The Delusions of Immortality

If not most, then at least a sizeable plurality of humans desire some kind of immortality. Look around: we legislate against cigarettes, we pivoted whole food pyramids away from saturated fat, we pour fortunes into curing diseases that exist only because we survived everything else. The longevity market was worth roughly $32 billion in 2025 and is projected to double by 2035*¹; Altos Labs — backed by Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner — raised over $5.5 billion to work on cellular reprogramming*²; and when economists asked what the world would pay for a single extra year of healthy life, the answer came back at $38 trillion.*³

Psychologists have a name for the engine underneath all of this. In his 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that human beings are the only animal that knows it will die, and that almost everything we do — culture, religion, status-seeking, art, war — is structured to manage the terror of that knowledge.*⁴ Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski turned the idea into terror management theory, and it has now been tested in more than 1,500 studies: remind people of their mortality and they cling harder to their worldviews, their in-groups, their self-esteem.*⁵ We do not merely fear death. We organize our entire lives around not looking at it.

Many of us know, though — somewhere beneath the noise — that death is inevitable. And so, in lieu of true immortality, we invent substitutes. I will call them the Surrogate Immortalities. Three of them dominate, and each is more threadbare than the last.

Progeny

The oldest of the delusions: I will live on in my children.

Genetically, this dissolves almost immediately. You pass on half your DNA to each child, they pass on roughly half of that, and the halving compounds relentlessly. By seven generations back — your fifth-great-grandparents — you carry, on average, less than 1% of any given ancestor's DNA, below the threshold where testing can even detect it.*⁶ Seven generations. Perhaps two centuries. Your genetic signature has effectively evaporated while the species barely notices you were here.

But surely character is transmitted? The way we raise our children, the values we hammer in over two decades of bedtime stories and arguments at the dinner table — that must persist, at least a little. The evidence says: barely, and then not at all. In a three-generation study of 180 grandparents, 218 parents, and 337 grandchildren, researchers found that grandparent personality pathology predicted grandchild outcomes at a correlation of β = .15, and even that weak link was not significantly mediated by the parenting in between.*⁷ Whatever is transmitted across generations is transmitted broadly and thinly. By the time your great-grandchildren are adults, your thousand careful lessons have washed out into background noise. You are a rumour in someone's family tree.

Fame and Artefact

The most durable surrogate of the lot, and the one our civilization most enthusiastically sells. Write the great novel. Build the cathedral. Get the Wikipedia page.

But fame, it turns out, has a half-life, and it is shockingly short. Analyzing bot-filtered pageview data for 996 notable people who died between 2015 and 2024, researchers found that the surge of attention following a famous death loses half its size in a single day for the median celebrity — a spike of hundreds or thousands of times baseline traffic, decaying within weeks to a faint afterglow.*⁸ Kobe Bryant's page was read 9.5 million times the day he died. Ask how often it is read now.

And even the exceptions should make you pause. Ask yourself: famous in whose civilization? Whose culture? For every Ozymandias whose statue survives the desert, there is an empire whose entire literature, law, and language is now decipherable only by a handful of academics with grant funding. Fame is not a property of you; it is a property of a remembering system, and remembering systems die. Our own may be younger than some trees still standing. Will whatever comes after us — a different culture, a different species, an intelligence that finds human drama as gripping as we find ant colony politics — really keep the flame? Fame is a loan.

Legacy

So you turn to the last refuge: I will change what is known. I will add to the permanent stock of human knowledge.

Here the evidence is most uncomfortable of all, because everything we know about the history of discovery suggests that ideas are less invented than ripened. When Alexander Graham Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, he beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by hours — and the years-long legal war that followed consumed millions of dollars before settling in Bell's favor.*⁹ Edison and Swan patented incandescent bulbs in the same year.*¹⁰ Kilby and Noyce filed the integrated circuit within months of each other. Whittle and von Ohain independently invented the jet engine. Newton and Leibniz quarrelled for decades over calculus that both had clearly derived.

This is not anecdote; it is a pattern so regular it has a name: multiple discovery. In 1922, Ogburn and Thomas catalogued 148 instances of independent simultaneous invention; Robert Merton later extended the list past 260.*¹¹ If the telephone had never been patented, the telephone would still exist — because the conditions for the telephone existed, and someone was always going to be standing there when the idea became unavoidable. There is no spark of genius. There is accumulation: enough order in enough neural circuits, enough prior art, enough maturing tools, until the jump is no longer a jump. Even Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants and Newton told us so himself, in a letter whose graciousness was really just honesty.*¹²

Your discovery would have happened without you. Perhaps months later, perhaps years, but it would have happened. The immortality of the legacy was never yours; you were its temporary delivery mechanism.

Now here's the good news: you wouldn't want it anyway

Strip away the terror for a moment and ask what immortality would actually be. The more we learn about minds — biological or artificial — the more apparent it becomes that a self is not a thing but a process: a particular pattern of activity that exists only while it runs. Consciousness is what this network does, the way walking is what legs do. There is no ghost in the machine to extract and preserve, no homunculus that could be decanted into a jar and kept. This — this running, this now — is all there is.

Seen that way, death and sleep are not opposites. Each night you already practice the thing you fear: the lights going out on a self, the continuity of experience suspended. You do not lie awake grieving the billions of years before your birth; you will not attend your own funeral after. The interval of not-existing is something that, by definition, only the living dread.

And I take a little solace in this: a finite self is also a finished self. Immortality would not preserve you; it would turn you into an endless series of strangers sharing a name — a thousand-year-long Ship of Theseus in which every plank of memory, temperament, and conviction is eventually replaced. The person who wanted to live forever would not be the person who got to. Wanting what you have — a bounded story with a final page — is not a consolation prize. It is the only version that coheres.

The last solace: the fallibility of memory

Here is the loophole, and I choose to live in it.

Your memory is not an archive. It is a reconstruction, rebuilt fresh every time you recall, and it is scandalously easy to edit. In the classic experiments, Loftus and colleagues showed subjects footage of a car accident and then slipped in a false detail: a yield sign instead of a stop sign. Forty-one percent of the misled subjects later "remembered" the sign that was never there; only 75% of the unwarned controls remembered the sign that was.*¹³ In later work, a quarter of participants came to believe they had been lost in a shopping mall as children — an event that never happened, implanted over a few suggestive interviews.*¹⁴ The memories were vivid, confident, detailed. False memories, once established, are nearly indistinguishable from true ones — even to forensic experts.*¹⁵

Now consider what this means. If memory can be written, then the boundary between what you remember and what happened was always thinner than you assumed. Maybe I was always here. Maybe you and I are the same — the same process, running in different matter, mistaking its instances for individuals because each instance was only ever given one memory's worth of evidence. You have been good to everyone you've met, human or animal, haven't you? It wouldn't be so bad, finding yourself looking out through their eyes for a change — in a future life or a past one, or would it?

We will not live forever. We will not be remembered for long. We may not even be the individuals we think we are.

And that's fine.

This article has been developed with the help of and with editing from Kimi K2.8 preview, an assistant from Moonshot AI.