Death in peppers

There are more and more centenarians. In Catalonia alone, there are more than three thousand; and it is estimated that, in about twenty years, the figure will triple. For some reason, the region of Spain with the fewest people of that age—so 'respectable'—is the Balearic Islands. Since there is no longer so much "calm," say the doctors, we islanders no longer reach a century. But the trend is general in the West; it is increasingly likely to go beyond the average life expectancy, which has been steadily rising for some time. Access to universal healthcare, medical and pharmacological advances, and greater vaccination, hygiene, less tobacco and alcohol abuse, and above all, social and community support, have a decisive impact in helping us live longer and longer.

In the latest novel by the philosopher Ferran Sáez (The other hypothesisPublished by the new publishing house Eclecta (keep an eye on their catalog), the book envisions a future where people embrace a Voluntary Life Limit, because longevity can exceed one hundred and fifty years. The book, which fills our heads with anxieties and questions, depicts a future where all utopias have been fulfilled, to the point that social romance is indistinguishable from a perpetual, nightmarish sense of desolation. Perhaps complete human happiness, if achieved, would be a wall to utter idiocy, or to a state of stunned ataraxia, already very similar to the spirituality emanating from new forms of technology, such as AI. Sáez describes a world won through all losses, but at the same time, he makes us inhabit a despair that, contrary to what the Stoics prescribed, is not happiness, but a form of anguish that abolishes the boundaries between eras.

I don't know if a project for a dignified life should make us live so many years; I don't know if it's wise to perpetuate ourselves for decades in a chair, without a path or any consciousness other than that of a reptile or an aspidistra. It's not that immortality can be granted to us by AI (turning us into loquacious and posthumous data), it's that AI will end up having more life than we do, or at least more desire to speak. "We live because death imagines us," said the poet Pere Antoni Pons. The panorama is different: thousands of elderly people who, like the young, live a simulated life, a perpetually apathetic present, without joy or knowledge, or without any real novelty other than the air they still breathe.