Today's post is by Alessandro Fiorello, an adjunct philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa, where he also received his PhD in 2025. His main research interests are in free will, narrative views of personal identity, ethics, and related topics in the metaphysics of death and philosophy of religion.
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| Alessandro Fiorello |
All human beings have at least one thing in common: we are all going to die. Achievements in nutrition, public health, and medical science have increased human longevity. Many people believe that increasing our longevity indefinitely would be desirable. But what if being given indefinite extended longevity creates a kind of boredom with one’s life that cannot be solved by finding new things to do?
In my recent essay, “Terminal Boredom, Longevity, and Narrative” I analyse a famous argument against the desirability of immortality by the British philosopher Bernard Williams. I argue that Williams’s argument is properly understood not as an argument against immortality itself, but as a concern about longevity.
Williams uses Elina Makropulos from The Makropulos Case to illustrate his point. EM has lived 342 years and is bored because of her longevity. The traditional view is that EM is bored, making immortality undesirable due to boredom. I believe, like many philosophers, that the problem is not immortality itself but longevity. Over time, a person exhausts meaningful projects, ambitions, and commitments.
The key problem is identity. The source of meaning in our lives comes from the projects, values, and desires that reflect the kind of person we are. Careers, relationships, interests, hobbies, etc., are linked to our character. If people persist as the same person over an extremely long time, we risk exhausting the sources of meaning available to that character. Eventually, there may be nothing left that genuinely engages us.
There seems to be an obvious solution: change. People will adopt new goals and reinvent themselves. But the more we change, the less we remain the same person. Our identity provides life's meaning, as I’ve discussed. To avoid boredom, we must let go of this identity. The dilemma is: creating new meaning requires abandoning the sense of self that gives our lives coherence. Does this solve the problem?
John Martin Fischer defends immortality by proposing a type of identity allowing change while remaining the same person. He compares human lives to stories, but not as a single unified narrative. Instead, he suggests our lives are a series of overlapping "never-ending stories," which foster new experiences. Continuously creating new stories and projects helps prevent boredom.
I argue that this solution comes at a substantial cost. A meaningful life requires more than simply having experiences. It requires understanding those experiences as parts of a coherent whole. Narrative unity allows us to see our lives as our own. It enables us to connect our past, present, and future into a meaningful story.
Drawing on Marya Schechtman’s notion of “empathetic access,” I argue that people need more than memory or psychological continuity. We must be able to identify with our past and future selves from a first-person perspective. Without a unified narrative, we lose the intelligibility and self-understanding that make a life meaningful.
The result is a troubling conclusion. Fischer’s model may avoid boredom, but it does so by weakening the very kind of personal identity that Williams believed gives life meaning. We may be able to extend life indefinitely, but only by sacrificing the unified self whose projects and commitments make life worth living in the first place.
The debate over immortality is therefore not about living forever. It is about whether a meaningful human life can survive extreme longevity. My conclusion is that there are limits to how long a meaningful life can be extended. The challenge is not death itself but preserving meaning in the face of ever-increasing longevity.
Williams uses Elina Makropulos from The Makropulos Case to illustrate his point. EM has lived 342 years and is bored because of her longevity. The traditional view is that EM is bored, making immortality undesirable due to boredom. I believe, like many philosophers, that the problem is not immortality itself but longevity. Over time, a person exhausts meaningful projects, ambitions, and commitments.
The key problem is identity. The source of meaning in our lives comes from the projects, values, and desires that reflect the kind of person we are. Careers, relationships, interests, hobbies, etc., are linked to our character. If people persist as the same person over an extremely long time, we risk exhausting the sources of meaning available to that character. Eventually, there may be nothing left that genuinely engages us.
There seems to be an obvious solution: change. People will adopt new goals and reinvent themselves. But the more we change, the less we remain the same person. Our identity provides life's meaning, as I’ve discussed. To avoid boredom, we must let go of this identity. The dilemma is: creating new meaning requires abandoning the sense of self that gives our lives coherence. Does this solve the problem?
John Martin Fischer defends immortality by proposing a type of identity allowing change while remaining the same person. He compares human lives to stories, but not as a single unified narrative. Instead, he suggests our lives are a series of overlapping "never-ending stories," which foster new experiences. Continuously creating new stories and projects helps prevent boredom.
I argue that this solution comes at a substantial cost. A meaningful life requires more than simply having experiences. It requires understanding those experiences as parts of a coherent whole. Narrative unity allows us to see our lives as our own. It enables us to connect our past, present, and future into a meaningful story.
Drawing on Marya Schechtman’s notion of “empathetic access,” I argue that people need more than memory or psychological continuity. We must be able to identify with our past and future selves from a first-person perspective. Without a unified narrative, we lose the intelligibility and self-understanding that make a life meaningful.
The result is a troubling conclusion. Fischer’s model may avoid boredom, but it does so by weakening the very kind of personal identity that Williams believed gives life meaning. We may be able to extend life indefinitely, but only by sacrificing the unified self whose projects and commitments make life worth living in the first place.
The debate over immortality is therefore not about living forever. It is about whether a meaningful human life can survive extreme longevity. My conclusion is that there are limits to how long a meaningful life can be extended. The challenge is not death itself but preserving meaning in the face of ever-increasing longevity.