X-Message-Number: 31505
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: What's Next 2009: Amortality
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:50:04 -0700



http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884758,00.html

5. Amortality
By CATHERINE MAYER


When Simon Cowell let slip last month that he planned to have his corpse 
cryonically preserved, wags suggested that the snarky American Idol judge may 
have already tested the deep-freezing procedure on his face. In 2007, Cowell, 
now 49, told an interviewer that he used Botox. "I like to take care of myself,"
he said. Cowell is in show biz, where artifice routinely imitates life. But 
here's a fact startling enough to raise eyebrows among Botox enthusiasts: his 
fellow Brits, famously unconcerned with personal grooming, have tripled the 
caseload of the country's cosmetic surgeons since 2003. The transfiguration of 
the snaggletoothed island race is part of a phenomenon taking hold around the 
developed world: amortality.


You may not have heard of amortality before-mainly because I've just coined the 
term. It's about more than just the ripple effect of baby boomers' resisting the
onset of age. Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the 
intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep
decline in the influence of organized religion- all viewed through the blue 
haze of Viagra.


Amortals live among us. In their teens and 20s, they may seem preternaturally 
experienced. In later life, they often look young and dress younger. They have 
kids early or late-sometimes very late-or not at all. Their emotional lives are 
as chaotic as their financial planning. The defining characteristic of 
amortality is to live in the same way, at the same pitch, doing and consuming 
much the same things, from late teens right up until death.


Cowell is one of their poster boys; so too is France's Nicolas Sarkozy, as 
mercurial as a hormonal teenager. Madonna is relentlessly amortal. It's easier 
to diagnose the condition in the middle-aged, but there are baby amortals - 
think Mark Zuckerberg, the world's youngest self-made billionaire, who looks set
to comport himself like a student geek to the end of his days. The eldest 
amortals, born long before the first boomer wave, are still making mischief 
around the world.


Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil encourages them
to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and cryonics enthusiast co-wrote
with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen to forestall aging so that adherents 
live long enough to take advantage of forthcoming "radical life-extending and 
life-enhancing technologies." Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey 
is toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. "We are in serious 
striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder and chairman of the 
Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to each successive research team 
that breaks the record for the life span of a mouse. It is "bleeding obvious," 
he adds, that it is possible to extend the human life span indefinitely. "Most 
people take the view that aging is this natural thing that is going on 
independently of disease. That's nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases
are age-related diseases because they're the later stages of aging."


For all the optimism about how science may prolong life, mice and humans keep 
turning up their toes. No matter how much the government bullies and cajoles, 
amortals rarely make adequate provision for their final years. Yet even as 
faltering amortals strain the public purse, so their determination to wring 
every drop out of life brings benefits to the private sector. They prop up the 
tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep 
gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly 
as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals 
hate to be pigeonholed by age. They're a highly sexed bunch. Viagra and its 
cousins help give elderly amortals a pleasurable alternative to aqua aerobics 
while blotting out those pesky intimations of mortality. At the Coco de Mer 
erotica shop in Los Angeles, which offers instruction in subjects like "Being a 
Mistress in the Bedroom," patrons recently included two women in their 80s. 
"They were both like, 'Help - we want to have fun,'" says the store's owner, 
Justine Roddick.


Notions of age-appropriate behavior will soon be relegated as firmly to the past
as dentures and black-and-white television. "The important thing is not how 
many years have passed since you were born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the 
Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you
think about yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't 
sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality has already 
revolutionized our attitudes toward age.






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