how incomprehensible the universe is, requires us to act and find something that makes us feel better and not live in a state of constant neurotic terror.
At this point, our overly evolved brain circuits start working in order to avoid going insane. This is called rationalizing, or building constructs that can make us feel in peace with regards to our own existence. These come in different forms, such as:
- Religion: thinking that my life will continue in a blue sky surrounded by fluffy clouds appeases the fear of insignificance and impermanence that may come along with death.
- Drugs: numbing yourself from the terror of existence, which works in the short term, but which might actually backlash, both by making your life even more miserable, or by creating even deeper awareness about how trivial everything is.
- Work (or generally ‘keeping busy’): mundane day to day tasks are used so that you never have to think too much about the meaning of life overall. Ernest Becker calls this tranquilizing ourselves in the trivial.
Facing this terror of impermanence and insignificance, the vast majority of people respond by engaging in what Becker calls a “defiant creation of meaning.” They set out on a journey, seeking out significance and permanence throughout their life all along the way, acting out what he calls an “immortality project.”
This project entails creating a system of values, and a set of projects that allows us to live in accordance with those values, thus escaping that constant feeling of existential dread. We run from the fragility of our biological existence and retreat into the symbolic, our hope being that by carrying out these projects will immortalize our symbolic selves within the human culture.
Human culture to Becker can be thought of as the conglomeration of millions of different immortality projects, all working together. Human civilization can be seen in many ways as the reflexive response to our awareness of our own mortality.
Ultimately, our societies rely on the fact that we aren’t all going to be sitting around, worrying all the time about the fact that we’re going to die, and that nothing really means anything on an objective level. And so human culture provides people with ready-made, pre-constructed societal roles to fall into, that pull us out of the unproductive state of neurotic terror we would otherwise be in, and then these roles give people the illusion of significance and permanence.
What Becker says is that we learn to identify ourselves and our values based on the categories that our culture gives us to work with. We don’t just pull random categories of identity out of thin air. We say things like I’m a homeowner, I’m a ballet dancer, I’m a democrat, I’m a republican. I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a blue-collar worker. We say this, but what we really are though is a collection of illusions; illusions we appropriate from the culture we live in that make us feel significant and permanent; illusions that make us feel more in control, more durable and more important than we actually are.
I’ve been fighting with this realization for a good couple of years now, until I realized that there is no way I can pursue a normal life and be able to function without accepting these illusions, or as Becker would call them, a “necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation.”
There is no award in seeing through this, in patting oneself on the back and saying “oh I’ve known this for so long, I’m so damn smart!”
There is no way you can just see through the story that you’re telling yourself and not end up right back where you started, that is, in a place of terror or neuroticism.
At this stage, you have two options:
1. Fully embrace the realization that life is meaningless and ‘exit life.’
2. Or use it to your own advantage.
Personally, option one has always been out of the question: as much as I’m aware of all the above, as much as I’ve been paralyzed by it for quite some time, my curiosity pushes me to explore this meaningless life further. Moreover, I would be a coward to pass the pain to the few people that care about me and would suffer for my departure.
Therefore, since I can’t just sit idling waiting to perish, it’s worth following Becker’s advice and take some of that overflowing intelligence, all that neurotic energy, and apply it to something that’s actually productive.
I will get better at the skill of compartmentalizing the illusions that give me the life I want to have. Get better at seeing these illusions as tools, and then use these tools to ‘pass the time’ in a way that feels more aligned to the self-projection that I have established for myself.
In the same way Albert Camus would tell you to keep pushing the boulder and smile while doing it, so I will strive to be bolder, to live harder, to love stronger.
These reflections are just the beginning of a much larger conversation. If you’re interested in exploring these ideas further, I’d love to hear your thoughts — schedule a call with me here.
