| In this post, we will explore the concept of immortality. We’ll examine Milan Kundera's 'immortality personality' as described in his book, along with several famous figures from the past who believed they had uncovered the secret to immortality. LISTEN - 20 minutes
There’s a book you’ll never read in a language you’ve never heard of. The main theme of this book is immortality and its impact on humans. The genre is a comedy. It’s an old, long-forgotten play, likely written in the 40s, and I’m going to share it with you today. A group of scientists is working on the problem of aging and immortality. The government, as usual, wants what it always wants—fast results, preferably yesterday. Maybe they secretly dream of becoming immortal themselves and ruling forever over the rest of us: bored kings with too much time. But of course, they would never say that. Officially, it’s all “for the greater good.” Because if death didn’t exist, then everything would be fine, right? Everyone would be happy. No more fear, no more loss, no more problems. Just endless life, nicely stretched out like a never-ending Sunday. So death becomes the villain of the story. The root of all suffering. The one thing we just need to get rid of. But… is it really that simple?
So many evils in the name of immortality
Betrayal, control, possession, murder
So many shoulds, ifs, whens said and done
Will it change humanity for the better? Our lives?
Or are they just false hopes and calculated lies?
The director of the science group finally makes an announcement: the drug has been found. Death, it seems, can now be stopped. From this moment on, anyone—well, anyone healthy enough—can become immortal.
The gates of the center open, and people start arriving from all over the country, carrying their hopes in their fragile little hearts. Then comes the small detail. The drug works only on completely healthy adults. Absolutely healthy. Not “mostly fine,” not “a bit tired but managing.” Truly healthy. And to prove that, you’ll need to leave your blood and urine samples. Just a small test before eternity. As you can imagine, the queue to the science center grows. And so does the business around it. Because, let’s be honest, there aren’t that many perfectly healthy people walking around. But there are plenty who would very much like to live forever. We follow one such hero, who decides to improve his chances by buying someone else’s urine. A practical solution… we all get it.
wanna-be-immortal
Soon, things begin to shift. People lie to each other. People cheat. People even kill. All in the name of immortality, which suddenly feels less like a dream and more like a competition. And in the end, after all the running and testing and hoping, it turns out the funding for the whole project (and vaccine) was fake.
This story makes you wonder whether immortality is really the key to a healthy, never-ending, happy life. And whether it’s something we should even be given in the first place. Maybe things are arranged this way for a reason, so we don’t completely ruin each other—or the world—by staying here forever. We come, we live, we leave, and ideally we pass something on to the next generation. I hope it's something good, or at least not too damaging. What if we’re simply not built for this kind of endless existence?
Of course, not everyone agrees. In fact, quite a few people strongly disagree—and they also happen to have a lot of money. Here in 2026, several ultra-wealthy individuals are investing heavily in ways to extend human life. They call it “solving death,” which sounds noble and dramatic. But more often it seems to mean something closer to “cybernetic immortality,” where the human part becomes… negotiable. At some point, you do have to wonder: if you remove everything fragile, temporary, and human—what exactly is left to keep alive? So, let’s go back a bit and see where all this started—at least on the scientific, philosophical, or literary level. A good place to begin is with Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), often considered the founding father of immortality, or simply of anti-death philosophy.
Fedorov looked at death and decided it wasn’t just unfortunate—it was humanity’s main problem. Not war, not poverty, not bad manners... Death! His idea was bold. He believed our central mission as a species should be to achieve literal, physical immortality. For everyone. Not just for the living right now, but for everyone who has ever lived. Yes, including your great-great-great-great-as-many-time-grandparents. All of them. And this wasn’t meant to be some vague spiritual afterlife situation. No, Fedorov imagined science stepping in, guided by moral and spiritual purpose, to bring people back and keep them around indefinitely. It’s an ambitious plan. I wonder about the logistics… kinda complicated. But you have to admire his vision: if death is the problem, then simply remove it. Preferably for all of human history! Death as a Technical and Moral Problem
- He argued that death is not a grand metaphysical mystery but an engineering bug that can be fixed. Accepting it, in his view, is less “wisdom” and more a kind of philosophical laziness, bordering on moral infantilism.
- Naturally, this means all our favorite political dramas — war, poverty, injustice — are just side quests. The main quest is obvious: stop dying. Everything else, he suggests, is just elaborate coping with mortality.
Two Causes of Death (and the Modest Plan to Fix Them)
- Fedorov reduces death to two annoyingly practical problems:
a) the body wears out and refuses to self-renew forever;
b) the outside world keeps trying to kill us (disease, disasters, bad luck, other humans). His solution is something he calls “regulation,” which sounds harmless until you realize it means total control over both biology and nature: a) to upgrade the human organism into a self-repairing system;
b) to tame external nature so thoroughly that random death becomes a historical curiosity. Immortality and Resurrection: A Package Deal
- Living forever isn’t enough, though... Fedorov insists that if we become immortal while leaving everyone who ever lived conveniently dead, we are morally bankrupt.
- His reasoning is simple: our ancestors gave us life, so we owe them the courtesy of returning the favor. Immortality without resurrection is, in his eyes, selfishness with bad branding.
How Resurrection Might Work
- He speculated that future science could gather the scattered particles of the dead—yes, yes, all of them—and reassemble people from cosmic dust, essentially treating the universe like a very messy archive, I guess.
- The resurrected wouldn’t just come back as their old, fragile selves. They’d be upgraded into self-regulating, mind-directed bodies—less “human 1.0,” more “conscious biotech platform.”
- Meanwhile, those still alive would undergo the same transformation, because why should the resurrected have all the fun? The body, at this point, becomes a project—something you should manage like a startup...
Cosmic Scale and the Real Estate Problem
- Bringing back everyone who has ever lived creates an immediate issue: where do you put them? His answer is straightforward—colonize space. Not out of curiosity or adventure, but because we’ll run out of room very quickly.
- He said that in the long run, humanity’s job is to spread life and consciousness across the cosmos, reorganizing matter and resisting entropy itself—basically turning the universe into a well-managed, immortal house.
Links to Modern Longevity Thinking
- Fedorov called for a systematic scientific assault on aging and death, long before it became fashionable.
- Today, he reads like an early, slightly unhinged prophet of transhumanism: aging as a disease, radical life extension, full-body regeneration, and the quiet assumption that biology is just another problem waiting for smarter or better tools.
Next is Ilya Metchnikoff (1845–1916) - The Man Who Wanted You to Die… Properly. Metchnikoff, a Nobel Prize–winning zoologist and doctor, took a more restrained approach to death than Fedorov. He didn’t want to abolish it—just fix its timing, improve its quality, and make it feel less like a biological ambush. Death as Disharmony, Not Destiny
- In The Nature of Man and The Prolongation of Life, he argued that most deaths are not “natural” at all. To him, aging looked suspiciously like a slow, chronic illness fueled by hidden toxins and unruly microbes.
- In other words, your body isn’t gracefully aging—it’s quietly poisoning itself and calling it “nature.”
Orthobiosis: The Dream of a Well-Behaved Life
- Metchnikoff introduced orthobiosis, the ideal life trajectory: long, healthy, relatively free of decline, and ending only when everything that needed to happen has already happened.
- Think of it as a perfectly timed exit—no tragic diseases, no drawn-out decay, just a neat conclusion, like a TV show that knows when to stop.
Metchnikoff
The Life Instinct vs. the Death Instinct (An Awkward Timing)
- Metchnikoff noticed something deeply inconvenient: people usually die when they still very much want to live. This mismatch, he argued, is the root of existential dread and general human pessimism. His solution was elegantly strange—extend life long enough, reduce suffering enough, and eventually the desire to live will… flip.
- At the end of a properly extended life, the life instinct would gradually transform into a “death instinct”: a calm, rational, almost polite willingness to die.
- In its most unsettling form, this means that if everything goes well—or if life is sufficiently optimized—you wouldn’t (and shouldn't) cling to existence at the end. You should, quite sincerely, want to die. Possibly even look forward to it...
Longevity, Not Literal Immortality
- So, as you see, unlike the more ambitious anti-death enthusiasts, Metchnikoff did not propose eternal life. He aimed lower—only 130 to 150 years, give or take, with a few functional organs.
Biology, Yogurt, and the War Within
- Metchnikoff blamed much of aging on what he called “self-poisoning”—a charming concept in which your gut microbes slowly sabotage you from the inside.
- His proposed countermeasure was equally charming: fermented milk, yogurt, and an early enthusiasm for probiotics, because the path to existential peace runs directly through your gut.
- He believed that medicine, hygiene, and social progress could gradually replace humanity’s dread of death with something like cautious optimism—provided we first fix the 'plumbing.' In this version of events, death stops being a horror and becomes something closer to a polite conclusion—less “catastrophic failure,” more “thank you, that will be all...”
Aging as an Unfinished Experiment
- In his later writings, Metchnikoff used his own aging body as evidence, describing old age as biologically dysfunctional, personally unpleasant, and philosophically unresolved.
- Even so, he remained committed to the idea that this was not the final version of human life, but a flawed draft—one that future science might finally edit into something coherent.
Personal Pessimism: The Body Refuses to Cooperate
- Metchnikoff observed, with growing irritation, that as people approach death, their desire to live often intensifies—as if the will to live only reaches full strength precisely when the body is shutting down.
- He phrased it politely, but the implication is absurd: it seems your biological system saves its strongest motivation for the exact moment it becomes useless.
- He saw this not as poetic tragedy, but as bad design. Aging, he insisted, is “very similar to disease”—a widespread malfunction that we have collectively agreed to call “normal” simply because it happens to everyone.
Old Age as a Design Flaw
- In his more optimistic moments, he claimed humans feel a deep aversion to aging—not out of vanity, but because something is fundamentally misaligned. The instincts say “continue,” the body says “decompose,” and neither side is willing to compromise.
- Dementia, physical decline, and premature death were, to him, evidence of a profound internal mismatch—a system where the user and the hardware are no longer compatible.
- Most people, he argued, die before reaching any real “saturation with life.” They are removed mid-experience, like readers forced to close a book halfway through—only to be told this is the natural ending.
- He referred to this as the "MAIN MISFORTUNE ON EARTH," which is a way of saying that the human lifecycle is poorly timed.
A Modest Proposal: Fix Everything Later
- Metchnikoff proposed creating an entire scientific discipline—gerontology—to eliminate what he considered the core defects of existence: disease, aging, and death (or at least death’s current chaotic scheduling).
- He believed that, at some unspecified but reassuringly distant point in the future, science would extend life “to a desired limit,” neatly correcting the very disharmonies he was currently experiencing in his own deteriorating body.
- In other words, the plan was clear: suffer now, document everything, and trust that future humans will debug the system.
After a lifetime of arguing that death should occur only at the proper, harmonious moment, Metchnikoff encountered the original version anyway—and, finding no updated model available, accepted the default setting at 71.
At St. Petersburg he met his first wife, Ludmilla Feodorovitch, who suffered from tuberculosis so severe that she had to be carried to church in a chair for the wedding. For five years Mechnikov did all he could to save her life, but she died. Broken by this loss, troubled by weak eyesight and heart problems and by difficulties in the University, Mechnikov became, at this time, so pessimistic that he tried to take his own life by swallowing a large dose of opium; but, fortunately for himself and for the world, he did not die... |
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Next is the well-known Milan Kundera, a French writer of Czech origin.His novel Immortality is not accidentally considered one of his most famous works. In it, the writer addresses the problem of the “immortality of personality” and, in his characteristic manner, deconstructs it, passing it through the crucible of the unbearable monotony of human intellectual and sexual experience. Milan Kundera’s works are very difficult to “take apart.” In his novel Immortality (1990), the plot is fragmented and resembles a musical leitmotif, as in many of his novels. The book is divided into episodes, characters, and events that replace one another in an almost chaotic sequence, creating the impression of snow falling in twilight. His rich imagery and metaphorical language only deepen this effect.
In the very first scene of the novel, the reader finds the author in the recreation area of a public swimming pool. There, together with the writer, we see a beautiful woman of Balzacian age who is learning to swim. After completing the lesson and saying goodbye to the instructor, the lady makes a gesture that “enters into stubborn dissonance” with her age and appearance. The author is amazed and moved. In that moment, he creates in his imagination a heroine named Agnès and embarks on a long journey along the waves of her life...
Both the smile and the gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old woman. Her hand swept upward with enchanting ease. It seemed as if she were throwing a colored ball into the air, playing with her lover. Her smile and gesture were full of charm and grace, while her face and body had lost all appeal. It was the charm of a gesture sunk in the immensity of a body.
The novel Immortality by Milan Kundera is largely devoted to the philosophical problem of alienation. The author reflects on the loss of human individuality. People become their gestures. They pass down the same set of gestures from generation to generation. In this sense, a gesture is a phenomenon more unique than an individual. The individual becomes nothing more than a tool—a carrier and embodiment of that gesture. In my opinion, it is no accident that Kundera chose “gesture” as the primary carrier of individuality. A gesture, a fleeting movement, in its primitive simplicity, exists on the borderline between idea and matter. With this choice, Kundera seems to place modern man beyond both idealism and materialism, leaving him at a philosophical and existential crossroads. In our time, ideology (including both idealism and materialism), according to the writer, is replaced by imagology (the science of images). Imagologists determine the vector of individual and social life, further erasing the boundaries of human uniqueness. The place of the philosopher is taken by the tailor, who sets fashion through the depth and shape of the neckline on a woman’s dress. Instead of movement and qualitative change, imagology offers a peaceful alternation of images “in the vigorous rhythm of the seasons.” Reality loses its meaning and is replaced by appearance (simulance).
The creative essence of man, which determines the uniqueness and originality of his personality, is pushed into the background—lost and leveled. Images (samples) of creativity come to the forefront. It is no coincidence that one of the novel’s characters, Paul, laments the insulting metaphysical disparity between millions of meaningless Europeans and the fifty names of geniuses who are everything:
Europe has reduced Europe to fifty ingenious creations which it has never understood.
As it seems to me, the conclusion—or rather, the verdict—of the novel is disappointing. The immortality of Goethe or Hemingway is unattainable in the modern world... The primacy of form over content, of image and gesture over idea, destroys individuality. The individual is alienated and dehumanized. By revealing the preconditions of this process, Milan Kundera’s novel serves as an epigraph to the disintegration of the human personality. And when individuality and personality are dead, the body might as well be dead, too. This is something to think about...
Let's return to 2026, where we find ourselves neck-deep in the imagology of TikTok, Instagram and alike, desperately trying to live as long and as healthily as possible while maintaining the correct aesthetic. By the way, this is the goal of this blog—to help you live a longer, happier, and more meaningful life, assuming you survive the weekly reading... Even if we merge with AI and become some kind of designer species with excellent skin and zero judgment, remember this: a long life is not always a happy one. But a happy life is always longer and better. Maybe because laughter confuses death just enough to buy you a few extra years :) So do not rush—small steps, ladies and gentlemen, small steps... Begin with the modest goal of staying alive until 2036. That's only ten years! Surely we can manage that without doing anything too scary, like downloading our consciousness into a computer tomorrow or eating nothing else but fermented dandelions. Ah, and don't forget to move!
We will continue this conversation in Part 2 (in May), where we'll discuss the views of Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire who had thoughts about immortality long before it became a Silicon Valley investment strategy, and those of Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who believes aging is a bug we can patch, assuming we don't all get distracted by shiny new apps first.
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