How Could Immortality Be Good?

December 31, 2021 | By Shayley Martin DC ‘22

image description: soaring archway of a cathedral that lies in ruins, with an infinite sky beyond

In books and movies, immortality is generally a bad thing. We watch characters strive for it only to discover that life goes sour if prolonged. Even aside from practical issues like overpopulation and resource depletion, there’s a prevailing idea that human nature can’t stomach living forever. The end of a Netflix series called The Good Place captures this well: the occupants of paradise become so bored with the afterlife’s never-ending stream of pleasures that they rejoice when finally offered a chance to vanish from existence. The show concludes that fleetingness gives life its meaning.

Yet eternal life has always appealed to us (cf. Ecclesiastes 3:11)––there’s a reason we study the Epic of Gilgamesh and chat about advances in cryogenic technology. We don’t want eternal life, and yet we do. We see how it could go wrong, but it fascinates us anyway. 

So imagine with me for a minute, as maybe you have before, an Earth where we are all immortal. My question for you is: what would it take to make that a good thing? What problems would have to disappear? What good things would have to appear? What would need to change? Make a couple notes if you’d like.       

… 

I believe everyone is immortal, and all my life I’ve asked myself the same question I just asked you: how could life as we know it become worth living forever?

What if our bodies couldn’t hurt or deteriorate?

I’ve imagined a world with no pandemics, no cancer, no funerals, not even headaches. We’re all safe and healthy. But that’s not enough—even the safe and healthy among us can be miserable. College students know this well.

What if we stopped doing bad things?

Many books’ and movies’ discomfort with immortality stems from the idea that there’s something wrong with us. Given forever, we wouldn’t improve ourselves, but exploit our surroundings until they became unlivable, fight each other in endless petty feuds, or become lazy and bored with the eternity available to us.

So I’ve often imagined a world where we all decide to resist our selfish tendencies and cut out any behavior that threatens to make living together forever untenable. We curb our greed and laziness and spite, and instead we begin to live in harmony, securing our collective happiness by having only as much as we need and not more, being kind, and not hurting each other. No more poverty, no more cheating, no more pollution.

Plenty of outward suffering would end, but I suspect that each person’s inner life would become a minefield. Whenever I wished for more money, for example, I would scold myself and find something else to think about. But if more money were really important to me, I’d inevitably think about it again and again, and then I’d think about the fact that I was thinking about it. When your main goal is improving yourself, it’s hard to think about anything besides… well… yourself. Spending eternity trying to distract myself from all the things I really wanted would be miserable.

What if we lived for others?

I scrapped this focus on bad behavior, then, and imagined what would happen if we all started living for our fellow human beings––if self-centeredness became the enemy. Instead of trying to silence the little voices in our heads that want to make things easier for ourselves and harder for others, I imagine that we actively put others first. Instead of thinking about our own flaws, we find other human beings to love and live for.

But what happens when those human beings disappoint me? How dare they? I live for them! And here I am, miserable again

Living for others sounds lovely, but in practice, anytime partners get too invested in each other or parents get too invested in their children, we caution them against living entirely for another person. Living that way forever would be yet another type of misery.

What if we get all three previous improvements—impervious bodies, a virtuous world, and universal love for others—but none of them is the real point?

Though I often wish for the three improvements above, I don’t think even all three together would make immortality good. Instead I have to return to the reason I believe we are immortal: that God originally designed us for it. According to the Hebrew Bible, when God made the first people, He made them immortal. But since He gave them free will (Deuteronomy 30:19-20), they had the option to push Him away. They did, and that decision made them and their descendants both mortal and miserable. The rest of the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament tell how God has spent our whole history trying to bring us back to Him, not by taking away our free will, but by showing us love and giving us the choice to love Him in return. 

As part of that project, God gave us back our immortality. He became a person, let himself be put to death in our place, and then came back to life, which opened the same route to us. In the process, he gave us not only eternal life, but also the chance to begin an eternal relationship with Him, without which eternal life would suck (2 Corinthians 5:14-19). 

Immortality is only a side benefit, then, of His larger project of reconciliation, which also has the side benefits of impervious bodies (Revelation 21:3-4), a virtuous world and universal love for others.

The reason immortality fascinates us is because we’re made for it. The reason it scares us is because we are missing what will make it good, the only person who could make living forever worth it.

The project so far

Even if you don’t think much about immortality, you might imagine how the world could improve. Maybe you even work toward causes that are part of your vision, such as promoting renewable energy, ending poverty, building an anti-racist society, etc. You might consider all these good causes vaguely connected somehow. Perhaps they would all be helped along by some larger change, like a general increase in human decency. No one knows how to bring about a larger change that fits the bill, but nevertheless all the causes all seem to fit into some larger project, though its shape is shadowy.

What if God’s project was not confined to some vague spiritual realm or dank church building, but was actually the great capital-P building Project that simultaneously addresses all the leaks that we see need fixing? It does, after all, confer immortality, unhurtable bodies, virtues, love for each other, and the chance to hang out with the inventor of justice, mercy, creativity, platypi, etc. for all time. What if we could understand the world’s problems––today’s problems, big and small, inside and outside ourselves––not in terms of all our separate endeavors to fix them, but in terms of God’s overarching mission.

And with those rousing words, I’m going to do my best to stop worrying about some hazy future eternity. Remind me, if you see me: immortality begins now.

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