sgiath.dev

I love life. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to stop existing. I don’t want to be stripped of all choices. And I am not planning to die.

Most people treat this as something to get over. “Everyone dies.” “It’s natural.” “You should make peace with it.” “The end gives meaning to life” I’ve heard all of these from therapists, priests, and well-meaning friends. I reject all of them. Making peace with death is giving up on the most important problem you’ll ever face.

The copium pipeline

I grew up Roman Catholic. Church on Sundays, prayers before bed, the whole thing. In my teen years, I experienced falling out of believing in God and questioning my faith, like every normal teenager does. And when I met my future wife (Roman Catholic too) and we started dating I gave the faith a second chance and fair shot. I experienced charismatic movement to the point where I was apparently speaking in tongues. But when I honestly looked at my experiences, I realized that I cannot rule out the possibility that it is all just in my head without any divine intervention. And I started to analyze the claims church makes and realized they are all just copium.

// TODO: explain this ^^ more?

Religion is terror management. That’s not an insult - it’s a diagnosis. Terror management theory in psychology describes exactly this: we’re organisms wired for survival, but cursed with the knowledge that we’ll die. Every other animal gets to ignore this. A deer doesn’t lie awake at 3am thinking about the heat death of the universe. We do. And religion evolved as the painkiller - a way to reconcile “I must survive” with “I definitely won’t.”

It’s copium. Effective copium. Copium that built cathedrals and wrote symphonies and gave billions of people a reason to get up in the morning. I’m not dismissing it. I’m saying I can’t use it, because I can’t unknow what I know.

It’s not a trick question

Sometime in my twenties I read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism and it crystallized something I’d been feeling but couldn’t articulate.

The argument is almost embarrassingly simple. If a six-year-old is lying on train tracks, you save her. If a 45-year-old has a curable disease, you cure him. These aren’t controversial statements. Now: if a 95-year-old is dying of old age, and you could prevent it - would you? What about a 150-year-old?

If life is good and death is bad, that doesn’t change at some arbitrary age. There’s no birthday where the moral equation flips and suddenly it’s fine to let someone die. Transhumanism isn’t a radical philosophy. It’s just “life is good, death is bad” applied consistently, without special cases, without an upper bound.

This hit me hard because I’d spent years feeling like my fear of death was somehow immature or excessive. Like wanting to live forever was a childish fantasy I should outgrow. Yudkowsky made me realize I had it backwards: the people who accept death are the ones adding complexity. They’re the ones who need to explain at what exact age life stops being worth preserving. I just need to say “keep going.”

Choosing a different drug

Here’s the thing about rejecting religious copium: you don’t stop needing to cope. The fear doesn’t go away. You just need a better strategy.

My strategy is to not die.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. I mean: I intend to be alive in 2000 years. Whether that happens through medical breakthroughs that stop aging, replacing failing organs with engineered ones, gradually swapping biological parts for mechanical ones (my preferred method), or eventually uploading whatever “me” is into something more durable than meat - I don’t care about the method. I care about the outcome.

Is this also copium? Absolutely. I’m not deluded about that. The difference is that my copium has a nonzero probability of being true, and that probability is increasing every year. Religious copium asks you to believe without evidence and wait for something unfalsifiable. My copium asks me to look at the trajectory of AI, medicine, and bioengineering.

One of these you can work toward. The other you can only pray for. I know which one I’m picking.

The fear itself

I want to be clear about what I’m afraid of. It’s not pain - pain ends. It’s not the process of dying - that’s a medical problem. It’s non-existence. The idea that there will be a last thought, a last moment of experience, and then nothing. Forever. Not darkness, because darkness is something you experience. Just… nothing.

People handle this in different ways. Some find comfort in legacy - “I’ll live on through my children, my work.” That’s a weaker version of the same copium. You won’t live on. Your influence might persist for a while, but you - the thing having this experience right now - will be gone.

Others go the Buddhist route: the self is an illusion anyway, so there’s nothing to lose. Clever, but try telling yourself that at 3am when the existential dread hits. The self might be an illusion, but it’s an illusion that really doesn’t want to stop existing.

I respect people who genuinely don’t fear death. I’ve met a few. I’m not one of them, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The bet

Longevity escape velocity is a concept from Aubrey de Grey: the point where medical advances extend life expectancy faster than time passes. You age one year, but medicine gives you back more than one year of healthy life. Once you cross that threshold, you’re no longer on a countdown.

Are we close? I don’t know. Could be 20 years, could be 50. Could be never. But “could be never” is better odds than “definitely never,” which is what you get without trying.

Here’s what I do know: AI is accelerating biological research at a pace that would’ve been unthinkable ten years ago. Protein folding is solved. Gene editing is becoming routine. Organ printing is moving from lab to clinic. The people who say “that’s science fiction” are the same people who said the internet was a fad and smartphones were toys.

I’m 33. If I can stay healthy for another 30 years, I think the odds are decent. Not certain. But decent. And decent odds on immortality beat certain death every time.

Plan B

My plan is to live forever, or at least until I get tired of it and then a bit more.

If that doesn’t work - if the science doesn’t arrive in time, if aging catches me first - I have a plan B. I don’t intend to spend my final years with a degraded mind in a hospital bed, slowly becoming less of myself until the machines are turned off. That’s not dying. That’s being slowly erased.

Plan B is to go hunt a bear and don’t come back.

I mean that somewhat literally and somewhat metaphorically. The point is: agency. Even in dying, I want the choice to be mine. The fear of death is really a fear of losing all agency - the ultimate loss of control. If I can’t beat death, I can at least refuse to let it happen to me.

Why I’m writing this

Most conversations about death are wrapped in comfort. People want reassurance. They want to hear that it’s okay, that it’s natural, that there’s something beautiful about mortality giving life meaning.

I think that’s backwards. Mortality doesn’t give life meaning. Mortality is the thing threatening to take all meaning away. The urgency you feel isn’t beauty - it’s terror, dressed up in philosophy.

I’d rather be honest about the terror and do something about it.