A Return to Immediacy?

Abstract

If humans gain immortality will the result be that we reign in our appetite for instant gratification? Will the one night stand be replaced by the hundred year wait for more emotionally and physically satisfying sex, because we do not want to fill the vessels of our memories with junk experience? This does not seem probable. Instead we might see that humankind abandons its hard-earned ability to reason and plan ahead, because survival will be automatically ensured and all needs will be taken care of effortlessly. The ability to reason and plan will be unnecessary, and the ability to live in the ‘moment’, like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, might be prized as a weapon against the boredom of endless time. If this comes to pass, humankind will have lost essential features of what ultimately makes us human, and although individually we might be ready to give up these features to be able to live eternity comfortably, as a collective we might not, because we want to safeguard a collective future of humankind akin to the present.