What If I Don’t Want to Live That Long? Longevity from a Skeptical View
Living longer doesn’t always mean living better. Amid the enthusiasm for longevity science, there is a silent —and increasingly lucid— current that questions whether we truly wish to extend life indefinitely. Skepticism doesn’t stem from a rejection of health or progress, but from the intuition that the value of lived time cannot be measured only in quantity.
The Fatigue of Long Days
Long-lived societies celebrate each added year as a collective achievement. Yet in many cases, the extension of lifespan is not accompanied by well-being, meaning, or companionship. Growing older can become an empty horizon if the added years are lived in loneliness, illness, or loss of purpose. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han spoke of “the exhaustion of the contemporary subject”: a prolonged life, yes, but one that is saturated, without pauses or depth.
In a world that idolizes youth and fears decline, living longer can feel like a kind of aesthetic or emotional punishment. The question some people ask —and few dare to voice aloud— is simple: how long does it make sense to live?
Against the Obligation to Be Eternal
The culture of longevity sometimes slips into a new form of morality: the obligation to remain forever young, active, and productive. In this narrative, dying at 90 seems like a failure, and showing signs of frailty, a lack of discipline. But a long life cannot become a race against time.
Writer Susan Sontag had already warned of the danger of turning health into a modern religion. Longevity should not be an end in itself but a space of freedom: the right to decide how, and until when, we want to live. Martha Nussbaum reminds us that human dignity lies precisely in that autonomy: in each person’s ability to choose how to inhabit their body, their limits, and their own end.
The Fear of Disappearing
Behind the desire to prolong life lies an understandable fear: that of disappearing. Science promises, in some way, to postpone that disappearance. But what happens if the obsession with living longer ends up draining intensity from what has already been lived? In his essay Mortality, Christopher Hitchens reminded us that accepting the end is also a form of reconciliation with life.
Philosopher Albert Camus said that the awareness of limits does not impoverish us but frees us: “life is the sum of the decisions we make in the face of the certainty of death.” Aging with serenity means recognizing the limit, not denying it. It is not about giving up, but about reconciling we with the idea of finitude, understanding that the value of existence also resides in its fragility.
The Rebellion of Those Who Doubt
Skepticism toward longevity is not pessimism: it is lucidity. It is the voice of those who defend that a dignified life doesn’t need to be infinite. It is the affirmation of a humanism that focuses on intensity rather than duration.
In recent years, philosophers, doctors, and gerontologists have begun to speak of “longevity with limits”: a view that recognizes the merits of science but warns of the danger of turning life into a laboratory product. In the face of the promise of biotechnological immortality, new questions arise: what will happen to the meaning of life if there is no longer an end? What place will mourning, inheritance, or memory have if no one ever disappears?
Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that the dream of digital immortality —the transfer of consciousness into a machine— could transform human identity into a perpetual algorithm. But what would remain of the human without vulnerability, without aging, without limits?
Living Less, but with More Meaning
Perhaps true progress doesn’t lie in living longer but in learning to live better: to care for time, to pause it, not to accelerate it until it’s exhausted. To reclaim a life full of relationships, learning, and meaning. Zygmunt Bauman wrote that a liquid life, without depth or commitment, may last long but leaves little trace.
Longevity should not be an obligation, but a possibility that is chosen, built, and, when the time comes, also let go. The challenge is not to defy death, but to reconcile ourselves with time.
If you could choose not the years of your life but the way you want to live them, what would you prioritize?