Near the end of May’s coronation service, the crowd in Westminster Abbey hailed Britain’s newly crowned monarch by proclaiming, “God Save King Charles! Long live King Charles! May the king live forever!” In times past, this ritual well-wishing may have exhibited an element of unwarranted optimism. Yet if a contingent of modern-day immortalists prevail, King Charles III will prove the U.K.’s final sovereign, not because the British have finally had it with antidemocratic pomp, but because Charles really does live forever — along with everyone else.

The promise of eternal life has conventionally been the dangled carrot of religion. It is now the holy grail of Silicon Valley. After all, what good is being a Big Tech billionaire if all that money can’t buy you out of ending up drooling, doddering, and in due course nonexistent, just like your undocumented gardener? Fascinated by parabiosis, the transfusion of young people’s blood into older veins, PayPal’s Peter Thiel is heavily invested in health and biotech companies. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is throwing tens of millions at longevity projects. Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates has donated $100 million of his own money to dementia research. Life-extension ventures are popping up everywhere, with names like Verily, Elevian, Fountain, Halcyon Molecular, Nootrobox, Navitor, Stemcentrx, the Methuselah Foundation, and Human Longevity, Inc. Why, by 2017 Americans’ investment in longevity topped $7 trillion, thus constituting the world’s third-largest economy. Meanwhile, the Terasem Movement, People Unlimited, and the Church of Perpetual Life have bettered plain old Christianity with more appealing religions that entice their flocks with eternity sans the disagreeable business of dying first.

A disclaimer: I’m no medical researcher. I’m a fiction writer. While I do routinely stick my nose into a host of nonfiction subjects that are none of a fantasist’s business, I’m still in no position to analyze the prospects of success for cryonics, stem-cell therapy, nanotechnology, telomere extension, transhumanism (which foresees the uploading of consciousness to more-durable synthetic bodies or computers), the eradication of senescent cells, or the life-sustaining effects of living a hundred days underwater. But I’m as qualified as anyone to wonder: Why is the clichéd search for a fountain of youth accelerating, with no apparent sense of embarrassment? Is the ambition to hang about indefinitely healthy or warped? What might be the up- and downsides of living for hundreds if not thousands of years? And what could a greatly protracted or veritably infinite life be like?

In my last novel, Should We Stay or Should We Go, I dedicate a long chapter titled “You’re Not Getting Older, You’re Getting Better” to a future in which my protagonists live to see a cure for ageing. Like all their neighbors, my once-elderly British couple can soon pass for 25. If they keep looking both ways before crossing the street, they will live forever. (Oh, and there’s no King Charles — nor will there ever be. Elizabeth II gets an early bottle of the restorative tablets, to her son’s dismay.) So I’ve thought about this stuff. In the book, eternity starts off great. Then it begins to wear.

Mind, efforts to push the human envelope fall into discrete camps. Immortalists truly hope to conquer death. Less head-in-the-clouds efforts aim to extend life span beyond today’s surprisingly low American life expectancy of 76 years. I’m personally keenest on the ambition solely to increase “health span.” What’s also known as “morbidity compression” would impede or reverse the physical and cognitive ravages of ageing, which some clinicians characterize as a disease. The goal is not necessarily for us to live longer, but for us to live well longer, thereby saving health-care systems a bundle. For the irony of all these resources being poured into longevity is that, economically and experientially, shedloads of people are living too long — in terrible shape.

Me, I’m more consciously afraid of ageing than I am of death, which is probably typical for a Boomer. At the risk of sounding lamentably shallow — guilty as charged — I find when contemplating my own demise my mind no sooner lands on the topic than careens off it, as if sloshing down a waterslide: “Excuse me, what were we thinking about? What?” Ageing, by contrast, is horribly unabstract, in the present and in prospect. I hated seeing my capable parents become pallid simulacrums of their former selves by the time they died at 90 and 93. I know what’s coming. I’ve seen it. As for any research that keeps me on the tennis court an extra year, I’m all in.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the waning of traditional religious faith in the West would translate into a determination to seek life everlasting here on Earth. Dismissing the offer of sitting at the right hand of God the Father as a con, most members of the cultural mainstream have become spiritual cynics. (That said, at least a belief in our capacity to defeat death — if not via the digital second life dramatized in the lighthearted series Upload, at least with vitamin B12 and manic exercise — beats the Church of Woke, a brutally reductionist neo-religion that squashes a phantasmagoric, multifaceted world to the flat, confining categories of race and “gender.”) Nowadays, many of us assume that any bid for immortality will be a DIY job. Jesus isn’t going to help.

Although I’m the daughter of a theologian, my beliefs, or lack thereof, are in line with this secular trend. What meager spirituality I’ve ever fostered I’ve largely expressed through literature — what I read as well as what I write — and I probably rely too considerably on the arts in general both to give me a sense of mission and to pass the time. Yet I’d hardly characterize my feeble faith in the arts as a doctrine.

I can’t be alone in having found most religions’ conceptions of life after death far-fetched, as well as oddly earthbound in their versions of payoff and penance. It may not be a coincidence that most television shows about the afterlife (The Good Place, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies) are comedies. For my own part, I take some heart in the physics rubric that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so if consciousness exists and isn’t merely a neurological trick, maybe my me-ness will survive my death after a fashion. Yet energy can be dispersed. So whatever entity is typing these words might better be compared to a cup of water, and death breaks the vessel. The water spills on the floor, seeps through the cracks, evaporates. No more typing.

For that matter, I wonder how many folks who still embrace mainstream religions genuinely believe they’re going to heaven. My professionally religious father clearly didn’t, or in his final years he’d not have clung so fiercely to a greatly diminished existence by the fingernails. The myth of a tribulation-free afterlife as reward for behaving oneself in the present constitutes an inspired but overobvious bit of social engineering, and it’s impossible to ascertain just how much comfort it provides even passionate believers at the coalface. In relation to death, then, we can’t say how much the waning of formal religion has truly transformed our collective psyche.

What has changed is our collective hubris. This is a distinctly anthropocentric era, in which we imagine we can dial the temperature of the entire planet up or down by congressional fiat. A third of Americans believe preposterously that, with sufficient application of advanced technology, modern medicine can cure any illness. Now that we have Wi-Fi, humans can obviously achieve anything, and whatever happens, even the weather, is either all to our credit or all our fault. We no longer believe in external forces beyond our control — not in God’s will, of course, but not in the caprices of an observable universe 93 billion light-years in diameter, either. Folklorically, nature herself is no longer a forbiddingly indifferent, frighteningly fickle “mother” on whom we depend, but a fragile, helpless ward, rather more like a pet, in need of our protection and in fear of our neglect. (The environmentalist proposition that the planet we inhabit desperately requires Westerners’ rescue must constitute the ultimate “white-savior narrative.”) Thus for the modern sensibility the notion that human immortality would be “unnatural” is absurd. Nothing is written. When anti-ageing researcher Dr. Judith Campisi estimates that the maximum human life span “will be somewhere around 115, plus or minus maybe ten years in either direction,” the submission falls on deaf ears. Limits are for suckers.

Are the pioneers of the life-extension movement altruists, or are they mostly obsessed with selfishly persisting as individuals for as long as possible? I can’t vouch for the character of particular notables in the longevity biz — most famously, the futurist computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who in 2015 predicted human immortality by 2030, and the shaggy quasi-guru Aubrey de Grey, the biomedical gerontologist author of Ending Aging, whose grand bearded visage eerily echoes hackneyed images of God. I can merely observe generally that character is always a mixed bag, and most ambitious people are driven by a complicated combination of ego and vision. What about the project itself, then? Is this secular urge to extend human lifetimes benevolent, or disturbing? A single letter divides immortal from immoral.

There’s a difference between wanting to feel young — to have energy, to be free from pain and impairment, an ambition with which most of us would be sympathetic — and wanting to look young. For the Silicon Valley set, as for their neighbors in Hollywood, appearance seems to be paramount. Especially for people so wealthy that money is meaningless, youthfulness is the preferred currency.

A lapsed Mormon missionary, the tech tycoon Bryan Johnson seeks to convert his monetary fortune to this alternative means of exchange. Claiming to sport the fitness and lung capacity of an 18-year-old and the skin of a man aged 28, the 45-year-old employs 30 doctors for his Project Blueprint to remain personally youthful, while getting regular transfusions of his 17-year-old son’s blood (if perhaps relatively harmless, as a teenager’s blood supply should be self-replenishing, a vampiric practice that instinctively makes the skin crawl). The regime includes microdoses of Botox and the injection of salmon-sperm DNA around the eyes, which along with the variety of posed, shirtless pics in the press of Johnson flexing his pecs with his son suggests that the project is at least as much about vanity as about the advancement of science. That’s not to be prissily chiding. Many of us are neurotically worried about our looks. I’m vain. It’s just that a smoother complexion in middle age — and Johnson’s appears weirdly rubberized — is hardly one giant leap for mankind.

There’s likewise a difference between dreading death and yearning to live. To the extent that immortalists are fired by desire, I admire their appetite. Maybe Gordon Gekko is right, that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Eagerness to stick around implies a relishing of what existence has to offer: its sensory exhilarations, its passionate attachments to other people, its opportunities to reflect and grow wiser. Clinging to this life conveys an appreciation for that life, and when relishing something one understandably wants more of it. Too, the reaching-for-the-stars, pushing-the-boundaries-of-human-achievement sort of thing always seems laudable. Our forebears extended longevity by developing antibiotics, improving sanitation, and defeating once-fatal diseases, for which those of us older than 31 — average life expectancy in 1800 — have reason to feel grateful. Perhaps researchers exploring the possibility of physically preserving the memories in our brains are simply up to more of the same, and we’ll look back at a eureka moment that allows us to freeze our dreams as we now regard the development of the smallpox vaccine.

By contrast, purely wanting to forestall death is negative and fearful — a frantic putting off of an unknown that could be unpleasant. On the dread side as well, there seems to be an element of babyishness to this insistence that we don’t have to die, similar to the refusal of spoiled children to go to bed on time. We just want to have our fun, and we don’t want to take our medicine; cramming down cake and having it too, we balk at paying the ultimate price of being alive in the first place. The urge to burst our biological bonds may be quintessentially human in its aspiration and defiance, but it also suggests a bratty exceptionalism. Never mind that billions of people before us have submitted to mortality; we’re special, we’re different, and we don’t have to. Refusal to accept the terms under which we were born, and all our ancestors were born, lacks grace. It lacks humility. And that’s leaving aside the likelihood that any number of the routes to vastly increased if not eternal life currently funded by Big Tech investors are barmy blind alleys, the pied pipers leading the march of so much money either dodgy or delusional.

Yet even if the proponents of intensive longevity research are all hucksters or lunatics, imagining a world in which death is rare to nonexistent is a compelling thought experiment. Prickly ethical questions and thorny practicalities arise.

Such as, how much will our secular salvation cost? Bryan Johnson’s 30-doctor protocol costs $2 million per year.

Although most new technologies that catch on eventually drop in price, any novel life-extension therapy that’s effective would likely be expensive enough to start with that only a handful of the super-wealthy could afford it. Given that 2 billion people in our razzle-dazzle 21st century still don’t have access to clean water, it’s hard to believe that future miracle cures for ageing or death would be administered to a whole global population of between 8 and 12 billion, even if the cost came down from, say, millions of dollars per person to a few thousand. It’s therefore easy to envision a new elite, who not only own fleets of cars, yachts, and houses but live eons longer than the peons. After all, that disparity is already in evidence. On average in the U.S., men in the top 1 percent of the income distribution live 15 years longer than the bottom 1 percent. Should that gap increase to centuries, the resentment among the underclasses could grow positively murderous.

On the other hand, big deal. We’ve long abided the injustice that some people live to hug their grandchildren and others die in infancy. Them’s the breaks. Furthermore, why would it be any skin off the noses of the rest of us if a few rich people were able to buy themselves elastic skin, full heads of hair, functional brains, and longer lives? It’s not as if this deep-pocketed elite would be ghoulishly leeching off our own years of life, as they do in the 2011 sci-fi film In Time (which posits a world where the poor sell their futures to survive in the present). If the well-heeled were spending their own money, this paradigm would be non-zero-sum. At least splashing out for longevity is a sensible application of one’s private resources, which is more than we could say for most of what the affluent fritter their wealth on. I’d sure rather splurge on an extra ten years than a designer handbag.

Hence when I tripped across this extraordinary line in The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever (2022) by the conspicuously progressive author Peter Ward, I choked: “If we continue down the path of untempered inequality, we may as well be dead anyway.” Oh, really? By that logic, better that we all return to that 1800 life expectancy of 31, so long as everyone drops dead by the same age and there are no obnoxiously “privileged” exceptions who live to 32. This is the same perverse elevation of equality above all other values that encourages the Left to prefer a world in which everyone is destitute to one in which most people are middle-class and some people are rich. A good capitalist would reason that if money were finally able to buy something genuinely priceless — life itself — a citizenry would be keenly motivated to earn and innovate. I sure wouldn’t work late for some lousy handbag.

On the economics of eternal life, a more compelling concern is that resources would be apt to remain in the same hands. Because these days many a parent lives into the 90s, children often don’t come into inheritances until they’re themselves registered for Medicare. What if parents instead lived to 200, or didn’t die at all? The family home would never be sold or handed down. Younger generations would be shut out of the housing market even more completely than they are now. Mortality is one of the prime drivers of the velocity of money: Hoarded wealth passes on to younger people who spend it. For at a certain point, the temporally old (whatever they look like) would be apt to buy one high-quality blender and that’s that. They have enough stuff. On a large scale, greatly elongated or unlimited lifetimes could have a depressive effect on the global economy.

Yet a cure for ageing would surely see the end of retirement. Atavistically, the French may still insist on the right to stop working at 62, while blithely expecting to live to 100 on the public dime, but an even more considerable life extension would upend the whole concept of reaching a given age and putting one’s feet up. Life without end would mean work without end. Whether that seems a good or a bad thing depends on whether you hate your job.

More painful than the prospect of shuttering all those golf courses is the prospect of more or less ceasing to bear children. Otherwise, eliminate mortality and the global population would soar. Competition over scarce resources such as food and fresh water could lead to ruinously cutthroat wars. In “You’re Not Getting Older, You’re Getting Better,” women are soon required to obtain a license to get pregnant. Because my immortals are highly motivated to avoid risky behaviors — so much for bungee jumping — few such licenses to replace the deceased are granted. The rare children allowed into the world are so fawned over that they grow up into intolerable adults.

In other words, the people who’d pay the price for hyper-longevity would be the folks who’d never be born. Do we owe it to generations not yet here to graciously step aside and make way for new arrivals? Displacing of our own descendants might start to feel piggy.

With a static, effectively permanent human population, chronic risk aversion and nearly universal senescence would lead to stagnation across a whole range of areas. With eternity at stake, who would volunteer for the military? Peoples loath to put their lives on the line for their countries and prone to cherish safety above all else would be easy prey for political tyrants. Hazardous lines of work, policing, firefighting, would hold little appeal. The same set of individuals holding down the fort century after century would certainly entail a loss of dynamism, a literal absence of new blood, and subsequent stasis in the arts and sciences. In Should We Stay, film buffs and fiction readers are interested only in narratives set in the days before the development of “Retrogeritox,” because only in a world where people still died did dramatic stories seem possible.

That said, what are the arts and sciences for? Would it matter that new literature was numbingly reiterative or that the field of mathematics was fallow? Once we’d established our exclusive club of imperishable humanity, into which new members were seldom admitted, what would our purpose be? What would we do with ourselves, design yet another iPhone?

For it’s on the psychological and teleological level that this mental simulation is most stimulating. With only about 80 years to play with, plenty of people already have difficulty coming to grips with what they’re here for and what they want to accomplish. Many a mortal already finds life meaningless. In the face of an indefinite ellipsis, of being and being and being, the burden of finding purpose and meaning could grow unbearable. Why, today’s longevity crusaders derive their own senses of usefulness and direction by fixating on the defeat of death. Were they to succeed — job done, no one dies — what would they do with themselves? They’d need a whole new quest.

Indeed, in a never-ending life, where one trudges a vast temporal wilderness with nothing but haze on the horizon, simply having seized on a viable quest would surely be cherished far more highly than the quest’s incidental fulfillment. That is, having conceived of a holy grail tantalizingly out of reach would be the ultimate holy grail, while the completion of any mission could be crushing: no more agenda, no more compass, no more destination. (My characters successfully meet their rather arbitrary goal of visiting every country in the world. On return from the last one, Oman, the spouses are sullen. There’s nothing left to do other than visit every country in the world twice.) The qualities that make longevity trailblazers attractive — desire, zest for life, raw ambition — are precisely the qualities that the attainment of their goals would imperil.

For the most pressing threat to an immortal would seem to be boredom. Interests can wear out. Pleasures can wear out. As my character Kay notes, “Remember when I stopped drinking red wine? I shocked myself, but I’d simply had enough red wine.” (For your sot of an author, a horrifying proposition. It’s all too fitting that a gleaming glass of red wine adorns the American cover.) Sexual fantasies can wear out; sex itself can wear out. Many a marriage falters as it is. Even devoted couples who now go the distance of six or seven decades might find it challenging to stay together once, robotically completing each other’s sentences, they’ve kept the same company for centuries. A likelihood even more forbidding than getting sick of the love of your life? Getting sick of yourself.

Sheer endurance doesn’t guarantee that people improve, either. Most folks are only so smart, talented, perceptive, and entertaining, and merely loitering for a great deal longer wouldn’t necessarily expand these limitations. A mere sliver of our immortals would likely grow wise. We’d have the odd genius living to 350 and making a string of astounding discoveries, along with hordes of the ever more tiresome wearing out their welcome. Thus, rather than die of pancreatic cancer at only 56, the likes of Steve Jobs could still be with us, but the neighbor who plays blaring mariachi at 3 a.m. might also live next door forever.

Finitude gives our lives urgency. A clock is ticking in the back of our minds from an early age. Our decisions seem to matter because they cannot be remade. It’s vital how we spend our 35th year because we will never be 35 again. Were we blessed — or cursed — with an indefinite life span absent physical decay, how we spend year 35 would be of no consequence. All decisions could be remade. Choose this profession, later choose another. Choose this wife, or this city, later choose another. In my mind’s eye, I conjure pervasive lassitude, inertia, apathy, and bewilderment. In Should We Stay, immortals are tortured by suicidal ideation — although killing themselves is just one more thing they can’t be bothered to get around to.

Even if the medical hurdles are surmounted, humans may not prove psychically suited to vastly longer lives, much less interminable ones. It’s an ironclad rule of economics that, if you flood the market with any good, it plunges in value; monetarily, an infinitely available good is worthless. The same rubric might apply to unlimited time. An eternal life could in some ways seem more precious — as noted, with eons on the line, the long-lived might be disinclined to run red lights — but otherwise living would almost certainly be infected by a besmirching dreariness. Worse, by malice. While older populations are broadly less prone to crime and warmongering than hotheaded younger ones, people display extreme temperamental variability. To the malevolent, acts of violence might become even more appealing, if only because mayhem would make something happen, and murder, which would if anything seem only more horrible, could grow still more alluringly transgressive. Rates of mental instability run high in our species, especially in “advanced” societies whose inhabitants aren’t preoccupied with physical survival. So we can’t rule out the possibility that eternal life would drive a significant proportion of humanity insane.

The mortal life is inherently tragic. The inevitability of death bestows poignancy and pathos on the most otherwise-ordinary existence. A beginning, middle, and end provide our every personal story a firm dramatic structure. I wonder if a life everlasting would make us feel less important, less interesting, less poetic. Some of our richest emotions flow from loss: mournfulness, bitterness, regret, sorrow, grief, and rage. The dominant emotions in an everlasting population would probably be restricted to a paler palette: irritation, melancholy, dissatisfaction, impatience, frustration, indifference, world-weariness, finickiness, dismay, resentment, disgust, despair, and sourness. Every sunrise, I’d anticipate a deafening chorus of that classic line from White Mischief: “Oh, God. Not another f***ing beautiful day.”

Yet allow me to turn the tables on myself. Might the supposition that humanity depends on mortality for meaning be put down to a failure of imagination? Might the notion that, without death, life becomes hollow be sour grapes? Right now, immortality or anything close is not remotely on the cards. In 1997, Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman, died at 122; in 2013, the Japanese gentleman Jiroemon Kimura died at 116. Both thereby survived beyond Dr. Campisi’s theoretical hard limit on human longevity of 115 years — but not by much. How convenient, then, to dismiss something you can’t get as not worth having.

We could make an alternative case that mortality itself is at the root of many psychic dysfunctions. Mass shooters feel free to go on rampages because after all they’re going to die anyway. Whether or not we address it head-on — we don’t, mostly — from an early age we are living with a background trepidation whose noise grows louder every year. Surely it is death that threatens us with a sense of pointlessness, and it is the pending disappearance of both ourselves and everyone we hold dear that stirs all those “pale palette” emotions of dissatisfaction, indifference, dismay, etc. Why bother to do anything when the result is still oblivion?

Without the distraction of an upcoming lights-out, without the motivational drag of knowing that all our efforts will end in tears, maybe we’d learn to be genuinely happy. The gnawing anxiety that so often permeates our interior lives might fall away. Our panicked glancing at the clock might yield to an expansive ease, a relaxation, a glorying in an ever-open-ended future — that Friday-night anticipation of a languorous three-day weekend writ large. Maybe instead of our pleasures wearing out, our neuroses and psychoses would wear out. Our pettiness, our meanness, our selfishness and stinginess. We could learn new languages, master new skills; think how great my tennis game could grow! We could make an unlimited number of new friends, for whom we’d always have time, as an unending string of Tuesday 8 p.m. dinner dates extend before us. We could read every work of literature ever written, from Cervantes to Stephen King; we could listen to every piece of music ever composed, from Bach to R.E.M. We could indulge our every fascination. We could synthesize this civilizational treasure trove and come to a comprehension of the universe and ourselves that isn’t on offer with a paltry century or so to figure everything out. Shedding mortality’s inbuilt fearfulness, we could achieve unexplored depths of intimacy with other people. We could roam distant galaxies once short life spans no longer constrain the range of manned spacecrafts. We’d never kick ourselves for having accomplished so little on a given day, because any hiatus of productivity would be costless, and we might learn to redefine what being productive means. We could finally afford to revel in the scent of lavender, the chord of C minor, the glow of vermillion . . .

I’m sorry, but why is it that, whenever I write optimistic scenarios, they come out sounding like satires?

In the end, I come full circle to conclude that there’s a place for sour grapes. I for one am resigned that a solution to mortality is unlikely to arrive in my lifetime, and I’m going to die. I will make modest concessions to endure a measure longer. I’ll do my sit-ups; I’ll eat my greens. But I’ll not lavish the tiny amount of time remaining to me on desperate efforts to extend it, nor will I mar my few upcoming evenings by denying myself a glass of wine. Call the claim convenient, fine, but the imminence of death really does have upsides, especially that propulsive sense of urgency, and because for now we don’t seem to have a choice in the matter, let’s embrace what little good we can find in our pending demise. Surely short and sweet beats long and bleak. Besides, the vision of a species that has calcified into the same individuals forever, with no renewal, no turnover, no children, is ghastly.

— This essay is sponsored by National Review Institute.