Survival Is Insufficient
Maybe, the opposite of survival is risk. Maybe, it is abandon. Maybe, it is rest.
My oldest daughter, ten, fishes a brown envelope from our mailbox and reads the return address. “Uh, mom? Why are you getting a package from something called ‘Life Extension’?” Her eyebrows climb her forehead as she hefts herself into the front seat of my SUV. I shake my head, offering a sideways smile. “I have no idea what that is. Maybe a magical potion that will help me live forever?” I secretly wonder if a company is hawking cryopreservation or aged cell removal; these days, nothing seems too outlandish to arrive in my mailbox.
The car idles at the top of our driveway while I tear open the envelope. “Ahhh,” I say, remembering with a quick laugh. “It’s vitamins!” I pull a translucent blue bottle of Vitamin D3 from the package, holding it where she can see. “It’s for my bones,” I say. “If it extends my life, it won’t be for long.” My daughter lets out a sigh, what seems to me like relief, and for a fleeting moment I wonder if she’s been reading too many fantasy novels.
I can’t shake the interaction—how, with the delicate curiosity of a child, she noticed the brand “Life Extension” and the unsubtle promise inside it. As adults we hardly have time to notice how the vitamins are branded, much less take the walk or prepare the food that would give us nutrients the old-fashioned way. We are moving too fast. But my daughter, who does not yet speak “advertising,” paid attention: a hint buried inside a slogan, meant to work on our subconscious.
Life Extension. Pay for this, and you will live longer.
A recent episode of the podcast No Stupid Questions asked this: Will you live to be 100?
It’s not, despite the microplastics in our bloodstream and the pollution in our skies, unrealistic. Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine and geriatrics at Boston University, is currently researching people who live into their 90s and beyond, what he calls “SuperAgers.” The goal of his studies is to “pinpoint the right genes” that contribute to super longevity in the hopes of “developing drugs that mimic those genes and allow more people to enjoy longer, healthier lives.”
I don’t want to live past 90. I don’t even know that I want to eradicate whatever threat will eventually take me out. When my husband and I made a will, I scanned the page and efficiently checked all the “pull the plug” options. Who can say what they’d really want when the time comes? But, so far, I have never been a person to whom radical life extension has appealed, at all.
Like if we’re at a dinner party and the question is “Would you never eat chocolate again if you knew it would add five years to your life?” my answer is a hard no. If I were adding five years to an expiration of forty or fifty, my real answer, of course, would be pleading yes—give me more years. But by default we all imagine ourselves with long lives (it’s a coping skill), so I assume at the dinner party that I’m choosing between 85 and 90, 90 and 95. In which case, I’ll have my chocolate.
But maybe that isn’t true; maybe, at 90, I will desperately not want to die. Maybe I will wish I could take back every ill-advised bite and sip. A year-and-a-half from forty (I’m counting, yes), time seems to pass so quickly it regularly gives me little waves of nausea. A little wave when my six-year-olds write me notes in their charming, still-imperfect handwriting and I know both the notes and the imaginative spelling won’t last much longer. A little wave when the ten-year-old rolls her eyes at her dad, who is slightly more embarrassing than he was even three months ago. A little wave as my iPhone feeds me pre-pandemic photos, and I see both the voices and bodies of my children were a little clumsier, a little softer. My own face a little tauter, clearer.
It could be the greatest tension of all, the one we hold whether we want to or not. Slow down, moments, slow down, years. But don’t last forever; soon I will be too weary.
Let me stay young and alive; but since I can’t, let me grow old well, and die.
Forge ahead; rest.
In Cormac McCarthy’s famously bleak novel The Road, a father and his young son wander a scorched, post-apocalyptic earth with only a few survivors. The planet is so wrecked by an unnamed, unexplained disaster, the father and son are forced to wear masks to protect themselves against dangerous particles still floating in the thick, gray air. In this world, there are no fish, no leaves. Only dirt and ash.
The boy’s mother is absent because, (accurately) imagining the horrors to come, she shot herself in the backyard months ago. To the father, this makes no sense. A person keeps going, no matter what. A person survives.
The Road is fundamentally about survival. It includes one of the most nightmarish passages in all English literature (iykyk). In this world, humans harvest other humans. (Because they are evil? Or because they must to survive?) It is a book about to what lengths humans will go to stay alive, and to what lengths they should.
It’s been ages since I read the novel, but my lingering memory is that of walking and fighting, walking and hunger, walking and hiding. Awakening each morning to survive the day for no reason other than to survive it. The tedium of the father and the boy’s journey of survival translates into the reading experience, which for me was maddening as well as terrifying and heartbreaking. My persistent impression while I read: WHY???
What was the point? For the first time, I wondered why a person would fight to stay alive when what he’s surviving for is another day in a world that can only reasonably called a hellscape. “Nobody wants to be here,” the father says, “and nobody wants to leave.” The specter of death looms so large that most of us will stave it off at all costs, subconsciously or no. Like the father, who sacrifices everything to keep his son alive. Just alive—and barely that.
Actually the book offers a far more complex consideration of the meaning of life. But I don’t remember much about that. I remember the walking.1
The boy’s father reacts with perseverance. The mother reacts with despair.
Perseverance is good! Despair is bad!
But McCarthy is asking us something. At what point does “perseverance” become foolishness? And conversely, at what point does the thing that looks like despair actually resemble pragmatism? Can a refusal to merely survive be, actually, hope?
There is untold beauty in survival, like the way tulip bulbs wake up and push their way out of the dark earth after months of winter. The father is noble, and we hate the mother for giving up. The boy asks his father: “’What's the bravest thing you ever did?’ [The father] spat in the road a bloody phlegm. ‘Getting up this morning,’ he said.”
This good, DNA-level instinct in us is what Life Extension appeals to. It’s why antiaging-antideath promises are the most effective and most primitive form of advertising. Promise me that I can keep going. Promise me this isn’t the end, that the end will never come.
In another post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, nearly all 7+ billion humans on earth are dead from a flu pandemic. But some are alive.
The humans who remain must decide what they are living for. If, like Kirsten and Jeevan, they hunker down, locking the doors and hiding themselves away with water and food rations, they are certain to survive. But survive for what?
Thus Kirsten, who eventually abandons safety and survives into adulthood (at the cost of killing someone, it should be noted), becomes a member of The Traveling Symphony, a band of actors that goes town-to-town performing Shakespeare plays. Shakespeare in an almost-empty, now-terrifying world? Costumes and line memorization and stage directions? What’s the point?
From the slogan inscribed on The Traveling Symphony’s caravan, we get our answer: “Because survival is insufficient.”
It’s the case for reading books and painting and gardening while we drown in bad news. After our great loves are over, lost, or gone. While glaciers melt into the sea. It’s the case, I think, for chasing deeper instead of longer.
In Station Eleven, the author writes, “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the parking lot.”
I’ve been haunted by the hidden promise on that blue bottle: Life Extension. I guess what I can’t shake are the ways I buy into the promise, bleak as it is, forsaking the richness of an experience now for the empty promise of more experiences to come.
It’s easy to be so charmed by the idea of more living that I sacrifice better living. I sacrifice presence.
There is no shortage of funding for life extension research, but we can hardly be bothered to read a poem. To play an instrument. To, while we are still here, look at a tree.
But, says poet-philosopher David Whyte, “Hiding is a way of staying alive.” When the environment is hostile to survival, hunkering down is a nature-approved, time-tested tactic. Whyte goes on: “Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snow bound internal pulse of the hibernating bear.”
To hide is to offer and experience the bare minimum of life. It can keep us alive, yes, but it is meant to be a temporary condition. All of us hide behind some version of televisions or TikTok, busyness or vitamins, alcohol or solitude. Hiding isn’t inherently harmful; at times, it’s necessary. But we are meant to emerge from hiding into life and action. The coping strategy cannot become the endgame. Survival is insufficient. This part, we (I) sometimes forget.
Whyte tells us to move, ultimately, out of the darkness of survival into the light of being. “Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light.”
Presumably, that is the hope of the father in The Road. That if they hang on long enough, light is coming.
For weeks the Life Extension emails to which I was automatically subscribed arrive in my mailbox. They want to know: am I tired? stressed? sad?
They want to know: “What’s your stay-well strategy?”
I have many strategies—some of them, like spinach salads, healthy. Most of them, like the nightly application of retinol, probably absurd. But I wish I had only one strategy: to be.
Soon, the Cryonics Institute may be be able to replace the water inside your body with protectant chemicals, then freeze your brain and, later, bring you back to life. But not even cryonics prevents death. One website advertises it as “pausing the dying process.” My vitamins and my retinol and my rushing are an attempt, also, to “pause the dying process.” I worry by becoming preoccupied with pausing the dying process in the future—spending and spinning and pushing ahead—I pause the living process in the present. Maybe “Will we live to be 100?” isn’t the right question at all.
If it’s true that survival is insufficient—and I think it is true—what do we do instead?
Maybe, the opposite of survival is risk.
Maybe, it is abandon.
Maybe, it is rest.
Eventually, we risk ourselves to become ourselves—or something more than ourselves. “Hiding done properly,” says Whyte, “is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children, or even as emerging adults.”
Or as Kirsten puts it in Station Eleven: “We traveled so far. Your friendship meant everything. It was difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.”
(and, of course, the basement scene)