The quest for physical immortality is as old as the human race. Decrepit mummies in Egyptian deserts attest to the same doomed aspiration as ancient Chinese emperors who pickled their insides with cinnabar, hoping to outsmart death. Baseball ace Ted Williams’s head in cryogenic stasis, bobbing in liquified gas waiting for the day when science surpasses God, has become a symbol in our age for the eternally frustrated hope that our frail bodies can conquer time. Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity idea fudges a bit by making immortality a function of mind transferred to a silicon substrate, but the basic notion is the same. Whoever we are, whatever this life is that we have been given, we want to keep on keeping on, bitter cup forever passing us by.

A man named Bryan Johnson, subject of a 2025 documentary titled Don’t Die (here), has garnered fame recently for walking the same path as Qin Shi Huangdi and Tutankhamun of yesteryear (and Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin of today). Johnson, an apostate Mormon, made a lot of money in the tech business. He spends millions of that money every year trying to keep his body from going the way of all other flesh. Supplements, plasma transfusions, special sleep regimens, treatments and screenings of all kinds — Johnson is intent on achieving what he calls his “blueprint.” Making death “optional,” dying never or someday, all at one’s choosing, is Johnson’s goal. In June of 2026 Johnson was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, but he appears undaunted. The quest for immortality continues, the body’s obvious track record to the contrary be damned.

Death as an option, a choice on a menu of services, is becoming popular. Few have the resources to go Johnson’s route, treating the body as an idol and pampering it with chemicals and muscle training the way tribes once fatted calves. Fewer still have the outlook required for the job. Life is hard for most. Each day brings new worries, new sorrows. As the years pile up, the heart sags down. Who wants to keep waking up lonely, sad, remorseful, and hurting for eternity? Death as an option, a way out, begins to look attractive.

The anti-Bryan Johnson business of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is, as one might expect, booming. MAiD is now in the top five causes of death in Canada (see here). The Netherlands are at the vanguard of civilizational decay: the Dutch are now killing children with autism (here) and depression (here). A young woman with some psychiatric disorders was also death-optioned in Holland not too long ago (here). Belgium green-lighted the institutional killing of minors in 2014, but even that was not enough. Ten years later, the pro-death laws were adjusted again, opening the door to murder even wider (see here).

The United States, never as hip as the Europeans, is gradually getting on board. Oregon led the way in 1997. New York and Illinois are coming online this year (here).

Whether you want to live forever in the body or toss off the mortal coil like so much detritus on a trash heap, you can, as the advertisement puts it, have it your way. Die or don’t die. The choice is yours.

Or is it? An underlying premise of both the Johnson and MAiD ways of thinking seems to be that the afterlife is not even an afterthought. The physical operations of the body are the only reality the person can or will ever know. Another assumption is that the life one lives is one’s own, something to dispose of or hoard at one’s pleasure. But both of these assumptions are easily disproven.

On the materialist reading, the life that we are said to possess comes into existence at the same time that the possessor does, namely at conception or whenever else the line is set. The owner and the owned are coterminous, in other words. They are the same thing, on the physicalist model. But this is an absurdity. How can one own what one is? Does the rose own the red? The red the rose? Does the circle own the roundness? The roundness the circle? Where is the distance that lets the act of possession come about? He who chooses death must in some sense separate his decision-making capacity from the body he will be killing. (Likewise for he who chooses physical immortality: the chooser is not the chosen.) It seems clear that the person who chooses death or physical immortality does not do so as a merely material being, but as a spiritual being with certain physical characteristics and attributes. The person who Johnsons or MAiDs him- or herself commits a logical non sequitur. The life we have is not ours. We live it but don’t have it. Its beginning and ending are not up to us.

If this is true, then the possibility of an afterlife is not at all easily dismissed. If there is a me apart from my physical existence, then it stands to reason that my physical existence, whether I unnaturally prolong it or cut it short, does not end me, just one mode of me. And if that is the case, then one ought to be careful about fooling around with life. For, if I am not my body, and if life is not mine, then I got it from somewhere. And, if we are being honest about information and order and creation, then I got it, more precisely, from someone. That someone may not be very happy with the way I have treated the life that he has loaned to me. He may be angry at me for living my life in a bad way. He may ask me hard questions, in a non-physical setting, about where my body is, about what I have done with the living bundle that I seem to have mistaken as not only mine but also as something of no consequence.

Or, in Johnson’s case, when the inevitable death does come, however procrastinated, perhaps the loaner of life will ask why that life was greedily gorged on, why its caretaker did not spend it in service of others. Did he not notice, the Author of life might inquire, that life is an open-ended equation, that it’s meant to be used for communion and mercy, and not for narcissistic, solipsistic hobbies fundamentally distasteful to the Author Himself, whose own death won an eternal life of an entirely different kind?

These kinds of questions probably trouble the Johnsonists and the MAiDists alike. Everyone is a soul. Everyone knows who he or she really is. Humans can be physically, but never metaphysically, truly blind. Physical immortality is not a brave pioneering endeavor. It is raw cowardice, a running away from one’s real identity. Getting a doctor to kill you is running away in the opposite direction. Fake, physical immortality, or cheap, doctor-induced death: these are both mistaken in the same basic way.

Die or don’t die, the choice is yours. But that is not the choice that your life is forcing you to make. Which path do you follow after the physical body has suffered and been broken? That is the choice on which everything depends.