Closing Time
Before we get into today’s piece: last month I was on the Dating Lab podcast to talk finding love, ghostwriting Hinge profiles, and why a too-great first date might actually be a red flag. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Someone once told me that, since time feels like it speeds up as you get older, your life is—subjectively speaking—almost over by the time you turn 30. There’s something to that idea. My four years of college felt so stuffed with life that Robert Caro would have needed multiple volumes to cover them all; the decade since feels like it could all fit on one of those laminated placemats of fun facts from history you get at a kids’ restaurant. If the trend continues, I’ll be 60 by the time I finish writing this essay.
As a teenager I would sometimes consider the abstract possibility of dying, usually while listening to Death Cab for Cutie, and in my imagination I was always impressively equanimous. In these hypotheticals I created for myself, no matter how little time I got, I always felt like it would have been enough. Life was already so rich and full; every other day something happened to me that was the most important thing in the world. Now that seems crazy—of course it wouldn’t have been enough. Can it ever be enough? I hear a lot of people say that having kids makes the thought of dying worse, that they want to stick around long enough to find out whether their children become doctors or artists or black market cigarette kingpins in the gulags of the future, whether they have a family of their own or live a childfree life of pleasure with their eight AI girlfriends.
But I started feeling this way long before my own child existed, back when he was just the running joke I had with my girlfriend about how she really needed to be less forgetful about taking her birth control. Maybe my equanimity back then was just your typical teenage know-it-all-ness, a natural outgrowth of my certainty that the things happening to me and my friends were the most important and meaningful events in all of human history and that nothing that happened to anyone over eighteen mattered whatsoever.
None of this stops me from feeling an almost instinctive revulsion when I read about those crazy rich people who are trying to live forever. Most of them are so fixated on lengthening their lives that in the meantime they forget to actually do any actual living. Or else their super-scientific, objective, not-at-all-driven-by-repressed-emotions forecast just so happens to determine that the ability to indefinitely extend life will be developed… just in time to prevent them from dying. (Also, Ray Kurzweil was my friend’s neighbor growing up, and his wife called the cops on them multiple times for extremely minor infractions.) These people always make me think of that probably-apocryphal story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at a party on Shelter Island, where Vonnegut tells Heller that their billionaire host has made more money in a single day than Heller has earned from Catch-22 over its whole history, and Heller says, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have: the knowledge that I have enough.”
So I’d never consciously choose to live forever. But maybe if it were an option I’d keep signing up for one more year, just one more year, over and over and over, until it ended up approaching forever after all. It’s like all the stupid domain names I keep buying: I never intended to hang onto maxx.sexy or alexandmaxineurope.com for the rest of my life, but now here we are, several decades and thousands of dollars in hosting fees later, and I keep hitting that “Renew” button every time they ask me even though by this point there’s absolutely no good reason to keep any of these websites going.
Ultimately, though, I think it’s kind of like how it’s better for a night out to end when everyone’s still a little disappointed to go home. Because otherwise it turns into one of those nights where you’re wandering around the city far too late, surrounded by weirder and weirder people, getting either too fucked up or sobering up too fast, slowly realizing that the night actually ended a while ago and you just didn’t want to admit it. That’s why, when people ask me if I think there’s any kind of afterlife, I always say that I can’t be certain, but I sure as hell hope not.