Tag: spirituality

Where is your cage?

June 4th, 2025

Read time 9 minutes

Meaning begins with freedom

I was walking high on the crown of an Aegean caldera, splitting through warm sun and cool sea breeze. I set out to venture from the towns of Oia to Fira, but allowed myself to wander wherever my eyes took me: sapphire vistas, dead ends, over rocks and brambles, and up to the edge of cliffs. I believe I smiled for three hours, even laughing to myself as my path led me through natural beauty and the beautiful ideas of the books I was reading, the friends I missed, and decisions I would soon make.

While descending a local peak, I came by a fence on the sea side of the caldera’s edge. Its chain links offended me. A bird rested on the metal post, singing into the crisp morning air. The fence was no barrier to her.

Despite my joy, flowing from the deep sense of freedom I was experiencing, I was, of course, already bound before I came across the fence. I was bound by nature, and by my own nature. I was bound by gravity and the rocks beneath my feet, for which I was grateful. I was bound by my consciousness and perceptions, limited as they are, but sufficient for my enjoyment.

I was also bound by fear. I wouldn’t have dared walk beyond the edge of the trail despite how indigo flowers and iridescent lizards had tempted pursuit. A step towards them slid pebbles cascading down the cliff face, a 300 meter spill. I was content with this limitation too.

But until the fence, I had not felt confinement. The fence was imposed on me, by others; by the will of man.

Farther down the trail, the fence had collapsed from the erosion of the cliff. How apt: the barriers of man are arbitrary and ephemeral. Unlike the bounds of the natural world, which define the world of freedom I seek, the bounds imposed by man are abstract, artificial, and subject to change.

There is no singular meaning of life, but life is not meaningless. Human life is full of meaning, because it is our nature to create it. Whether it be to love, create, learn, pursue virtue, or follow the many idiosyncratic desires that fuel our lives, there is a common prerequisite.

Humans must be free.

My anecdote is a simple metaphor, framed by reflections I had already begun writing. Before that, the theme had emerged in recent conversations. I began seeing confinement everywhere: legal, financial, mental, material, relational, chemical. Those around me were tormented by their prisons, if only they could recognize their cell and address it as such. If only I could…

Some people are literally confined. Slaves and prisoners experience a true restriction in their freedom, and in the extreme we can see its effects more clearly. The slave is stripped of all meaning, and as a result, their humanity. They are not permitted to love or to learn, to pursue any of the true desires of their soul. If they do find purpose it is like a diamond in the desert of their suffering. It may placate or excite them briefly but insufficiently, and they continue to die of thirst, deprived of their ability to imbue and enjoy full meaning. As with the man in the desert, the ultimate purpose for the slave should be freedom. No distraction can be afforded. This becomes the meaning of their life; to reach the bridge to meaning.

An influential book for me was Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, and those who have read it can reasonably challenge my claim. In the book, Frankl describes how purpose is critical to survival, and more relevantly, that meaning is not given by circumstances, but discovered or created by the individual.

Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how’

– Victor Frankl

I believe this to be true, and it does not invalidate my claim. Frankl was interned in Auschwitz, effectively a slave sentenced to death in a Nazi concentration camp. However, in these most evil and deprived conditions, he managed a freedom of the mind. A person can choose their attitude, and through that, find meaning. That Frankl found meaning in his hellish environment is a testament to the resilience of the human mind and an indication of the necessity of meaning for human existence. But that he was able to find meaning at all resulted from an incredible inner freedom. Left with no other avenues, Frankl discovered that he could, in the solace of his mind, find liberty. The implications are profound. Frankl would eventually be freed from the physical confines of the concentration camp, and with this additional freedom, continued to pursue his purpose to a higher level – by developing the field of logotherapy and spreading his lessons to the world. The search for meaning should not be thought of as contingent on freedom from physical constraint, but as requiring freedom in some essential form. After all, one must first be free to search.

In fact, the most insidious prisons we are subject to are not always so concrete and obvious. Some people may exist in a prison of the psyche, rapt by fear and anxiety that confines their actions. Is medication a cure, a freedom from psychic shackles, or a palliative from the suffering? Others are trapped by work, tormented by the unceasing stresses of employment but unable to leave. Some are confined by their political environment: allowed to go outside and enjoy the sun, but unable to demonstrate (and therefore even think) critically against the ruling regime. Even a relationship, often the source of the highest human joy, can be a prison as in the case of an abusive partner or damaging familial environment. William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” depicts such a family environment, and the noble escape of a boy trapped within it.

A prison can take many forms, but they share distinct commonalities; a restriction in freedom, and a barrier to escape.

Search for and think carefully about your prison, it must be recognized consciously because it will torment your subconscious nonetheless.

A trapped lion fights ferociously for its freedom. Only after its will is broken does it submit to confinement. Eventually, it becomes placated by abundant food and cheap entertainment. Its cubs, tragically born into captivity, know even less of what was lost. The prison is their entire world. Despite their ignorant bliss, the lion cub is stunted, unable to develop physically or mentally to the potential offered in their natural environment. It has no conscious memory of an unbounded existence, and yet it is still damaged subconsciously by the anti-natural circumstances of its imprisonment. The lion has been robbed of its nature, stripped of its meaning, subjugated to serving the meaning of its human captors. It is no longer a lion, but the cellular husk of one.

Animals characterized by intelligence and mobility, such as Orcas and Elephants, often begin to deteriorate noticeably in captivity at a zoo, despite access to food and medical technology. Humans are animals of this kind as well.

Though some prisons may be more tolerable than others, what is true for the slave is true for all: you must strive for your freedom. The meaning of life is what guides our behavior, and our behaviors are what compose our life. This life is all we have. To accept tyranny, to allow life to be diminished, should never be acceptable.

This is not to say that we can aspire to be limitless. There are true boundaries to existence which form the framework for our nature. We exist within necessary social boundaries as well, having agreed to the social contract with our society and exchanging freedom for order. This is a worthy transaction. However, the barriers which are formed by mankind — be it external or even internal— that do not serve us fairly have no requirement to exist.

There can be no compromise or placation. Free yourself. If you can see your prison, and notice how it diminishes you, it is your obligation to break free. The escape will not be easy, but the reward will be in proportion to the challenge. To be your true self, filled with soul to the brim, you must first be unbound. From there, from the basis of your true and free nature, you will be able to imbue the manifold meaning of life that awaits you, and enjoy its rewards.

To live a life rich with meaning, we must first be free.

Until then, the meaning of life is freedom.
Would you take an immortality pill?

January 23rd, 2025

Read time: 7 minutes

Should you?

The idea of immortality is transcendental, ingrained in some way into every human. It is evidently vital to our survival that our ego craves permanence. This drive is why we cautiously guard our lives, but also why we sacrifice for others; while personal immortality is impossible, there is an understanding of the immortality of the species that is critical.

In the current era of scientific advancement, aided by the creation of mechanical cognition, we are closer than ever to learning the secrets of biological aging. As it turns out, slowing or reversing biological aging is a scientific possibility. There is incredible demand, worth trillions of dollars, to make such a thing a reality, not only to satisfy the vanity of the individual but also to reduce the societal cost of senility. These factors should make a discovery inevitable.

Let’s imagine that such a breakthrough happens in the next 30 years, and that you are recruited for the late-stage trials of a drug that’s early trials showed tremendous success in halting the signs of biological aging.

Do you take the pill?

Your instinct is to perhaps say yes. Reasonable. This is a desire, a craving, fundamental to your being. Perhaps you envision how many books you can read, or how you could travel the world for the next thousand years. The power is immense.

You pause for a moment, the pill resting in your palm. You stare into it, beyond it, and see something.

You see the grief of saying goodbye to your friends and family, some of whom cannot afford the luxury pill, as they age past you and fade away.

Time doesn’t feel the same anymore, and decades blink past like hours of the day. You make new friends, you laugh and have fun, but when you disclose your immortality you sometimes see a flash of discomfort on their face. Mortal people hesitate–perhaps subconsciously– to form deep connections with you. It is difficult to engage romantically with a person who can’t come with you.

You feel as if you are in a glass cage in Time Square; occasionally you make eye contact amid the bustle only to lose them to the current. You are alone.

You suffer from unbearable ennui. In your mortal life you had occasional blue days, but now the purpose of life has become almost entirely extinguished. You once heard a ticking timer spurring you to seize the day. Now the sun rises, and it rises, and it rises.

And yet you hang on.

And you hang on for a thousand years, meeting new best friends every 20 years. Some are amazed by you; for the past five centuries you have been an international consultant, negotiating peace between countries. You have become wise over time; you have learned and actually lived much of history, you are polite and charismatic to strangers, and have gained excellent perspective in how to navigate everyday problems.

Nevertheless, when you meet a person your biological senior, you get a sense that they know something you can’t grasp—that their perspective is beyond what you can understand. There is a level of humility, a trait you have come to revere, that has become unachievable to you.

And another thousand years passes, and the species has moved on from where it once was. It is a common misconception that humans are beyond evolutionary pressure. Instead, the sheer number and diversity of potential mates available to modern people may be accelerating natural selection. You notice that within a dozen generations you are viewed as physically, mentally, and most importantly, aesthetically inferior. Despite your incredible level of maturity, there are biases in the hardwiring of your ancient brain that make you more prone to brutish and uncivil behavior compared to your contemporaries. Future humans have no purpose for you, a relic of a bygone era, except as an object of curious fascination.

Soon after, technology develops to allow a human consciousness to be uploaded to a mechanical system. You are permitted to be included in the project because of your historical experience, yet you see more tangibly now the danger of the choice.

The human mind is not meant to live in a computer, you protest. The desire to extend your lifespan is a trap. You live exactly as long as you are supposed to, any more would be an aberration that comes at a cost, and this cost is inconceivable to us now.

This vision of yours doesn’t even take into account the amount of social chaos (the resentment, frustration, and envy) that would arise if there were a class of society that exclusivly had access to this pill.

The hunger for immortality is like that for fat, salt, and sugar. A thousand years ago a person would wish for a mountain of these substances, and yet they would surely destroy themselves with it in short order. People today live with such mountains and do the same.

There may be some who, after hearing all of this, may think that they could handle this burden. Such an individual, if possible at all, would have to be more intrepid, noble, and sacrificial than any hero in our history. In every sense this person would have to be inhuman, and that would be their fate either way.

Despite the temptation, being finite is fundamental to our existence– and thats okay. In fact, it’s not only okay; it’s beautiful. To rebuke this would be cancerous to society and degrading to the individual. Nothing in nature is designed to be infinite, and instead resilience arises from adaptability. Nature favors the dynamic over the static.

Humans sometimes have an arrogant idea of the limitlessness of our consciousness. There is a false conception that, given enough time, a human brain can learn enough to ascend to godliness. While the capacity of our brains is magnitudes beyond what we understand currently, it is still bounded by the environment that has created it. We are limited by a hardware that filters our perception of the universe into familiar frameworks, one of which is a finite life. Changing this would create catastrophic psychic trauma in our software. A human mind is only equipped for a human life (a problem that will bias our understanding of artificial intelligence). If, or when, our species is meant to have individual immortality, it will arise out of the fabric of our being not spring from our ambition.

Consider The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known stories, dating back perhaps 5,000 years. Gilgamesh, who is two-thirds god, rules the city-state of Uruk with incredible strength but also cruelty. In one story he is shaken by the death of a close friend, becomes consumed with his own mortality, and grows terrified of dying .

He journeys to find a mythical sage who had been granted immortality by the gods for surviving a great flood. The sage explains that immortality is reserved for the gods, but challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for seven days to prove that he is worthy of such a privilege. Gilgamesh fails this trial. The sage’s wife then offers Gilgamesh a herb to restore his youth, but a serpent steals it away symbolizing the inevitability of aging and death.

Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, realizing that immortality lies not in an endless life, but in the enduring legacy of one’s deeds. The wisdom of ancient texts continues to astonish.

I aspire to be healthy, functional, and to live a very long, happy life. I look forward to each phase of life, eager for the different joys and perspectives they may bring. Every day, I do what I can to live as long as possible. But in the end, after a lifetime of playing with my beloved friends and family, I also want to die. I would not have it any other way.

It is the finitude that makes it all precious. Embrace it.

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Tag: spirituality

Where is your cage?

Would you take an immortality pill?