Eternal youth: a tyranny?

I will call the Peter Pan syndrome the desire to never die and, likewise, to always remain young and healthy.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

This fiction is beginning to flirt with the possibility of becoming reality. Research seems to be succeeding in modifying our aging, including reversing it. David Sinclair is a reference, among other scientists, in this research.

Nobody better than David Sinclair and scientists in the field to talk about the possibility of reversing aging.

What am I talking about, then, here? I want to talk about this Peter Pan syndrome that I summarized in the first paragraph.

I want to question why we might want to stay young forever or for thousands of years.

I want to question, even more so, why we choose the young option, perhaps between 20 and 30 years old, to live eternally.

My argument is that the phases of life have important characteristics and, perhaps, there is no hierarchy in which being young always wins.

It will be hard to argue that being very old, including illnesses and frailty, is something positive. I agree: illnesses and frailty, movement and thought difficulties compared to earlier ages does not sound good.

But I want to focus on things that might seem good, even after we are no longer young.

Knowledge is not a good argument, I agree as well. Although we acquire more knowledge over time with aging, technologies that allow staying young for thousands of years do not prevent the accumulation of knowledge. I agree.

I am left with the hormonal argument. Behavioral. I want to propose that we have important behaviors according to phases of our lives.

An important behavior I notice is sexual desire when young. We can consider this as a reference of a healthy body, but here comes my argument, we can also consider sexual desire as a human phase, which can be surpassed when we no longer need to think about sex day in and day out.

Our free will may be much less free according to the hormones circulating in greater or lesser amounts in our body.

Using sexual desire as an easy reference, I would like to propose that several other micro-behaviors can also characterize our phases throughout the various decades of our lives.

In my hypothesis, it may be that instead of pure free will, our phases push us toward varied behaviors, governed by hormones, knowledge, and even diseases.

It may be that calmness in an advanced phase is driven by less testosterone and certain movement frailties. I do not know. But they may include diseases just as much as hormonal change in the favored behavior at each epoch.

It may be that the difficulty of reasoning so well favors less impulsiveness to solve the world's problems.

And vice versa. Hyper-agile reasoning can push us to try and solve all the world's problems.

So what now? If we consider each phase as an important entity, disregarding therefore the old age that only increases with age, which phase should we privilege when able to eternize a life (or live a hundred thousand years)?

I see science seeking the youngest adult phase, between twenty and thirty years old, as a reference for a hyper-extended life, if and when this can happen in the future.

Like Peter Pan. Always young.

Something even more picturesque is discovering that the end-of-life phase - when we barely walk and are quite fragile - may eventually be a preparation for death, without major turmoil.

For example: the engine stops, everything slows down - including desires to change the world and spread seed, even desires to spread knowledge - and finally, the curtain closes and closes.

With pain, just as pain occurs at any age, but also with awareness.

If this set of hypotheses of mine makes any sense, being born, living each phase, including lowering the curtain and then dying, start to make a lot of sense.

Just as, without my hypotheses, it makes a lot of sense to want to live as long as possible, as young as possible, like a great video game - with just one level - that we never want to stop playing.

Or a compromise: we stop when we want to.

The consumer market is already targeted at youth, so it is even more natural, even from a marketing standpoint, for anti-aging science to also be targeted at a young age.

If there were no hierarchy among ages, then even the age right before dying and its partner subsequent death would be valid behaviors, thus ending the eternity of what I called the Peter Pan syndrome.

We know nothing, we are learning and, even more, there is not even a right and a wrong.

I leave the reflection.