Long ago, in my pre-adolescence and early teenage years, which unfolded in an entirely different period of human history, kids throughout various prosperous areas of the world joined in a lament. No matter how fast you ran, we despaired, you could never outrun your demonically adhesive, unyieldingly restricted, irrepressibly imperious self.
It’s comical in retrospect, I suppose—our ignorant forays into teachings and practices from distant cultures, our experimentations with what, at the time, were quaintly called mind-altering substances, our aspirations to a generous, stain-proof love, through which, theoretically, we’d experience our true relationship to the cosmos.
Mainly, more than our clownish scramble, it was the ardent longing itself—for the spiritual or metaphysical expansion that would enable us to prolong those breathtaking instants of freedom, fleeting apperceptions of the luminous reality lying beyond the frontiers of our senses, and thus to effect a Houdini-like escape from the stifling domination of the self and to encounter reality head on—that earned us the ridicule of subsequent generations.
Oddly enough, we didn’t give much thought to escaping that other maximum security prison, death. We took as a given the term individuals are allotted to spend in their living bodies. Sure, there were famous examples of those who tried to slither under the wire, Faust and so on, but all those contortions wasted on flouting the mysterious finality of death—it seemed, frankly, rather childish, and always to work out badly. Humans, generally, were comfortable enough using basic techniques to achieve a sort of second-rate immortality: building massive structures or writing a poem, contributing huge sums of money to whatever, getting one’s name on a plaque or doorplate, or simply having children.
Those days of my youth were not entirely carefree, but these of my old age aren’t carefree at all. Thanks to the internet, we watch the entire globe in real time as it goes up in flames. We watch the floods and tornadoes, starving populations on the move, little children getting shot and little children shooting, forests being felled for toilet paper as microbes leap from the fleeing animals. We watch the anxiety-addled populace salute the vengeful autocrat. We learn that our food is half full of plastic, that products to sanitize our homes also shrink our brains, that the nutritional supplements we take, the medical interventions we undergo, the soaps we wash with, do more harm than good; that the internet itself is poisoning us even as we read—foraging there for relief, for entertainment, for salvation—and furthermore, that we can’t believe a thing it tells us. And behind the noisy cascade of collapse, we can barely hear the incessant tinkling and rustling of money streaming up-up-up into outstretched hands.
In short, we can’t help but observe that our own exuberant enterprise has generated some unforeseen corollaries. Clearly, our species is designed to engineer, in the very act of flourishing, its own demise. How long do we have? It’s not looking good.
Yet that’s impossible! There has been life on our blue-skied planet for so long! Could we ourselves—the culmination of all that life—we ordinary folks sitting around right now in our gym clothes, scrolling through our news feeds, be among the last beings to experience it?
Yes, indeed, those of us who find ourselves weirdly alive at the end of the Anthropocene are in a rush. Admit-tedly, the vexing issue of the self did not, by definition, entirely disappear, but as time closed in on us, more efficient techniques were devised to escape it—often unfortunately resulting in lawsuits, prison for so-called cult leaders, truckloads of remaindered wellness manuals, and whatnot.
Oh, but the self, the self… Anyhow, by now we know there is no such thing. Or at least we understand that there’s no real point thinking about one’s self, because one’s self isn’t actually under one’s own auspices. What we called the self turns out to be nothing more than an ongoing unstable compromise between the conflicting demands of our hormones, our neurons, our personal histories, our grandparents’ personal histories, our microbiomes, which are composed of trillions of micro-organisms (probably also in conflict) whose functions and names we’d never be able to remember even if someone had told us what they were. Thus we’ve dispensed with the absurdly abstract and outworn notion of the self in favor of the more distinct and compliant model, identity—plus the concept of consciousness, which is so nebulous and unlocated that nobody could possibly feel entrapped by it. In short, we don’t need to escape from the self. What we need to escape from is death.
It was our own brains that got us into this unspeakable mess, and our own brains will have to get us out of it. Fortunately, we have our outstanding species trait of problem-solving to depend on. Those of us who have been lounging around grousing about how all the world’s wealth flows to the top can just wake up, stop grousing, and feel chastened. Because who should be hard at work solving the death problem but the very billionaires so maligned implicitly above?
Even as their explorations in space to locate plausibly hospitable planets continue, their new plans—the little bits of them that have filtered their way down to the public—are even more ambitious, greater in scope and purpose than the most life-changing human innovations to date.
The proposed underground Edens don’t boast the traditional aspirational lions and lambs lying around together. Picture, rather, sleek pickleball courts, stocks of special lab-produced provisions that are showing great promise in extending life in rats, simulated sunlight, and carefully adapted flora and fauna, bred to flourish in the special conditions. Apparently there are even plans afoot to house a community of medical/scientific scholars capable of effecting physical conformation for fortunate applicants, including new body parts to replace those that have surpassed peak performance. But the cherries on the sundae, so to speak, are the tantalizing experiments in uploading consciousness, based on the aggregate wealth of AI, into appropriate receptacles for those whose brains no longer optimize: a procedure that—stunningly—will also of course solve forever the intractable human sense of an isolated self.
There are bound to be some kinks that haven’t yet entirely been ironed out. (Who, for example, will be trusted to guard the compounds against intruders?) But, as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were to the emergency of an earlier moment, so Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are to the current emergency, and we can relax in the certainty that the brilliant thinkers on whom the planet depends for its very life are sure to perfect their project soon, just as those others perfected—and in the nick of time—the atomic weapons that put an end to war.
Deborah Eisenberg has written five collections of short fiction and a few other things.
