You will die. That’s why your life is worth living | Well actually

Ted “the Kid” Williams was perhaps one of the greatest hitters baseball has ever seen. He played for the Boston Red Sox for nearly 20 years. The Kid was like a god from another era until his death in 2002, at 83.

His two younger children had his body carted off by private jet to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. There, his head was severed from his body in a process called neuroseparation, thought to increase the quick-freeze preservation of the brain. His head and body were placed in stainless steel nitrogen tanks.

He is still there, alongside his son John Henry, who died two years later – two of the 263 people the company claims to be preserving for future revival.

Williams’s oldest daughter, who wanted him cremated, challenged her siblings’ claim that their father chose this frosty, inanimate suspension. She ultimately dropped the lawsuit. What the baseball legend got, like it or not, was eternity in a tin can.

Twenty-four years after his death, the promise of immortality is mogging our culture, having shifted from cryotanks to the thriving wellness marketplace.

Tech millionaire Bryan Johnson has been a tireless salesman of eternal youth. Blueprint, his company, commands: “Don’t Die” – as if death were just another inconvenience the rich can pay to avoid.

Johnson is famous for trying to de-age his penis by enriching its blood flow and performing “tri-generational” plasma exchanges with his teenage son and 70-year-old father. He’s not even the most eccentric of the longevity crowd, a rather unimpressive yet profoundly influential supermajority of white men with shit tons of money and cringe-inducing genius complexes.

Selling the promise of eternal youth is big business for corporations that specialize in teaching young girls that their value is counted in wrinkles, convincing wannabe movie stars to stop eating (or to stomach a GLP-1), and convincing gym-bound boys to upgrade their faces by “bone smashing”.

Even Juan Ponce de León’s supposed search for the Fountain of Youth was a side hustle to his lucrative colonial ambitions. Today, the billionaires’ space race proves the hustle has real longevity.

Cryonics was only one expression of a much bigger idea – transhumanism: the belief that science might allow humanity to transcend its biological limits.

Transhumanism initially gained traction after the horrors of the first world war, when it seemed that human nature had gone astray, perpetuating only hatred and destruction. In the 1950s, some well-connected Englishmen, including Julian Huxley (brother of the writer Aldous), picked up transhumanism and ran with it.

While ideas about science and immortality had bubbled up in earlier decades, Huxley’s 1957 book, New Bottles for New Wine, centered on the belief that technology could enhance humans, making us smarter, healthier, and “more emotionally sophisticated”, Duncan Bell, a Cambridge professor and historian of the movement, recently explained.

Bell identifies transhumanism as a post-Darwinian phenomenon: if we have evolved, as Darwin established, then we are still evolving.

Yet the dream of “improving” humanity has always had an ugly underside. Huxley himself championed eugenics, the conviction that some people were unfit to reproduce or even live (though he ultimately denounced the Nazis and denied that race should be a genetic criterion for exclusion).

Today these ideas live on in myriad policies that are punitive to those who are different or disadvantaged. JD Vance has repeatedly called for Americans to have more children, embracing a pronatalist politics that echoes earlier conservative movements rooted in anxieties about women’s independence and the declining birthrates of white Americans.

By the 1980s, the movement had undergone a consequential shift: away from state-funded scientific advancement and toward private capital. The space age gave transhumanism new horizons, and eventually old dreams of space exploration found new champions – the billionaire class.

This is the shift on which the insular likes of Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs cut their teeth, replete with the old saws of their predecessors: space exploration, telepathic bot-think, surveillance and immortality.

A century after the first world war inspired radical dreams of remaking humanity, we face existential threats of our own – the decline of democratic institutions, climate change, nuclear threats. Yet today’s transhumanists offer little beyond grift and an ever more exclusive boys’ club. Flaccid and retrograde, they seem desperate to shove their billion-dollar trinkets down our non-consenting throats.

“The people we’re describing in End Times Fascism all believe that everything good and worth striving for and worth looking forward to is really not in this realm,” Naomi Klein recently said about her new book, written with Astra Taylor. “It might be colonizing Mars; it might be uploading their consciousness. This world, that we actually live in – our animate bodies – seems to be of no interest to them.”

Klein called the tech billionaires “traitors to creation”.

And so here we are. Instead of human advancement, we have the dull, underwhelming threat of Neuralink; Musk’s company is supposedly developing brain implants that will allow us to, yes, operate computers with our thoughts.

We’ve dreamed of the eradication of infant mortality and world hunger. Instead, our present is rife with frozen, severed heads; a distracting iPhone ping in our pockets every 30 seconds; SpaceX space junk on Russia’s clock; Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer glasses surveilling our kids; the privatization of everything; and the hastening of planetary death by datacenter resource extraction.

Even Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s Nobel-winning CEO and one of AI’s more measured figures (he’s open to “smart regulation”), believes his company is “solving all disease”.

Geneticist Adam Rutherford has called such grand promises rubbish. On the podcast Past, Present, Future, he recently said: “I think Demis is the very best of a deeply problematic bunch of engineers. And engineers are not scientists. And scientists are not all biologists. Biology is ridiculously complicated.”

Rutherford noted that these astronomical claims are always made when the genius engineers are seeking another round of funding.

Indeed, Rutherford has a more fundamental question: “Why do you want to live to be 120? Or 200, or never die? It seems like such a peculiar, psychologically problematic thing to state.”

“Astronomers study the oldest, biggest things in the universe, the oldest, biggest things that exist,” astrophysicist Dr Moiya McTier said. “And these types of objects are eventually going to do something like die.” Not just us, but everything around us, comes with an expiration date – as if death is not a price we must pay but a secret ingredient for living.

Massive stars can take 10m years to go through their hydrogen fusion, which produces heavy elements inside them. When they explode as supernovae, their elements spread throughout the rest of space. It’s beautiful.

As McTier explains, stars like our sun can take up to 10bn years for this process to occur – a long, rich life.

Our sun is middle-aged right now, she told me. In the next several billion years, it will start getting bigger, brighter and hotter.

“It’s going to move outwards eventually, maybe it will reach the orbit of the Earth, maybe Mars. Just like when we are older, when we reach that senior stage of life, our bodies change, the way that we move through the world and interact with our families changes,” she said.

Everything we know will die. McTier finds this comforting. Because mortality doesn’t just make life possible; it makes us part of the larger natural world and part of the community of homo sapiens who are born, who love, and who die.

The implication is simple: the ephemerality of life, its numbered days, makes those days precious, every one.

To run through the grass as a child, to hike a mountain trail, to kiss someone you love, to give birth, to feel the first warm spring day, to smell the bright leaves of fall, to hold your grandmother’s hand, and yes, to feel your body slow down as you age – these are experiences of human embodiment, not sentimentalities. And our species, with some variation, has been living this cycle of life for millennia. These experiences connect us to the world around us, what came before and what will come after.

Caring for those who are old and dying makes us human too. “Grief is a transformative experience,” McTier, who is also a scholar of folklore, the traditions and stories of cultures, says. “Losing loved ones brings communities together, which is necessary for society.

“We get a lot of perspective knowing we’re going to die. It changes the way we live our lives. People do things that are a little riskier; I don’t think we would do that if we lived for ever. We wouldn’t have the urgency.”

Being in community teaches us how to share resources according to need. It can temper our impulses toward selfishness, greed and violence that the early transhumanists worried about. It decenters ourselves.

What would McTier do if she were immortal? She would be a couch potato for eternity, she told me with a chuckle. “Then where’s the growth? Where’s the change? A valuable part of the human experience is growing up, evolving, learning, and ageing. Mortality motivates that.”

As for me, I’ve spent a lot of time at deathbeds over the past two decades – as a hospice volunteer, family member and friend – holding the hands of people, young and old, as they grapple with their own mortality and, in turn, confronting my own. Most of us will eventually find ourselves doing the same. Caring for the dying is what we do. It’s our oldest skill, our first work, our last graceful task.

The truth is that people who are dying don’t want space castles or beauty cream or trunkfuls of money. They want to make peace with old enemies or estranged family members; they want to smell the morning sun one more time. But – and this is almost universally true, in my experience – they want to die. They’ve done what they could with what they’ve had and they realize when it’s time – to be memories, inspirations, to be stardust.

Dying is scary – that fear can help us to take good risks and prevent us from doing really stupid shit. But the dying very often know the score and count themselves lucky for the years they’ve got. At the end of long years, or long illness, as the body hurts and wanes, the dying know the score. And we caregivers learn their lessons.

Who wants to live forever? This is the question I asked JR Pepper, an art historian who also leads tours in New York City’s Green-Wood cemetery. She is well versed in death and dying and is an expert on the history of the cemetery and its permanent residents.

“If you have all the time in the world”, she said: “Why live? It’s the vampire question.”

She means that vampires, who are immortal, get bored with their infinite time. They’re stuck in a stasis, their bodies never changing, the course of their lives and outlooks always the same.

Vampires are creatures from our collective imagination. They exist to remind us that immortality is really a drag and that even the fictionally immortal want to die too.