Eternal Youth: A Tyranny?

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

Sounds good, doesn't it?

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

No one better than David Sinclair and scientists in the field to talk about the possibility of reversing aging.

What am I talking about here, then? 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, 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 difficult to argue that being old, including diseases and weaknesses, is a positive thing. I agree: diseases and weakness, difficulty in movements and thoughts compared to previous ages do not seem good.

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

Knowledge is not a good argument, I agree too. Although we acquire more knowledge over time with aging, the technologies that allow us to remain 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 the phases of our lives.

An important behavior that 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 that circulate 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 towards varied behaviors, governed by hormones, knowledge, and even by diseases.

It may be that a calmness in an advanced phase is driven by less testosterone and certain movement weaknesses. I don't know. But they may include diseases as much as the hormonal change in the behavior favored in each era.

It may be that the difficulty of reasoning so well favors a lower impulsivity to solve the problems of the world.

And vice versa. A hyper-agile reasoning can push us to try to solve all the problems of the world.

And now? If we consider each phase as an important entity, therefore disregarding old age that only increases with age, which phase should we favor when we can eternalize a life (or live a hundred thousand years)?

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

Like Peter Pan. Always young.

Something even more picturesque is discovering that the final phase of life - when we walk little and are very fragile - may eventually be a preparation for death, without major disturbances.

For example: the engine is stopping, everything gets slower - including the desires to change the world and spread semen, even the desires to spread knowledge - and, finally, the curtain is closing 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 become something with great meaning.

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

Or a middle ground: we stop when we want.

The consumer market is already geared towards young people, so it is even more natural, even from a marketing point of view, that the science of anti-aging is also geared towards the young age.

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