Immortality Projects: The Psychological Trap of Trying to “Live Forever”

Once, while I was in an online foreign language class, my teacher posed a hypothetical question to the room:

“What would you do if you suddenly had ten thousand dollars?”

To which the class came up with plenty of answers that sounded impressive (e.g. “I would establish my own company”, “I would travel the world”, “I would use it to help the poor”, etc.)

When my turn came, I swiftly replied—without even thinking for a second:

“I would put it all into a bank.”

The Zoom room erupted into laughter. A ripple of palpable disappointment swept through my teacher and classmates. My response, as everyone quickly pointed out, was too boring.

Yet as I sat there, I couldn’t help but find their reaction perplexing.

I had given an authentic answer; deep down, I simply wanted the peace of mind that a financial safety net would provide, so that I could just get on with living my life. But somehow, they could not accept such a “bland” choice.

“Why?”, I couldn’t help but ask myself.

It took me quite a long time to figure out what was actually happening in that room. The teacher’s question, as “innocent” as it sounded, had nothing to do with finance; it just served as a psychological stage.

The unspoken expectation—which everyone in the class seemed to realize, except for me—was to perform. To say something marvelous like “I would backpack across Europe/ launch a world-changing startup/ engage in grand philanthropy.”

The class laughed because my grounded answer had shattered their collective daydream. By choosing psychological comfort over a grandiose narrative, I had, unintentionally, “broken the script.”

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had a phrase for this phenomenon: Bad Faith (mauvaise foi). It happens when we deceive ourselves into living inauthentically—by adopting the values, templates, and expectations handed down by others rather than embracing our own freedom.

When we reply to the $10,000 question with a template of ambition and adventure, we are only “performing” for an invisible audience.

Why then? Why does the idea of simply putting the money in the bank and living quietly feel so utterly disappointing to the modern mind?

People’s performative answers to these hypotheticals—as I figure—aren’t just about wanting to sound interesting to their peers. They are symptoms of a much deeper human reflex.

We cling to grandiose narratives because, deep down, we are all trying to run from the exact same ghost: death.

In fact, much of what we call “legacy” or “civilization” is actually a sophisticated psychological defense mechanism against that inevitable end.

Humanity is uniquely burdened by the knowledge of our own mortality. To cope with that uncomfortable reality, most of us spend the whole life frantically building what psychologists call “immortality projects”—in the hope that it would allows us to, somehow, “conquer” death and carve our own name into history.

Highlights

• Immortality projects are psychological defense mechanisms—such as creating art, building empires, or raising families—that people pursue to leave a lasting legacy and symbolically defeat the inevitability of their own death.
• According to anthropologist Ernest Becker, the human condition is a permanent tension between our infinite, god-like consciousness and our fragile, mortal physical bodies.
• Nowadays, immortality projects have shifted from symbolic legacies to physical preservation; people become obsessed with preserving youth and proving their “usefulness” to society.
• When human dignity is tied strictly to utility, individuals face existential anxiety and burnout from the constant pressure to “hustle” and produce.
• True fulfillment and legacy come from accumulating “being” in the present moment rather than chasing future validation.

What Are Immortality Projects?

Back in the day, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker articulated a framework for understanding human behavior in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. Humans, as Becker observed, are the only creatures possessing the conscious awareness that we are going to die. Unlike other animals, we live in a permanent state of tension between two radically different worlds.

• On one hand, we possess a brilliant, infinite, god-like consciousness; we can contemplate the cosmos, imagine eternity, and create complex symphonies of meaning.
• On the other hand, this dazzling consciousness is permanently trapped inside a physical body—a frail, mortal vessel that bleeds, aches, ages, and is ultimately destined for the grave.

Becker called this the “terrifying dilemma” of human existence. If we were to walk around all day acutely aware of our impending physical decay, we would be paralyzed by existential dread. We wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, let alone build bridges, write poetry, or fall in love.

To cope with the dilemma, human beings resort to constructing immortality projects. (also referred to as causa sui projects, meaning “to cause oneself”) Given that we did not choose to be born—and that we are unable to prevent physical death, we try to become the creators of our own enduring legacy. We build a cultural “hero system” to ensure that a piece of us will outlive our beating hearts.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker, “The Denial of Death”

Common examples of immortality projects:

• Religious & spiritual: Relying on a higher power or cosmic order. This includes the belief in an afterlife, reincarnation, or the idea that one’s soul will eventually merge with the universe.
• Political & ideological: Attaching oneself to a massive movement or nation that will outlive the individual. Examples include fighting for a revolution, extreme nationalism, or unyielding devotion to a political cause.
• Material & economic: Amassing immense wealth, building a generational business empire, or ensuring your name is etched onto the side of a towering skyscraper.
• Creative & intellectual: Writing a bestselling book, composing a symphony, or formulating a scientific theory that alters the course of history.
• Biological: Having children and obsessing over passing down one’s lineage, ensuring the genetic code survives the centuries.
• Digital: Obsessively curating social media profiles, blogs, and videos to leave a permanent, idealized footprint in the cloud.

By achieving what we might call symbolic immortality, we convince ourselves that we are not merely temporary collections of cells destined for dust, but beings of cosmic significance.

Are Immortality Projects Justified?

To most people, the idea of investing in immortality projects may sound understandable. After all, it’s just what an ambitious person would do, right?

But is it, after all?

When you look at your own grand ambitions, are you actually trying to build a meaningful legacy? Or are you, deep down, only running away from reality?

To answer the question, let us reflect on the psychological engine behind the behavior. Assuming that what you do is driven by the pure, creative overflow of love—then yes, it is a genuine legacy. You do the work because the work itself matters right now, NOT because of the applause it might earn you tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that’s not the true motivator of most people out there.

People aren’t building the business, writing the book, or curating the lifestyle because they authentically love it. Rather, they are just too terrified of what happens if they stop. Of facing who they really are—stripped off the external validation.

When we cannot endure the mundane reality of simply being, we must constantly project ourselves into the future through grandeur, convinced that it will protect us from our own impermanence. Over time, we become driven by destination addiction (also known as the Arrival Fallacy)—the misguided belief that peace and happiness are always just one more achievement away. As such, we hustle, we grind, and we boast about the grandiose things we will leave behind.

But in doing so, we forget how to truly live in the moment.

In the constant pursuit of “immortality”, we make ourselves fall victim to burnout, superficial relationships, and the constant anxiety that no matter how much we accomplish, it is never quite enough to silence the ticking clock.

It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping. He needs revolutions and wars and “continuing” revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension.

Ernest Becker

The Dark Side of Immortality Projects

Evading the real self

According to Becker, because we are terrified of our own vulnerability, we construct an immortality project to become a “hero” in our cultural narrative. Society provides us with ready-made “hero templates” to choose from. Instead of having to forge our own unique path (which many are uncomfortable with), we flee into the “heroic evasion”—adopting the pre-packaged roles our culture values:

• The Corporate Titan
• The Starving Artist
• The Saintly Martyr
• The Perfect Parent
• etc.

By stepping into these ready-made roles, we hand over our personal freedom to the collective—what philosopher Martin Heidegger called the “They.” We let the culture tell us what matters, what is valuable, and what constitutes a “successful life.”

In doing so, we exchange our unique individuality for a standardized immortality project. We seek a heroic legacy defined by public applause, forgetting that the public is just a collection of other terrified individuals trying to hide from their own mortality.

To existentialist thinkers, constructing such a project to escape death is the ultimate act of bad faith/ self-deception. Simply, because you are pretending to be an object with a fixed purpose (like a paperknife), rather than admitting that you are a radically free conscious being capable of thinking for your own and changing.

By chasing a symbolic, immortal ghost of ourselves, we fail to inhabit our current complex (and quite often messy) reality.

The root cause of human evil & tribalism

The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of God, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.

Ernest Becker

This is arguably the most profound (and chilling) insight of Becker. Because an immortality project acts as a psychological shield against the absolute terror of death, any threat to it is perceived as a literal threat to one’s life. When two different cultures, religions, or ideologies meet, the mere existence of one calls the other into question.

As Becker noted, wars, genocide, and bigotry rarely stem from innate aggression; they are typically the result of symbolic threats. To prove that our immortality project is the “correct” one—and thereby validate our own salvation from death—we frequently feel a psychological mandate to violently conquer, convert, scapegoat, or destroy those who hold competing projects.

This phenomenon, known in modern psychology as Terror Management Theory, explains why existential crises so frequently breed fanaticism, extreme tribalism, and cultural worldview defense. When our legacy is threatened, we become monsters in the name of heroism.

Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.

Ernest Becker

From Soul to Cell: The Modern Pursuit of Literal Immortality

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.

Ernest Becker

Historically, immortality projects were mostly symbolic. Religion offered the soul an afterlife; art and architecture offered the ego a legacy. However, as modern society has grown more secular and highly dependent on technology, people’s immortality projects have been shifting. Rather than merely trying to “save the souls” or leave an imprint, many—especially the ultra-wealthy— are trying desperately to “freeze” their physical bodies.

• Cryonics (Deep freeze): High-net-worth individuals are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies like Alcor to have their bodies (or just their brains) preserved in liquid nitrogen at -196°C the moment they die, hoping that future nanotechnology would revive them.
• Brain mapping & uploading: Billionaires are funding initiatives to preserve the brain’s connectome, driven by the belief that if you map every neuron, you can eventually boot up a person’s consciousness into a synthetic body or virtual utopia.
• Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV): Silicon Valley elites are pouring billions into cellular rejuvenation, bio-hacking, and gene therapy. Their ultimate goal is simple: never dying in the first place.

Speaking of which, I remember once working for a medical tourism company that promoted stem-cell therapy, largely marketed for its miraculous “anti-aging” effects. Even now, I can still recall sitting in discussions where people would constantly marvel at the treatment’s effects.

“Can you imagine? This youthful-looking person is actually [X] years old!”

Whether the science was entirely accurate or not wasn’t the point. What fascinated me was the psychology behind that remark.

When my colleagues gasped at a fifty-year-old looking twenty-five, they weren’t just thinking about good aesthetics or health. Deep down, they were—I believe—celebrating a perceived victory over time.

Anti aging immortality projects, techno-optimism & transhumanism

In a world where traditional religion has faded for many, biotechnology has stepped in to present a new kind of “secular salvation.” In a sense, modern longevity researchers and biohackers are becoming the new “clergy”. Aging, instead of being a natural mystery of life, is now treated as a disease that can—and should—be cured.

But swapping a spiritual immortality project for a biological one comes with a severe psychological toll.

When the ultimate goal is to keep the physical vessel from aging, humanity runs into what can be called the “Meat Suit Problem.” Specifically, the body is viewed as a vehicle—a “meat suit”—that must be constantly managed, upgraded, and policed. And the consequences of that life stance are staggering:

• Hyper-vigilance & paranoia: Every single wrinkle, every slight drop in energy, every gray hair—which is just an inevitable part of existence—is now an alarming indicator that one’s “immortality project” is failing.
• The metric obsession: People strap on smart rings and monitors, obsessively tracking their sleep architecture, blood glucose, and heart rate variability. While health tracking is fine in moderation, for the bio-hacker running from death, a night of poor sleep or a slice of birthday cake becomes an existential threat to their longevity.
• The loss of present joy: When you are hyper-fixated on optimizing your cells for the year 2060, you lose the ability to simply enjoy a late-night laugh with a friend or a sunbaked afternoon on the beach today.

The irony here is that no matter how much capital, stem-cell therapy, or green juice you throw at the body, the house always wins. The internal clock is still ticking.

Even if you may be able to delay aging from the outside, death is still coming for you.

Life is not permanent… Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, how beautiful it is? Its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness there is a poem, a song. Every leaf has gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with the music of many leaves, which in due season fall and are blown away. And that is the way of life.

But we don’t want anything of that kind: we cling to our children, our traditions, our society, our names and our little virtues, because we want permanency – and that is why we are afraid to die. We are afraid to lose the things we know… We want everything that gives us satisfaction to be permanent; we want our position and the authority we have over people to endure. We refuse to accept life as it is in fact.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Why We Are Obsessed with Immortality: The Cult of “Usefulness”

Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project.

Ernest Becker

For long, I have wondered: why are we so fond of beauty treatments? Why is modern culture so intensely obsessed with preserving youth, while at the same time utterly terrified of aging?

Just think about how society reacts to different stages of life—about how a young, conventionally beautiful woman is viewed compared to a frail elderly woman. Culturally—as dark as it may seem—people gravitate toward the former, while they tend to “look away” from the latter.

As I reflect on it, I cannot help but believe that there’s something more than just aesthetics here. In fact, the reason has to do with a deeply ingrained metric by which modern society measures human worth: Usefulness.

Under the cold logic of both evolutionary biology and modern capitalism, a person’s value is frequently reduced to what they can do, produce, or reproduce:

• From a primal standpoint, youth and vitality signal genetic continuity—life at its peak.
• Capitalism values people as economic engines. You are deemed valuable as long as you are an active producer of labor or a hungry consumer of goods.

When society obsesses over youth and turns its face away from frailty—whether it’s an aging person, someone battling a chronic illness, or someone who simply cannot “hustle” anymore—it is operating entirely within this framework of usefulness. In a sense, people’s dignity—the intrinsic worth one possesses simply because they exist, regardless of their biological age, bank account, or productivity—is being measured by conditional metrics. By how much one can “produce”, whether it’s reproductive potential, labor, or aesthetic consumption.

But what happens when one, inevitably, cannot “produce” anymore?

If our dignity is dependent on our utility, then dignity is something that can be lost. A sudden illness or a disability is enough to bankrupt our value as human beings.

This is the tragedy of the “usefulness” framework: it robs us of the peace of just being. It convinces us that a forest is only valuable for its timber, rather than its existence.

After all, nobody can stop the passage of time. No amount of money, skincare, or biohacking can reverse it.

When our immortality projects are built on remaining “useful” forever, we are fighting a war we are destined to lose.

Today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”

Redefining Immortality Projects: From “Human Doing” to “Human Being”

To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

Ernest Becker

Given that the prevalent “usefulness” framework is a psychological trap, and literal immortality is a war one cannot win, it is time for us to adopt a radical redefinition of what it means to live a life of worth. To shift our identity from “Human Doing” to “Human Being.”

When an immortality project is rooted in doing, life is treated like a rapidly depleting battery. Every passing year feels like a process of subtraction—you are losing your youth, energy, societal “relevance.” In this paradigm, we look at the young and envy them because they are full of “possibilities.”

Yet if we really think about it, we should realize that kind of idolization is deeply flawed.

Possibilities, after all, are fragile. They haven’t happened yet. They can be lost, ruined, or broken by the unpredictable tragedies of life.

To worship youth for its potential is to value an uncarved block of marble more than the completed statue. To live in a state of constant anxiety, decision paralysis, and anticipation of the future—while at the same time losing touch with the moment. With the people around us. With the joy of existing.

Conversely, when we anchor our lives in being, there will be a complete transformation in how aging is viewed. Not as a process of subtraction, but as one of addition.

Think about an elderly person who can no longer take care of themselves, a retired worker whose hands are scarred from decades of labor, or a parent whose youth was entirely spent raising a family. Under the conventional framework of usefulness, society would deem them “past their prime.”

However, they possess something infinitely more secure than possibility: Actualized reality.

They have already loved. They have already suffered, survived, made difficult choices, and realized meanings. Their life is a finished, or nearly finished, work of art. Nothing and nobody—not economic crashes, not societal shifts, not even death itself—can take those assets away from them.

There’s no need to spend massive amounts of capital and emotional energy trying to freeze one’s body in a permanent state of “doing.” Rather, what’s essential is that we begin to accumulate being.

We write the book because we love the texture of the words today, not because we want our name on a library wall tomorrow.

We raise our children to be whole human beings, not genetic extensions of our own unfulfilled egos.

Life is not an audition for immortality. It happens right here, right now.

Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God.

Ernest Becker

Is Immortality Worth It, After All?

Now, let us participate in a brief thought experiment. Imagine that tomorrow, a Silicon Valley biotech startup finally cracks the code. They offer you a pill that will stop your aging process indefinitely. You will never naturally die, though they leave the “exit door” open—you can choose to pass away whenever you decide the weight of existence has become too heavy.

Would you take it?

I suppose most of us would, instinctively, say “yes”. We imagine a life where we have the time to master a dozen languages, witness humanity reach the stars, and never have to endure the grief of losing our loved ones to old age.

However, if we look past the initial euphoria, stripping away death might actually deny us the very thing that makes life sweet.

In economics, there is a fundamental rule: Value is derived from scarcity. Why is a sunset so captivating? Because it only lasts for twenty minutes. Why does a vacation feel so special? Because you eventually have to pack your bags and go home.

If you were handed an infinite amount of time, the urgency to do anything would vanish.

Meaning thrives on boundaries. Without the subtle pressure of our own mortality, procrastination would, very likely, become an art form spanning centuries. “I’ll tell her I love her next decade” or “I’ll pursue that passion next millennium” would become valid excuses. Unbreakable immortality—which seems like a blessing in the beginning—would eventually devolve into inescapable cosmic boredom.

At the end of the day, the symbolic immortality projects—the arts we create, our acts of kindness and quiet contributions to the world—are beautiful precisely because we aren’t going to be here forever. They are our own unique ways of saying to the universe:

“I was here, and I cared.”

If we were able to live forever, we wouldn’t even need to say it.

Precisely because an encounter is ephemeral, it must be taken seriously. Life, after all, is filled with things that happen only once… When you take notice of the small details of life, nothing is repeated. Every opportunity is special.

Ken Mogi

Final Thoughts

As I think back to that Zoom classroom, and people’s disappointment at my desire to simply “put the money in the bank”, I cannot help but recall a fictional story I once came across: The Tale of the Three Brothers from the Harry Potter universe. In the story, three brothers—Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus Peverell—are offered a reward by Death himself.

The first brother asks for the Elder Wand—a tool of absolute power and dominance. He wants to conquer. He is ultimately killed for his ego.

The second one asks for the Resurrection Stone—a tool of attachment, clinging to the past, and defying the laws of nature. He is ultimately driven mad (and commits suicide) by it.

But the third brother, Ignotus Peverell, asks for the Cloak of Invisibility. He doesn’t wish to conquer the world, to defy the laws of the universe, nor to build a towering monument so society would remember his name.

He just wants to walk quietly through life, protecting his peace and his loved ones, unseen by the forces of destruction, until he is ready to take off the cloak and greet Death “as an old friend.”

This, I believe, is the ideal approach to life. In fact, the greatest philosophers and spiritual teachers in history have always advocated for acting like Ignotus—to stop building statues of oneself and instead dissolve the ego, so that one can actually connect with reality.

When you stop trying to “be somebody” in the eyes of society, you are free to be everybody and everything.

To give up your immortality projects does not mean giving up on life. Quite the opposite: it allows you to focus your time and efforts on sending ripples of kindness, presence, and awareness—which is the only real legacy one can leave behind.

So, let others laugh when you say you just want peace of mind. Because it means you are finally awake, while the rest of the world is still sleepwalking.

The true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.

J. K. Rowling

Other resources you might be interested in:

• 60 Existential Questions: A Reflection on Life’s Depths
• Find the Beauty in Everyday: 8 Tips for Uncovering Joy & Wonder in the Little Things
• Spiritual Purpose: The Quest for the Soul’s Calling
• The Shepherd of Being: Guarding the Mystery of Existence in an Age of Noise
• Will AI Kill Us All? On the “Bogeyman” of the 21st Century

Let’s Tread the Path Together, Shall We?

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