FT's Simon Kuper: The creeping feeling that life is getting too long

Key topics:Rising lifespan vs declining meaning, relationships and purposeAI shocks: cognitive jobs automated, threatening work identityLonger lives, worse health: dementia, morbidity, euthanasia debate.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Simon Kuper.I went to watch the comedian Louis CK months ago, but one of his riffs remains in my head. “Life is too long,” he complained. I like life, but as a fellow tired man in his late fifties, I identified. More than that, Louis has probably put his finger on a truth about our times: our lengthening lifespans may not be entirely welcome.In 2024, global life expectancy reached 73.3 years, a new record, above the pre-pandemic peak of 72.6. Medical advances in immunotherapy, anti-obesity drugs and now perhaps Alzheimer’s should keep it rising. Louis and I may reach 90. I expect my children will. But I hope their generation will want to.Life is extending while the things that traditionally gave it meaning are in decline. Especially among the young, ever fewer people have a partner, children, friends, a religion, or (I suspect) a belief in progress. Instead we have our phones.Now another source of meaning has come under threat: engrossing work. People have begun to experience “AI shocks” — moments when we suddenly glimpse how the technology could make us redundant. Mine came when I had an idea for a new book. Strictly as a prompt to think, I asked AI to produce some sample passages. I soon realised it could write the whole book that day. True, I’d had the idea, but my only role in the execution could be fact-checking for hallucinations..Read more:.Americans are sleeping more but feeling less rested: F.D. Flam.If I’m not someone who writes, who am I? Many radiologists, lawyers, coders and illustrators will have experienced some version of that shock. One day we’ll just get in the way of the machines. Translators are already nearly defunct. Future human work will probably be chiefly emotional (therapist, yoga coach) or physical (hairdresser, carer) more than cognitive. We have become “a downwardly mobile species”, argues the writer Tom Rachman. A life in which our minds are superfluous seems less worth living. There’s the famous story of a child pointing to Randolph Churchill, the great man’s son, and asking its mother, “What is that man for?” Soon we could all be Randolph.We might live longer with less purpose, and in worse health. Our lifespan has risen faster than our healthy years. The discrepancy is worst in the US, where the average person in 2019 lived with disability or sickness for 12.4 years before death. “The major problem with merely increasing life expectancy is that it also increases morbidity simply because people live long enough to get more age-related disease, disability, dementia and dysfunction,” writes Guy Brown, a biochemist at Cambridge university. “The extra years are being added at the very end of our lives and are of poor quality . . . ” Brown says death has morphed from a single event into “a long drawn-out process merged with ageing”.My mother’s years-long death from dementia gave her nothing. Asked in surveys how long they want to live, most people give answers ranging from about 85 to 93, but say they’d want less if they weren’t healthy. “One must die in time,” writes the social scientist Liah Greenfeld, quoting her mother. My grandmother, who lived to 92, occasionally asked visitors to kill her, though more in hope than expectation.The great psychologist Daniel Kahneman chose euthanasia in Switzerland aged 90 while still in decent health. He explained that he’d always believed “that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous”. He felt his life was complete. Who wants to live forever in the retirement home listening to fellow residents play their TikTok videos without headphones?Much of the spice of life comes precisely from its scarcity value. My friend the tennis writer Gordon Forbes, who died aged 86, called his great memoir A Handful of Summers. He took the title from an old diary note in which he mused that the best moments of a life were “squeezed in/To a headful of thoughts/And a handful of summers.” Those summers shouldn’t stretch out forever. The 200th time you have a peak experience, whether culinary or romantic, it means less. The draining of the life force with age is probably inevitable. Peter Thiel’s dream of immortality sounds ghastly.Brown, the biochemist, suggests a better route forward. He recommends shifting “medical research funding . . . from the main causes of death of the elderly, such as cancer and heart disease, towards the main causes of morbidity of the elderly, such as dementia, depression, arthritis and ageing itself.” Then we might finally honour the adage: add life to years, not years to life..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT's Simon Kuper: The creeping feeling that life is getting too long

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