The Entropy Budget

Never trust a person who wants to live forever

Photo by Merrilee Schultz on Unsplash

Never trust a person who wants to live forever.

I don’t mean this as hyperbole or metaphor. I mean it as a practical heuristic for navigating power in the 21st century. Because once someone has decided they should persist indefinitely, everyone else becomes a threat to that project. Not because you’re malicious, but because you exist. You breathe their air. You consume resources they’re counting on for century five of their existence. You reproduce, creating more competition for the finite materials required to maintain their indefinite persistence.

This is why Peter Thiel’s investments in life extension and his public statements that democracy is incompatible with freedom aren’t separate curiosities. They are literally the same philosophical commitment. Democracy assumes we’re temporary creatures trying to build something that outlasts us. Immortality projects assume I should outlast everything, which means I need control over the systems that might otherwise prioritize others.

The person seeking immortality has already made a fundamental choice about what consciousness is for. They’ve decided it’s for persistence rather than meaning. And that choice has consequences that ripple through every other domain—political, economic, ethical. Once you’ve committed to your own indefinite continuation as the highest good, democracy becomes dangerous, redistribution becomes theft, and other people become obstacles to be managed rather than participants in shared meaning-making.

We need to talk about the entropy budget. And we need to talk about what kind of civilization emerges when we accept it versus what emerges when we try to exempt ourselves from it.