Existential Dread: “One Day I’ll Die?”

At 3am, a couple of weeks ago on a night where I was having a particular amount of trouble sleeping, I opened up the Heart app on my watch and checked my current heart rate. I’d been laying in bed, in the dark, listening to the sounds of the Calm app running on my wife’s phone for hours. My resting heart rate is, on average, in the low 50s.

In bright red and white letters my watch quantified the feeling in my head: 110 beats per minute.

I was absolutely freaking out, quietly, in my head.

The source of my stress was a single, obsessive thought that I couldn’t escape:

One day, if nothing changes, I’m going to die. My heart will stop. My cells will begin to deteriorate. My brain will die. And if the world is wrong, if I’m wrong, about a soul and an afterlife… everything I am, everything that makes me ME will be gone from this world forever. No more thoughts. No emotions. No experiences. Forever. Gone. Dead. End of story.

I’m not a particularly religious person. I do attend a local Christian church every other Sunday morning with my wife and daughter. I enjoy the sermons and the moral reminders as well as the historical context of Christianity. The pastor is great. Intelligent, well-spoken and not the least bit bigoted. “We’re not here to judge. We’re here to love and get people to heaven. Leave the judgement to God.” All excellent things to have in a pastor.

I believe in and most days have faith (read: hope) that there is a god. A divine creator who has put purpose into this universe, and that it’s not all just random chaos. I’m comfortable not knowing the details of that entity. I’m comfortable with the idea that, if correct, religion (ALL religions) probably have the whole arrangement and all the details wrong. No, this ritual or that isn’t important. No, everyone doesn’t burn in hell forever. No, maybe there’s no hell at all. Or maybe it’s all eternal fire. No one on this side of creation knows.

I might expand on that thought process later, but for now, suffice it to say: I have hope. But hope is not knowing. It’s not having key information about my existence… and I can’t abide that in my life.

Engineering Meets Lifespan

I’m an engineer by trade. I’ve been building websites and applications for small businesses for a bit over 13 years. My brain now runs on logic. If / then. Provable outcomes. High quality architecture. Information in, results out. Lives and experiences improved. Working fast and having fun while solving problems with people I love.

Facing this question at 3am of “if I die, is there really the chance that there’s nothing else for me?” is a gargantuan fucking problem.

I’m missing key information in this equation of how I should expend my potentially limited lifespan. Key information that raises some fundamental questions:

Am I certain beyond all doubt that there is more to existence beyond the lifespan of my physical body?
Am I certain that if the lights go out in my brain, it’s not all over forever?
Am I certain that there’s not good cause to keep fighting to live here?
Am I certain, with all of the information at my disposal, that religion and spirituality are right and I have nothing to fear?
Am I certain that this isn’t all a complex universe simulation?

The answers are all obviously, emphatically: no. I am not certain. I’m missing information. Information that is, for now, inaccessible.

We do not yet have a reliable way to peek beyond the veil of life. Nor do we know if a “veil” itself exists, which would be an indirect answer of a kind.

So where does that leave me?

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas

Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Gambling is one of the most interesting and incredible activities. Put in a $100 and if you beat the odds, the slots might spit out $200 or $800 or $30,000. The gimmick of course is that your odds of beating those odds aren’t usually great. But hey, it could be you. So take the risk, right?

Now, what if the $100 isn’t just $100 of disposable income.

What if instead of a slot machine, you’ve got a cliff. A sunlit cliff off of which, if one were to leap into the infinite darkness below, with no chance of ever climbing back up, there’s potentially a bountiful utopia at the bottom of that fog with crystal clear beautiful waters, sunny beaches and a mansion for everyone, not to mention the divine love of an eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, ever-loving deity.

The catch is… you don’t know the odds. You haven’t heard voices down there. You don’t hear the lapping of waves or feel the warmth of that divine love. Instead there’s a dark shadowy fog and beyond that fog, as you peer down from your sunlit, warm cliffside vantage point, you aren’t sure what’s below. What lies beyond that shadowy fog? Others have rolled the dice. They’ve put in their indispensable, vital, unfathomably important and ONLY $100 and pulled the lever on the machine. They leapt into the darkness. Before now, there was no choice. Time inevitably pushed you forward until you took the leap regardless of your desires. Or disease picked you up and flung you, screaming, into that dark fog, your desires be damned. The world rolled the dice for you.

You get the metaphor.

That’s the question I’ve been faced with. Do I know there’s NOT a utopia down there on the other side of that feelingless, emotionless, infinite void? No. I don’t know that for certain. I HOPE there is. I (some day) have FAITH that there is. But that’s the nature of hope and faith. It’s uncertain. You don’t and cannot, at least now, here, for this problem, know the final truth until it’s too late. And potentially, darkly, you’ll never know. Because knowing might be a verb you don’t get to do anymore. Or any other verb for that matter.

Most of the time, I hate gambling. I’m too loss-averse. The $100 usually isn’t disposable enough to feel the pure thrill.

That leaves me with one and only one sane option: Don’t die.

Operation: Don’t Die

You might have heard this particular phrase before. A guy named Bryan Johnson, an odd rich dude with an obsession for longevity, uses the phrase often. I’ve heard it before while bouncing around videos on YouTube, thought about it as a concept only very little, and then went back to my day job. Blissfully ignoring the cliff and the fog below.

3am existential dread can change you.

In by bed at 3am, heart pounding, I had to know. What are people doing TODAY to live forever? Or at least live longer than the average 77.5 years? Is that a thing? I started researching longevity and found some things that were disappointing (soul-crushing) and others that were encouraging.

Is anyone living forever right now? No. No one has achieved immortality. That’s still firmly in the realm of science fiction. But more long-lived? Research seems to suggest that living a longer, healthy, ABLE life is possible. Achievable in my lifetime even. The acceleration of knowledge processing through machine learning and artificial intelligence is making that even more likely. Dr. David Sinclar, in his book Lifespan and in a podcast conversation with Lex Fridman said something along the lines of “we’re processing terabytes of data on this weekly. Soon to be daily.”

The robots might destroy us… but it seems like first we’re trying to use them to live longer, happier lives. In my opinion? We can solve the former while achieving the latter.

I’ve spent the last few weeks devouring information on longevity. Telomeres. Senescent cells. NDA+. Caloric restriction and the effects of reduced glucose on yeast cells. Aging mice with virally-applied gene therapies. Werner syndrome. Intermitting fasting. Hypoxic exercise.

It’s a fucking huge amount of information and research and the thing that sticks out to me the most, the thing that gives me hope?

Some researchers believe that aging isn’t a thing we just have to do. Some researchers, some that sit VERY FIRMLY on their proverbial rockers, believe aging is a disease. A curable disease. A disease that every person has eventually, with enough time, contracted. If something else didn’t get to them first. A disease that causes so many others that people dedicate their whole lives to solving them, or at least making them less horrible for those who suffer through them.

You know, it seems to me, humanity has gotten pretty good at curing diseases. Even cancer, the great demon of our age, is slowly being beaten back. We might be only a decade away from a pill or series of injections finding and stopping cancers altogether. And that gives me hope.

If we can do that, we can do anything.

Let’s Get Practical

I’m not a genetic researcher. I don’t even have a college degree. I’m an engineer who learned on the job and with the help of incredible mentors. All my knowledge is derived from folks way smarter than I am. I apply it as best as I can, and check the results. If it works, I keep that tidbit. If it doesn’t, I tuck it away as a successful un-discovery. What not to do is just as helpful, if not more, than what to do, when it comes to engineering and code.

The experts say this, about longevity:

Restrict your calories in some way. Fasting or general restriction both seem to work.
Eat the right kinds of foods that YOUR body needs. Supplement as needed.
Exercise. Make your body work. Do this regularly. Don’t overdo it.
Sleep. In the name of all that is holy, get more sleep. It’s more important than almost everything else.

So that’s where I’m starting.

The Plan

Intermitting fasting is easiest for me.
- Coffee in the morning and a little yogurt to take my pills with.
My diet is decent, so take supplements.
- I currently take 19 pills based on my initial research of what I should PROBABLY be taking. I’m going to the doctor to get tests done to get these right. This is a ballpark guess. We’ll narrow the focus with data. Remove obviously bad things. Minimizing alcohol to special occasions only, and even then only a glass or so.
Exercise 3-5 times per week.
- Orange Theory Fitness for 2 days.
- 3 days of running at least 2 miles. Treadmill or outside. Whichever I’m feeling.
Aiming for 7 hours of sleep avg. Up from an average of around 6 - 6.5 hours.

I’ll report back with more data soon, but it’s a start. I’ve got a few different ways to get some basic measurements, and I’ll be working on more rigorous testing measures soon.

Hopefully, I’ll get my wife, friends and family doing this with me. If nothing else, we’ll live longer, healthier lives together.

The truth is, I believe there’s something else beyond this life. I have hope that it’s there and that inevitably, I will be called home to that wonderful place.

But I am not certain of it.

So I’m okay with taking the long, scenic route to get there.