Sure, genetic engineering might extend your life, but would immortality be authentic? Burt Olivier investigates.

The above is a broadly scientific take on this question but it does not exhaust all the possible perspectives one could adopt towards it. There is also a psychological-existentialist perspective, as well as an ethical one, to mention but two. Martin Heidegger explains in Being and Time that the precondition for an “authentic” life (as opposed to an “inauthentic” one of being the victim of mere convention) is to face one’s own possibility of non-being (that is, your death) resolutely via the state of mind known as anxiety.

Once you have accepted the inescapability of your own death (instead of avoiding it, covering it up, and so on), paradoxically, it frees you for living a full life of caring for yourself and for others because everything else is relativised in light of the unavoidability of death. Petty competition with others for institutional or political power, for instance, appears insignificant compared to those things that appear important in light of your own impending death such as love for your family and friends, the attempt to live a creative life, and so on. This is an existential reason for our mortality — it is a prerequisite for an “authentic” life.

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