How To Live Forever
May 18, 2024 3:46 PM Subscribe
The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse. [New Yorker / Archive]
Wow. Best of the web indeed.
posted by kandinski at 3:59 PM on May 18 [1 favorite]
posted by kandinski at 3:59 PM on May 18 [1 favorite]
I worry about the kid nicknamed “penis-puh.” He needs better trousers.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:17 PM on May 18 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:17 PM on May 18 [1 favorite]
I have the equivalent of the kid diary from at least one past relationship and also some past jobs. Quote files are the best. I love them so much, I once suggested adding a quote feature to a Slack bot, and it was a cultural game-changer for that Slack instance. People began grandstanding in chat in order to get quoted. That could be a bit annoying at times, but it also added a lot of delightful absurdity.
The other thing I've done with them is songwriting and essay writing. I keep quotes and ephemera in my notes app and periodically copy things out to various files for art and music ideas. I also have some maybe grandiose ideas about future biographers, or maybe just family members. I suppose we'll see!
It's a good idea to have a digital executor these days. I wish my dear friend Bry did. That and the email circle made me think of him. He and I and another former colleague kept up email correspondence for an entire era of our lives. We'd also meet up once a month to exchange comics or just get Thai or Indian food for a long time, until I moved out of town. But yeah, sadly, he died on Thanksgiving 2022, so those emails and memories are most of what we have left.
I miss him so much. I'm glad I at least have that.
posted by limeonaire at 4:33 PM on May 18 [12 favorites]
The other thing I've done with them is songwriting and essay writing. I keep quotes and ephemera in my notes app and periodically copy things out to various files for art and music ideas. I also have some maybe grandiose ideas about future biographers, or maybe just family members. I suppose we'll see!
It's a good idea to have a digital executor these days. I wish my dear friend Bry did. That and the email circle made me think of him. He and I and another former colleague kept up email correspondence for an entire era of our lives. We'd also meet up once a month to exchange comics or just get Thai or Indian food for a long time, until I moved out of town. But yeah, sadly, he died on Thanksgiving 2022, so those emails and memories are most of what we have left.
I miss him so much. I'm glad I at least have that.
posted by limeonaire at 4:33 PM on May 18 [12 favorites]
Why am I not a grownup? I’ve been here for so many years.I feel seen.
posted by May Kasahara at 5:34 PM on May 18 [17 favorites]
I have a similar archive because I have been keeping a handwritten journal for some thirty five years, plus I archive several blogs I have maintained at various points. It got to be unwieldy, and I realized that no one is going to wade through it when I’m gone, especially after I had to wade through all my mother’s papers after her death. Last year I went through all of my stuff, wrote a short autobiography, and got three bound copies from Lulu, one for my adult kid, one for me if I end up in a nursing home, and one in case I lose one. I also got rid of most of my physical memorabilia at the same time. The thing is, none of us is going to live forever no matter how we go about things, but we sure can live richer lives.
posted by Peach at 6:10 PM on May 18 [10 favorites]
posted by Peach at 6:10 PM on May 18 [10 favorites]
Thirty-five years of handwritten journal? Surely there would be some sociology or modern anthropology study society/department who would be thrilled to have that?
Alternately, get a pretty good waterproof chest and bury them someplace to be found long in the future. Please don't destroy them!
posted by hippybear at 6:53 PM on May 18 [2 favorites]
Alternately, get a pretty good waterproof chest and bury them someplace to be found long in the future. Please don't destroy them!
posted by hippybear at 6:53 PM on May 18 [2 favorites]
If you can't find anywhere else for your journals, The Internet Archive would probably take them.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:57 PM on May 18 [4 favorites]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:57 PM on May 18 [4 favorites]
Destroyed long ago, though I transcribed the worthwhile bits, and those bits live on digitally (now I transcribe as I finish each journal and toss the rest). I went through it to write the autobiography. The world doesn’t need an archive of me any more than it needs all the stuff I used to store in my basement
I learned that when I spent a summer going through my mother's letters, sermons, and papers after she died. I honored her in the act but it was a loss of a summer in my own life.
posted by Peach at 7:33 PM on May 18 [10 favorites]
I learned that when I spent a summer going through my mother's letters, sermons, and papers after she died. I honored her in the act but it was a loss of a summer in my own life.
posted by Peach at 7:33 PM on May 18 [10 favorites]
The world doesn’t need an archive of me any more than it needs all the stuff I used to store in my basement
And yet that is exactly what we crave from ancient Greece, Sumer... written records of everyday life are regarded as having no value but they provide the greatest window into the lives of people.
posted by hippybear at 7:39 PM on May 18 [16 favorites]
And yet that is exactly what we crave from ancient Greece, Sumer... written records of everyday life are regarded as having no value but they provide the greatest window into the lives of people.
posted by hippybear at 7:39 PM on May 18 [16 favorites]
I'll add a word of caution here: after my mother died, my dad was tidying up and stumbled on some of her journals. He loved her very much, and sacrificed a lot for her over the years. I think she really loved him, but her journals were where some bad feelings and musings were recorded (given some struggles and therapy she had, likely at the suggestion of a therapist). And finding them was not good for him. Nor would she want them to have been read, I think, but although she died with plenty of warning as it were, she didn't think to destroy them or tell him to.
Maybe you care about future audiences, maybe you don't. But I gather one reason Pepys used shorthand was to prevent others, including his wife, from reading his diaries, great historical treasure that they are now. Consider instructions to your executors if you don't have time to clean up.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:52 PM on May 18 [17 favorites]
Maybe you care about future audiences, maybe you don't. But I gather one reason Pepys used shorthand was to prevent others, including his wife, from reading his diaries, great historical treasure that they are now. Consider instructions to your executors if you don't have time to clean up.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:52 PM on May 18 [17 favorites]
I may be in a rather foul mood after a day of hanging with the in-laws, but I was rolling my eyes to the point of muscular strain throughout this article.
I fail to see any phenomenological difference between the author’s planned bequeathment of his archive to his children & Bryan Johnson’s use of his son as a blood-boy. Sure, the desire to scream “I was here and I fucking mattered” down through the ages is obviously a key part of how humans grapple with mortality, but it just seems so goddamned selfish at its core.
I hope my children’s memory of me will be a thing they create and own, not a hagiography I foist upon them. And I’m ok with them interpreting it differently than me because that’s how stories change, evolve, and echo through the ages. But maybe (likely) I’m the weirdo.
Anyway, my tl;dr is “ok—and I cannot stress this enough—boomer.”
posted by turbowombat at 8:23 PM on May 18 [12 favorites]
I fail to see any phenomenological difference between the author’s planned bequeathment of his archive to his children & Bryan Johnson’s use of his son as a blood-boy. Sure, the desire to scream “I was here and I fucking mattered” down through the ages is obviously a key part of how humans grapple with mortality, but it just seems so goddamned selfish at its core.
I hope my children’s memory of me will be a thing they create and own, not a hagiography I foist upon them. And I’m ok with them interpreting it differently than me because that’s how stories change, evolve, and echo through the ages. But maybe (likely) I’m the weirdo.
Anyway, my tl;dr is “ok—and I cannot stress this enough—boomer.”
posted by turbowombat at 8:23 PM on May 18 [12 favorites]
So I don’t abuse the edit button, here’s the citation about Bryan Johnson’s use of his son’s blood: Millionaire Bryan Johnson Swapped Blood with Teenage Son
posted by turbowombat at 8:27 PM on May 18 [2 favorites]
posted by turbowombat at 8:27 PM on May 18 [2 favorites]
Great article and a thought provoking discussion. I have notes, journals, keepsakes, memorabilia that I've collected for decades. I even have notes on Metafilter threads I found particularly helpful or illuminating. It's great to look through the archive and remember the past or interesting ideas that have been forgotten. But do I even have enough time left in my own life to go through it all? When my parents passed it took forever to go through everything and it was so overwhelming that I found myself throwing away file boxes of letters without looking at them. I don't want my own children to have to do that and it might be time for some death cleaning.
On the other hand I was reminded of an Ask Metafilter answer from Miko in 2013. I have to say I didn't look through any boxes, I Googled it.
I'm a little surprised at the responses, which I am guessing aren't coming from historians.
Some of the most significant journals, speaking in the scholarly sense, have indeed been those of private individuals who were not famous and didn't write anything they expected to be of interest later on. Fame has very little to do with makes a journal of interest to historians. The best-known recent example is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, the diary of a woman in eighteenth-century rural Maine who wrote about delivering babies, growing a garden, having visitors, the weather, and other topics people considered unremarkable for centuries. When Ulrich indicated that she wanted to write about this diary, her professors told her no, everything useful had already been gotten out of it. Boy, were they wrong. Her work on this diary revolutionized the social history of Colonial New England. Ulrich was able to reconstruct complicated agricultural/industrial changes, explore the shift from home health care to the male-dominated medical profession, delve into issues of women's lives and reproductive health, argue that women contributed as materially (or more than) the men in their households in both cash and in-kind income, document previously un-organized seasonal and homekeeping information, and plenty more. All from what seem like brief, bare-bones two- and three-line entries. It's a great read.
Fame is not that important to historians. Famous people's lives are generally well documented in sources other than a journal - newspapers, proceedings, parodies, letters, legislative records, etc. PRivate people's lives are, in fact, a lot harder to find out about and lot more interesting to people practicing history today. What we know about events like the Civil War or even World War II, life aboard an American whaleship or on the frontier, we mostly know by the writings of non-famous people who simply observed and recorded the detail of daily life.
At some level it's impossible to say what historians of the future will find important and interesting about our time, and it will change, anyway. Diaries of non-famous people were scoffed at for a long time before they began to be taken seriously as sources of historical evidence. But I think there are some general principles.
For one, write about things that aren't documented elsewhere. IF you're writing about major news events, don't relate the event, talk about how it impacted your thoughts and feelings, what changes it has caused in your family and friends' lives, how things are now different for you than they were before.
Write about hyperlocal phenomena that are not likely to be recorded in major media or social media. Observing and writing about local people and day-to-day life, controversies and debates, contentious issues and local traditions can be really important. Describe the built environment and its condition.
Write about the weather and wildlife. No, really. Weather data is pretty topline, and today, environmental historians have become super interested in diary mentions of particular birds and mammals and plants and the like from 18th and 19th century diaries, because it provides evidence for reconstructing changes in the climate. Tell what birds come to your feeder.
Consider doing a lot of inventorying. It can be really hard to understand what people actually had in the past at any one time - something may have been invented, but just because I live in the time of the iPhone 5 doesn't mean I can afford one. Historians use inventory information to figure out patterns of class, ethnicity, taste, etc.
Write about daily routines. How far did you range in a day? What did you do, buy, who did you talk to? How do you relate to those people, what's your relationship like? Reconstructing past networks and travel patterns is of big interest now, as we do things like trace the intellectual history of the movement of ideas, or look at invasive species and how they got where they are.
Write about your joys and frustrations. It is hard to determine how people felt about things and events unless they describe them. Are you happy with your house, family life, job, hobbies? IS there more you yearn for? ARe you envious of other people and what they have? Are you satisfied at having come this far? Are you thrilled to have overcome any limitations in life? Reconstructing the attitudes of past times - the stuff that moves history - is one of the most difficult things to do, and diaries are one of the most useful resources to do it with.
posted by Miko at 5:19 PM on July 2, 2013 [260 favorites +] [⚑]
posted by Alcedinidae at 8:59 PM on May 18 [24 favorites]
On the other hand I was reminded of an Ask Metafilter answer from Miko in 2013. I have to say I didn't look through any boxes, I Googled it.
I'm a little surprised at the responses, which I am guessing aren't coming from historians.
Some of the most significant journals, speaking in the scholarly sense, have indeed been those of private individuals who were not famous and didn't write anything they expected to be of interest later on. Fame has very little to do with makes a journal of interest to historians. The best-known recent example is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, the diary of a woman in eighteenth-century rural Maine who wrote about delivering babies, growing a garden, having visitors, the weather, and other topics people considered unremarkable for centuries. When Ulrich indicated that she wanted to write about this diary, her professors told her no, everything useful had already been gotten out of it. Boy, were they wrong. Her work on this diary revolutionized the social history of Colonial New England. Ulrich was able to reconstruct complicated agricultural/industrial changes, explore the shift from home health care to the male-dominated medical profession, delve into issues of women's lives and reproductive health, argue that women contributed as materially (or more than) the men in their households in both cash and in-kind income, document previously un-organized seasonal and homekeeping information, and plenty more. All from what seem like brief, bare-bones two- and three-line entries. It's a great read.
Fame is not that important to historians. Famous people's lives are generally well documented in sources other than a journal - newspapers, proceedings, parodies, letters, legislative records, etc. PRivate people's lives are, in fact, a lot harder to find out about and lot more interesting to people practicing history today. What we know about events like the Civil War or even World War II, life aboard an American whaleship or on the frontier, we mostly know by the writings of non-famous people who simply observed and recorded the detail of daily life.
At some level it's impossible to say what historians of the future will find important and interesting about our time, and it will change, anyway. Diaries of non-famous people were scoffed at for a long time before they began to be taken seriously as sources of historical evidence. But I think there are some general principles.
For one, write about things that aren't documented elsewhere. IF you're writing about major news events, don't relate the event, talk about how it impacted your thoughts and feelings, what changes it has caused in your family and friends' lives, how things are now different for you than they were before.
Write about hyperlocal phenomena that are not likely to be recorded in major media or social media. Observing and writing about local people and day-to-day life, controversies and debates, contentious issues and local traditions can be really important. Describe the built environment and its condition.
Write about the weather and wildlife. No, really. Weather data is pretty topline, and today, environmental historians have become super interested in diary mentions of particular birds and mammals and plants and the like from 18th and 19th century diaries, because it provides evidence for reconstructing changes in the climate. Tell what birds come to your feeder.
Consider doing a lot of inventorying. It can be really hard to understand what people actually had in the past at any one time - something may have been invented, but just because I live in the time of the iPhone 5 doesn't mean I can afford one. Historians use inventory information to figure out patterns of class, ethnicity, taste, etc.
Write about daily routines. How far did you range in a day? What did you do, buy, who did you talk to? How do you relate to those people, what's your relationship like? Reconstructing past networks and travel patterns is of big interest now, as we do things like trace the intellectual history of the movement of ideas, or look at invasive species and how they got where they are.
Write about your joys and frustrations. It is hard to determine how people felt about things and events unless they describe them. Are you happy with your house, family life, job, hobbies? IS there more you yearn for? ARe you envious of other people and what they have? Are you satisfied at having come this far? Are you thrilled to have overcome any limitations in life? Reconstructing the attitudes of past times - the stuff that moves history - is one of the most difficult things to do, and diaries are one of the most useful resources to do it with.
posted by Miko at 5:19 PM on July 2, 2013 [260 favorites +] [⚑]
posted by Alcedinidae at 8:59 PM on May 18 [24 favorites]
I am not at all a journal writer, but I do write down funny things my kids say. Here's one of my favorites:
"I want to poop in the volcano." --My son, age 3, looking at Mount St. Helens
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:14 PM on May 18 [13 favorites]
"I want to poop in the volcano." --My son, age 3, looking at Mount St. Helens
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:14 PM on May 18 [13 favorites]
I can relate to the author's desire to document their life for their own sake. I'm someone who has often worried that I have a worse than average memory about life events (I think I even made an ask post about that), and I find it reassuring to have some documentation I can resort to when I'm older and want to remember these days. It's the same way I approach most things in my career - I'm not actually very "knowledgeable," but I'm good at documenting things as I learn them so I can re-learn them when I need them again. So far, I have photos backed up from 15 years ago which are from memories I thought were completely forgotten, but rush back quickly after a quick glance.
But I don't have any illusions that I'm creating any documentation for future generations; I'm sure of the billions of people on this planet there will be a sufficient number documenting their lives thoroughly (especially with the fact that things live on the internet now) such that anthropologists and historians won't be lacking material. If I have kids, of course I will save some documentation but in a very limited way. My grandfather was very good at this: he left for me a journal of his life, which only takes about an hour to read, and is a mix of the high-level biography of what he did as well as a few short stories that came to mind when he was writing it. It's beautiful and cherished. He also left behind a lot of beautiful poetry, which are similarly snapshots of a moment of his life but in a digestible, curated manner.
My approach to documenting my life is mostly to take a lot of photos and sync them with the cloud. Then, every few years when I remember, I back up that same archive to physical storage. As joe's spleen above explained, I'm very wary of keeping a journal that will live on and be read by anyone else. I'd say I'm not much happier or less happy than anyone else, but the things which I'm urged to journal about are problems that I'm working through. Sometimes knowledge of my deepest feeling about these problems would be a burden to those I care most about, and hence if I journal on such things I typically destroy it shortly after.
posted by unid41 at 1:13 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
But I don't have any illusions that I'm creating any documentation for future generations; I'm sure of the billions of people on this planet there will be a sufficient number documenting their lives thoroughly (especially with the fact that things live on the internet now) such that anthropologists and historians won't be lacking material. If I have kids, of course I will save some documentation but in a very limited way. My grandfather was very good at this: he left for me a journal of his life, which only takes about an hour to read, and is a mix of the high-level biography of what he did as well as a few short stories that came to mind when he was writing it. It's beautiful and cherished. He also left behind a lot of beautiful poetry, which are similarly snapshots of a moment of his life but in a digestible, curated manner.
My approach to documenting my life is mostly to take a lot of photos and sync them with the cloud. Then, every few years when I remember, I back up that same archive to physical storage. As joe's spleen above explained, I'm very wary of keeping a journal that will live on and be read by anyone else. I'd say I'm not much happier or less happy than anyone else, but the things which I'm urged to journal about are problems that I'm working through. Sometimes knowledge of my deepest feeling about these problems would be a burden to those I care most about, and hence if I journal on such things I typically destroy it shortly after.
posted by unid41 at 1:13 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
I so agree about recording the lives of ordinary people, and I'll just leave this here for those who may not be aware of it : https://massobs.org.uk/
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 5:28 AM on May 19
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 5:28 AM on May 19
Based on current evidence, selling bad copper is the best way to achieve immortality.
posted by mrzarquon at 6:24 AM on May 19 [10 favorites]
posted by mrzarquon at 6:24 AM on May 19 [10 favorites]
mrzarquon, this phenomenon is described by the slogan All Coppers Are Bad.
posted by It is regrettable that at 7:39 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
posted by It is regrettable that at 7:39 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
I read part of the article, but I don't understand how any of it relates to "adding years in reverse".
posted by NotLost at 8:44 AM on May 19 [4 favorites]
posted by NotLost at 8:44 AM on May 19 [4 favorites]
Nope, nope, nope. They say a person dies when their name is no longer spoken, and that's the only thing I want. If I created or acquired anything in life that you find useful, help yourself, but leave my name out of it. It's damnatio memoriae for me: no memoirs, no records, and definitely no heirs.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:23 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:23 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
All I'll leave behind will be my silly comments here and on Mastodon and a few decent photos on Flickr. If anyone laughs at or enjoys looking at any of those after I die, I'll consider it a fitting legacy.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:07 AM on May 19 [3 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:07 AM on May 19 [3 favorites]
I wrote a book on memory techniques and it inspired me to remember every single day of my life. At the end of each day, I'd choose one happy memory I wanted to remember, and then use various mnemonic techniques to hang on to it. So if you asked me what I did on (say) January 7, 2019, I could tell you that I went to an Italian restaurant with my wife and then saw Patti Lupone in a gender-swapped version of Company.
The problem was, I'm not Marylu Henner. This didn't come naturally to me. In order to keep those memories from fading, I had to study them regularly with flashcards, and as the years went by, I had more and more flashcards to study. After about four years, I was ditching my wife for twenty minutes every evening to study the pile, and I realized that my quest to remember old happy moments was robbing me of new ones. So I stopped. Without regular review, many of the memories have now faded, although some of them still remain-- the January 7 example was real, and I still know that date off the top of my head, merely because I reviewed it so many times over the years.
Stopping was unquestionably the right choice, and I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. But the practice of recording a happy memory at the end of each day, and then reviewing it regularly, was a good one and it did make me happier, until it became overwhelming. I keep thinking I should go back to a lower-key version of it, without the pressure of remembering every single date.
posted by yankeefog at 4:57 AM on May 20 [7 favorites]
The problem was, I'm not Marylu Henner. This didn't come naturally to me. In order to keep those memories from fading, I had to study them regularly with flashcards, and as the years went by, I had more and more flashcards to study. After about four years, I was ditching my wife for twenty minutes every evening to study the pile, and I realized that my quest to remember old happy moments was robbing me of new ones. So I stopped. Without regular review, many of the memories have now faded, although some of them still remain-- the January 7 example was real, and I still know that date off the top of my head, merely because I reviewed it so many times over the years.
Stopping was unquestionably the right choice, and I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. But the practice of recording a happy memory at the end of each day, and then reviewing it regularly, was a good one and it did make me happier, until it became overwhelming. I keep thinking I should go back to a lower-key version of it, without the pressure of remembering every single date.
posted by yankeefog at 4:57 AM on May 20 [7 favorites]
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posted by ellieBOA at 3:47 PM on May 18