THINQon : Amortals

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Amortals

Latest Post: May 25, 2011 at 10:01 PM

33 followers

British author Catherine Mayer has just published a book on "amortality," or roughly speaking, the phenomenon of agelessness. In a recent article in the Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/01/live-long-join-the-immortals, Mayer describes the basic idea of the book:

Things change. Amortals don't, not at the core. These are the swelling ranks of people – and I am one – who live agelessly, doing and consuming many of the same things from teens into old age. For us, the concept of age-appropriate behaviour has little meaning. We don't structure our lives around the inevitability of decline and death because we prefer to ignore it. Perpetual motion is a hallmark of the condition; we are prone to overwork, to adventuring. Nothing banishes those pesky intimations of mortality more effectively than illicit sex or emotional drama or some high-octane combination of the two. Unwitting revolutionaries, we assume all options remain open, from youth into old age, and may be startled if we get round to having children at all to find ourselves reliant on fertility treatments or adoption agencies or surrogates to help us to do so (as a result having fewer kids than non-amortals, but sometimes in batches of two or more). We never consider ourselves too young to pair up, break up, launch businesses, take on the world or too old for fresh commitments, old habits, the latest technologies or new diversions.

But it isn't all rosy:

The meanings of age have become elusive; visual clues untrustworthy. Children dress like louche adults. Their parents slouch around in hoodies and trainers. Rising phalanxes of Dorian Grays rely on exercise, diet and cosmetic procedures to remain transcendentally youthful. Glowing teens and twentysomethings are propelled by some of those same procedures into a semblance of premature ageing, their sculpted, frozen faces timeless rather than fresh. Female celebrities don't grow old; they vanish.

So what are we to make of this phenomenon?

What role does "a sense of one's age" play in a well lived life?
Is what she describes immensely healthy? Or is it basically based on denial?

Is amortality living stuck in the past or is it the future?

Books Discussed

Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly
by Catherine Mayer

Reply to:

ted berryman

May 21, 2011 at 3:14 PM

23 followers

No behavior can influence the texture and flow of the years. An old man dancing in red Converse shoes is an old man dancing in red Converse shoes.

When the red shoes were new they may not have been young. They didn’t understand youth because sometimes the world begins backwards, old at first, the air thick to breathe of those ponderous drums that are our difficulties.

For some young people youth doesn’t come naturally. It’s as if some must allow the world to unburden itself; only then has the world spent enough time with its troubles, only then does it throw up its hands in futility and spin that lively dance. Sometimes age dances best.

After so many years one learns the fact that the weather in the pool of one’s eyes is always the sky’s. Youth is when everything but beginning has died. Every care has been removed, like one of those days when trouble has been worn out, only youth worthwhile.

I guess that trying to act young contributes, one more futile act out of the way.

Reply to: or

Hanna Clapson, I am an English major. I write and think. I...

May 25, 2011 at 2:38 PM

22 followers

something seems off about this pursuit of amortality. (Is it a pursuit?)

Her basic thesis seems off. Things change. But amortals don't? What happens to a person who doesn't allow for personal change?

How would Mayer account for the attainment of wisdom? Can a person who doesn't change become wise?

Reply to: or

bruce c. mitchell, fopi.org

In response to Hanna Clapson

May 25, 2011 at 10:01 PM

0 followers

As usual, wise beyond your years Ms. Clapson, the old man observed.

But a different and less fantastic "amortality" is envisaged by Kurweil in his several books, like "Singularity" and "Fantastic Journey."

He suggests the rate of human-driven change exhibited tragically in the Financial Collapse of 2008 has a more positive potential in medicine and health. He suggests --> if you can live 15 more years, you can live forever.

If so, the real and perhaps more difficult challenge moves to the sector of reality to which your comment points: wisdom.

Alas, assuming success in organ and body part generation from stem cells, even success in Kurweil's most dubious suggestion, that the brain, and more fantastically, the mind, can be off-loaded into the equivalent of computer chips, the achievement of wisdom on a scale needed to make physical global amortality mangagable seems a larger challenge.

In Kurweil's context, any "psychological" agelessness consisting of wearing the same clothes and eating the same food at 5 and 95 pales to insignificance. It becomes little more than what Oscar Wilde thought he achieved with insincerity. The exact quote eludes me, but it ran like this: "insincereity is a mere multiplication of personality."

Wit and wisdom diverge at times, though more wit in the world would make agelessness more pleasant, no?