Don't Die vs Die with Dignity.

Part Two of Is the Future of Death Scheduled?

Why do questions get stuck in my head? I’m not sure, but it seems to be my nature. Maybe it’s your nature too? A question will arise from the ether, uninvited, and settle itself in my brain like a winter mouse in the walls of a warm house. The words of these questions run on replay, always in the same order, and sometimes I can trap the answer and free the question, but other times, the answer is never found. Like the mouse, it either moves out or dies and leaves a bad smell.

The question that’s been stuck in my head for months this time is: “Is the Future of Death Scheduled?” This question has a double meaning and I’m interested in both answers.

Please note, I am NOT AT ALL ENCOURAGING SUICIDE. I AM JUST SPECULATING ABOUT HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE FUTURE. PLEASE GET HELP IF YOU ARE THINKING OF ENDING THINGS.

Trigger warning: suicide, terminal illness, overdose

Bryan Johnson and MAID Don’t Die vs Die with Dignity collage by Charlotte Dune

The First Meaning

The first meaning of this question—Is the Future of Death Scheduled?—was triggered for me when someone I knew surprised me by selecting to die using Canada’s medically assisted dying program, known as MAID (Medical assistance in dying.) I’ve shared that story here.

In the first meaning of the question, I’m wondering if in the future will scheduling your death become more popular than randomly dying. As in, will more and more people plan their deaths with a calendar and gathering of loved ones? Will “Intentional Dying” become a thing? Will there be “Death Coaches” like life coaches? “Death Parties” instead of funerals?

I see some benefits to this scheduled death approach, and I don’t believe scheduled death and suicide are the same things because suicide is done without the consent of loved ones or society. Scheduled death/medically assisted dying is ideally a more open and informed decision, like the one Brittany Maynard made at age 29 when she found out she had terminal cancer.

A People Magazine cover showing Brittany Maynard, one of the most famous medically assisted dying advocates and patients in the U.S.

The Benefits of Scheduled Dying

"In the end, we all become stories." — Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder

• Planning. Instead of randomly dying at Walmart or in some other unappealing way, your death is exactly as you’d like it. You can plan your last words, your final meal, who you’re with, etc. Like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, you can attend and complain about your own funeral even.

• Loved ones aren’t on pins and needles, wondering when you will die. They can plan to be present to say goodbye.

• Instead of deteriorating slowly or spending your final days in and out of hospitals, as many elderly often do, you can part ways with the world in your own home, before you’re at the mercy of others.

• The money you or your loved ones would have spent on caring for you in your final days as your health declines can now be given to your descendants, spent on nice things for yourself before your death, or donated to charity.

• You may feel a sense of control, in knowing when the end is coming vs fear or wondering and worrying about when it will come.

• It is more reliable than many other forms of induced death. From the studies I found, self-suicide is around 56% effective, but medically induced death programs like Canada’s MAID and Switzerland’s Dignitas are 100% effective.

Whenever a friend of mine gets a prescription, she stashes a few pills away for a DIY version of MAID should she ever become unable to care for herself. She lives alone, has no children, and fears ending up in the state’s custody in a hospital or nursing home. For those without close family, a program like MAID might be a mental comfort, just to know it exists and is socially acceptable.

The Downsides of Scheduled Dying.

"Some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling." — Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• The most important downside to me is that assisted dying encourages premature death. We don’t know what medical innovations are on the horizon. What if a cure comes for you tomorrow? What if your life could continue to result in positive outcomes?

• We don’t know what medically assisted dying feels like. It could be much worse than natural death. Some advocates against MAID believe there is evidence that it feels like a slow drowning.

• It could cause a lot of conflict, as some loved ones may not support the decision.

• It could encourage other people to pressure you into picking medically assisted dying for their own selfish reasons.

• We have no idea of the afterlife or if any religions are real. What if you’re damned to eternal hell for committing suicide? But then again, is scheduled dying suicide? Or is it something else?

I’m sure there are many other pros and cons, but these are the ones I find the most meaningful.

I also want to highlight some reader comments on this topic, from a note I posted requesting personal experiences and thoughts about MAID.

Reader Comments on Scheduled Death

I was legally responsible for my father’s end-of-life care when he entered a coma last year. Though not exactly answering your question, it’s emotionally adjacent. DNR is a tough call to make. But it gave me the opportunity to sit with the concept of “healthspan,” or the quality of life as we age. My father was a long time heavy drinker and smoker and sugar addict. He had Lewy body dementia, diabetes, and had suffered repeated strokes. Before his coma, he wasn’t himself anymore. He didn’t know anything or anyone. He was unable to manage his basic needs. And he was physically violent. So, as he lay unconscious, his organs slowly shutting down, I considered what kind of life he would have if he ever awoke. Though at peace with my decision, the early call one morning was not an easy one…

I would like to see the “scheduled death” concept paired with its inevitable opposite, “negligible senescence.” As we approach a point where medical science and bioengineering make immortality possible, “scheduled death” may end up being the only alternative.

— Teague de La Plaine,

BondLife

A neighbor was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in her early 50s, and rapidly deteriorated. It was terrifying to me since I am of a similar age. While she still had enough cogency left to make a major decision and enough coordination to take the medicines herself, she and her husband and best friend flew to Zürich for her to have a medically assisted passing. I took great comfort in knowing she and her husband were free of the worst ravages of a truly terrible and irreversible disease, and that a clinic in Zurich was an option. It sounded like a very dignified, compassionate and well-orchestrated death, with support after the event. —

Erin Q.

A friend of mine is from the Netherlands where it's legal to end one's life if there is a terminal illness and no quality of life. Her friend did it and she said it was very strange to have a final phone call with him, knowing that after a certain day and time, he would no longer exist. Of course we know we're all going to die, we just don't usually know exactly when. —

Guy James

Reader and writer,

Valerie Smith

recommended a personal essay on MAID by

The Ignorant Ninja

and another reader who asked to remain anonymous let me know her personal experience learning a family member had made this decision, but didn’t tell anyone, and how upsetting it was to her to find out after their death.

As I mentioned in Part 1, MAID is touching more and more people. For Canadians, it’s becoming like six degrees of Kevin Bacon; everyone has a friend of a friend who has used MAID.

Imagining the Future of Dying with Dignity

The beginning of a brutal scene about elder death from the film Midsommar.

When I think of a future society that has accepted scheduled death, I’m drawn to remembering a scene from Cixin Liu’s brilliant novel Death’s End, the third book in the Three Body Problem series in which the character Tianming, is facing terminal cancer in the future and selects euthanasia. However, at the last minute, something unexpected occurs. I don’t want to say more, because I don’t want to spoil the book, but in the original Chinese, the novel was called 死神永生 which in a literal translation means: “God of Death Lives Forever.” Quite a different sentiment from Death’s End. But that’s book marketing for you. Just like “MAID” is death marketing.

It sounds nice to have a maid. However, despite the cozy, hand-holding, concerned faces of loved ones and the smiles of the dying portrayed in the MAID ads and literature, and even in documentaries like How to Die in Oregon, which certainly leaves one with a feeling that scheduled death should be legal, there is an equally dystopian side to assisted dying. We could see a society like the one depicted in the film MidSommar, where the community pushes their oldest elders off a cliff in a terrifying death ceremony.

One could imagine that as people live longer, younger members of society may demand generational exits, or coerce others to select scheduled deaths for financial reasons.

Though, I think you really have to be a sick psycho to want this, because I want older people to live forever. I would be thrilled if my parents could live forever and I’m still terribly sad that my grandparents died. I would love for death to end.

And speaking of people living longer, this leads me to the second meaning of the question Is The Future of Death Scheduled?

The Second Meaning

Death is the automation which rules the world of activity. — Henry Miller, On Writing

The second meaning of the question—is the future of death scheduled—asks if the future of death is scheduled, as in, can we see death’s future? And is it scheduled to end? Or will it go on forever? Can AI save us? Will superintelligence arrive like a God and preserve us from obliteration? Are we working towards a future where death ends? Literally, Death’s End? Or will The God of Death Live Forever?

We’ve figured out how to extend the lifespan of mice. Will we figure out how to extend humans? Scientists are also working on helping dogs live longer.

The loudest voice championing the end of human death is successful tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson who believes we can end death or at least extend the human lifespan so far into the future that a superintelligence will emerge that can cure death even if we can’t figure it out. Others think he’s crazy.

If you aren’t familiar with Bryan Johnson, there are hundreds of hours of him speaking that you can watch for free on YouTube, and there is also a new Netflix doc about him and his Don’t Die movement. He considers himself a “rejuvenation athlete.”

This is a comprehensive, free place to start:

I’ve been following Bryan Johnson’s work for a few years now, after seeing an interview with him and Lex Fridman in 2021 before he’d fully launched his Don’t Die movement and was working on a wearable brain-to-computer interface, like Neuralink, called Kernel. Now, he’s become a household name and is giving the masses longevity/immortality hope when prior there was none.

Johnson advocates for letting longevity algorithms smarter than us govern our lives and he’s working on creating this almighty, life-perserving algorithmic God. He suspects that a new religion will soon be born where instead of focusing on the afterlife, like so many other religions, we will focus on the foreverlife. We will live to live forever, not for heaven. Instead of dying for our sins, he wants to be the Jesus figure to end all dying. Together we will make Earth heaven and there will be no hell unless you stay up too late and eat too much junk food.

These are compelling, albeit far-out, messages.

He believes we will soon reach Gen0, (that’s a zero and not a capital “o”) the first generation to experience zero death, and the book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife deeply influenced and inspired his work.

Instead of first principal thinking, where one solves a problem by breaking it into its most basic parts, when it comes to extending the human lifespan, he advocates for zero principal thinking, where we eliminate the problem: death.

In an interview with businessman Tom Bilyeu, Johnson spoke about the coming future where we inevitably align with ai to end human death:

“We humans are going to work on our goal alignment and we're going to do it with artificial intelligence and we're going to do it with planet Earth. The future of our existence is a computational fabric of goal alignment of trillions of intelligent agents and we are immersed in this tapestry and we're moving in this trajectory. We don't know where, but along the system and much like evolution has done on planet Earth, but it's this system of interwoven intelligence, and we're part of it, and in doing that we may have to consider different ways of being.”

The big ideas of Bryan Johnson reinforce my feeling that there is always something new to live for.

He’s also reframed bad habits as acts of self-harm or pre-suicide, which is a powerful idea when you push the concept to its far edges. I would imagine that he’s mortified by government investment into programs like MAID, and would rather see financial capital go into extending healthspan and lifespan.

But like scheduled death, there are pros and cons to living forever. I’ll keep them short.

Pros to Ending Death

“When people die, they cannot be replaced” — Oliver Sacks.

• No one wants to die.

• No one wants their loved ones to die.

• Death appears often painful or miserable.

• Exciting things keep happening, and life on Earth gets better and better, so if you die, you’ll miss all the excitement and fun.

Cons to Ending Death

• We might get to a point where there are too many people on earth and the situation between the haves and have-nots could get very violent and toxic. After all, there are only so many beach houses.

• We don’t necessarily want to live indefinitely as elderly people, but it’s unclear which part of the lifespan would be extended. Many people in America spend 3 decades with chronic disease before dying, not ideal.

• What if there is a heaven and it’s actually great?

• What if reincarnation exists, but now no one is dying, so fewer and fewer are ever born and we get stuck with the same group of people and there is little human evolution or progress? (I doubt this will happen though.)

• It might not be fun to do the things necessary to live forever or for much longer. We may prefer dying after an enjoyable life.

• Murder might increase.

There are so many questions and I’ve not reached any final answers.

However, as I write this, I find myself leaning towards thinking the answer to both versions of the question Is the Future of Death Scheduled is yes. Yes, medically assisted dying will continue to grow in acceptance and popularity, and yes, we will find a way to extend the human lifespan and end human death.

One Last Thing

“True longevity is to die without perishing.” - Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A Plain Translation, by Ken Lui

Finally, as I chewed on these ideas, I read many articles and watched many videos and films. You can access my research on MAID here.

However, one woman’s story stuck with me the most. Her name is Sheryn Jamelle Brown, and she’s a quadriplegic young lady living in Florida. I don’t want to spoil any part of her story, but it’s one wild/terrible/hopeful tale, and I hope someone makes it into a movie.

I watched it in this order:

2.

3.

Now You

What do you think?

Does the future of death also weigh on your mind?

Is death the boss of life? And does it need to be so?

What do you think about Bryan Johnson?

Would you live forever if given the option?

Would you like your parents to live forever? What about your children? Dog? Lover?