Immortality summary

Can you imagine what life would be like if we were constantly focused on our inevitable demise? How would we get anything done? The devastating thought that all our life’s many deeds will have been futile after our death would make life seem absolutely meaningless, leaving us paralyzed.

This sort of tension is simply too much to bear over time. That’s why we’ve created immortality narratives, or stories that distract us from the death of our individual self and our communities.

Have you ever been in a life-threatening situation? How did you react? You probably didn’t just give up and think, “Well, I guess it’s time to die.” Far more likely, you felt an incredible urge to stay alive, thus taking immediate action to save yourself.

The first immortality narrative plays off this primal urge to survive. In fact, humankind has always dreamed of an immortality elixir, i.e., some natural way to live forever. Staying alive forever is a natural extension of our biological impulse to survive and is, as such, the most profane method of seeking immortality.

If the methods to “stay alive” don’t pan out the way we’d hoped, what would be the most obvious alternative? The answer is found in the narrative that accepts death but refuses to leave it at that: resurrection.

The narrative of resurrection toys with the possibility of reviving a dead body. The biblical narration of Jesus of Nazareth’s death and resurrection is perhaps the most famous of such narratives.

Because of the serious difficulties involved in reviving a cadaver, we’ll need a more sophisticated concept of a second, eternal life. The solution: believing in an undying soul.

A soul represents an individual’s immaterial being that survives even after the death of the body. In fact, the very concept of the soul brought forth the most influential idea of the modern Western world: the autonomous individual.

The fourth immortality narrative is able to withstand the scrutiny of modern skepticism, and thus offer us some hope at eternal life. This is the concept of legacy.

One way to achieve this is by creating a cultural legacy through which we inscribe ourselves onto the everlasting realm of the symbolic. Simply put, we can continue to exist through society’s use of symbols – things such as written language, pictures, film or music – which are then used to pass on traditions.

Immortality seems to be universally desirable, but is it really worth the effort? In fact, it has some pretty serious drawbacks.

For instance, even though immortality narratives have proven crucial for the progress of civilization, they also unleash more destructive forces. The most vivid evidence of this are the many wars fought in the name of specific belief systems. Whether Christianity, Islam, capitalism or communism, millions of people have died in wars between societies with differing immortality narratives.

As we’ve seen, our means of coping with the inevitable end are all lacking in some way or another. Instead, we should simply embrace our finite time on the planet.

In fact, our inability to imagine the experience of being dead is our best chance to live happily in spite of our mortality. Rather than managing our fear of death by hoping for an afterlife, we should instead look at the positive aspects of our inability to experience death.

The key message in this book:

Since our bodies are hard-wired to reject our mortality, we’ve created stories about achievable immortality in order to cope. More than likely, however, immortality is impossible, so our time would be better spent striving to enjoy the moment instead of battling in vain against certain death.