Why We Need to Die
6th November 2026
To be clear before I go further – I’m not against living longer. If humans gradually trended toward lifespans of 120, 150, even 200 years, I don’t think that’s a problem. What I’m pushing back against is the removal of the horizon entirely. Death doesn’t need to come at any particular time, but it does need to exist, looming just around the corner.
…
What I’m realizing is that both of these are the same thing. Being fully yourself requires accepting limits – who you are, how much time you have. You can’t be everything to everyone, and you can’t be forever. The constraint is part of what makes you, you. Choices that cost nothing aren’t really choices.
In that same vein – your choices being what you really are – Bernard Williams wrote this essay in 1973 arguing that immortality would actually be bad for us. His argument is precise: the desires that give you reason to keep living (he calls them categorical desires) would either eventually exhaust themselves, leaving you in a state of “boredom, indifference and coldness”, or they’d evolve so completely that you’d become a different person anyway. Either way, the You that wanted immortality doesn’t get it. You just die from a lack of Self rather than through physical mortality.