Just What's So Wonderful About This Whole Existence Thing Anyway?

Amazingly (to me), I still encounter people every so often who ask this question. It comes up in various different contexts: sometimes when I've been nattering on excitedly about life extension research, and sometimes just in the goings-on of daily life. And it never fails to take me aback. Regardless of what has been going on in my life (and believe me, it isn't always sunshine, kittens, and roses), the value of existence has never been something I've questioned.

I've questioned its meaning on many occasions, and I went through the requisite adolescent existential crisis, but the inherent worth of existence, particularly conscious existence, seems self-evident to me. Even on my moodiest day as a teenager, I still had an intense and unquestionable sense that being was something so precious and exquisite that it needed to be acknowledged and experienced through as many means as possible, for as long as possible.

None of this has anything to do with any sort of supernatural belief, nor does it necessitate a view of reality than anthropomorphizes the universe-at-large and assigns it the intents and appetites of (relatively speaking) newly-sentient hairless apes. Rather, it simply means that even in the absence of benevolent (or malevolent) creator entities, and even if life does not have some sort of disembodied "meaning" out there floating around waiting to be discovered by enlightened primates or the machines we eventually construct, there are still innumerable things that make existence a wholly worthwhile endeavor.

The raw materials wrought by and through space and time, the intricate interactions of forces and feedback, the evolved entity that is the imagination -- all these things together comprise a superstructure of potential and complexity of a sort that needs nothing but its very existence to prove its worth.

This superstructure is what I see in the drawing of every breath, in the shifting of every glance, in every moonlight dash out into the driveway to breathlessly take in snatches of constellation and frost-hued air. It is the first thing that greets me when the alarm blares in the morning, and the last thing that hangs before me like a camera-flash afterimage before I fall into sleep every night.

I do not live my life according to a checklist. Well, that's not exactly true -- I do make use of daily to-do lists, and I've gone through more than my share of sticky notes in this endeavor. But that's not the kind of checklist I am referring to here. Rather, I am referring to the kind of checklist that goes something like this: you're born, you grow into a small child, you play in particular ways, you go to school, you go to the prom, you find a mate and get married, you join a company and advance through the ranks, you eventually retire, you plan for your funeral, and finally, you die.

Though life-extensionists are frequently reminded of the fact that many people find moral fault in any expressed desire to thwart the enemy at the end, perhaps fewer are viscerally aware of just how pervasive the life-script checklist can be in a culture. This life-script manifests itself in numerous areas (from play to school to career to lifestyle in general), and people's reactions to those who deviate from it can be curiously hostile.

I started becoming aware of this hostility at a fairly early age, when it became evident to me that I was frequently the only female in any group of my age-peers who made a beeline for the spaceships and construction toys. I remember being literally chased down by a group of girls my age when I was eleven years old, who were determined to give me a "makeover".

I never found it particularly difficult to resist peer pressure, but for people without the kind of brain wiring that gives me that kind of resistance, I can see how it can be problematic when your strong interest in things your peers don't care about can mean you'll end up playing alone most of the time. Similarly, I have to wonder how many people might avoid learning more about longevity research because they fear that even if they themselves find a way to treat the health decline associated with their own old age, their friends will not follow suit (or more immediately, that their friends will dismiss their desire to live as long as possible as hubris or self-importance).

While I understand that social pressures can be very real for many, I don't really see how any social pressure can override permanently the sheer force by which the, well, wonderfulness of existence reveals itself at all levels of awareness that can be conceived of as awareness. It is my hope that somehow, perhaps, over time I might be able to contribute toward helping more people see this wonderfulness.

It's all around everyone, everywhere, all the time.

It is not to be found in ultimate fame or fortune or even security.

Rather, it is in the slide of cool sheets on a breezy summer evening, in the crunch of a raspberry seed, in the feeling of soaring as you find a mirror of your own inner workings in art or algorithm.

It is in the trees, it is in the gas giants, in the nebulae, in a future wrought of laughter and imagination and intent.

It is in the rising and falling of breath and in the whirring of machines, and in the careful construction of artificial neurons in a vast database in a large, cold room.

It is in the eyes of a cat and the musk of new-cut grass.

It is in the domes and spires of ancient cities, and of cities wrought in silicon and mind alone.

It is in the outdoors, in the cellular membranes of everything alive.

It is in the Internet and, it is in music.

It is so pervasive and so utterly, indescribably beautiful that words can scarcely wrap themselves around it.

This is why I seek to be alive: to continue to have (and be) a particular pattern in spacetime of a sort capable of experiencing a sense of the shifting and yearning of the superstructure of reality.

Humans have long constructed art and media in ways that represent dwarfed microcosms of the life-script: books and songs and symphonies characterized by exposition, climax, denouement, and end.

But now: imagine films one hundred years long, or books that are written as a kind of joyous and constant exposition -- not punctuated by a single megaclimax, but by millions upon millions of such events.

Imagine poems of such depth and complexity that nobody younger than one thousand can understand their secrets.

While the loveliness and significance of the earliest of human accomplishments in media and science cannot be denied, a future of long-lived consciousnesses could bring with it not only art-forms that mimic the structures of the past, but new configurations that challenge and delight sensory and contemplative experience in ways we can only guess at now. In order to do this wonderful existence a scant percentage of the justice it deserves, we need to run the experiment.