[Written with help from GPT-5]
Probably more than anything else, I want to live long enough to see the arrival of medical immortality. I don’t merely want to avoid death—I want to live forever.
As serious and analytical as I can seem, I have an insatiable curiosity and a love of life. I want to learn new things, master new skills, immerse myself in unfamiliar cultures, and experience lives radically different from my own. Unfortunately, the world I was born into leaves too little time for such pursuits. Like everyone else, I’ve had to spend much of my life studying things and working jobs I wasn’t passionate about simply to pay the bills. The knowledge that there is no law of physics prohibiting biological immortality gives me hope that a far richer existence may be possible for me.
For years, I’ve imagined what I would do with that gift: I’d start by moving to a small town in Italy, a country I visited only once but loved. I’d master the language, learn to cook authentic dishes, open a tiny restaurant, and slowly become part of the community. If, after twenty years, I grew restless, I’d move on. Maybe I’d become a train conductor in Tokyo. Later, a safari guide in Tanzania. After that, maybe a technician at a research station in Antarctica. There are thousands of cultures, professions, and ways of life I find worth experiencing. At the slow pace of my ordinary human mind, even a thousand years would not be enough to live every life I want to live. For years, my post-Singularity life plans seemed to be settled.
Then I realized something unsettling: The same technology that would allow me to pursue those dreams would also make them obsolete.
Suppose I survive long enough to purchase an immortality treatment, regain the body and mind I had at 25, and can subsist comfortably off of my savings from my lifetime of labor in our humdrum era. My Italian adventure begins exactly as I imagined.
A few years later, new enhancements appear. I install an upgrade that dramatically increases my speed of thought. Another allows direct connection to fully immersive virtual reality, like the Matrix.
Suddenly, I no longer need to move to Italy at all. I can experience the same town inside a simulation. In fact, the simulation could easily be better than reality. The architecture is perfectly preserved, but the intrusive chain restaurants disappear, the abandoned buildings at the edge of town are restored, and the inhabitants become more interesting. The ugly, slab-sided data center in the valley below vanishes. Historical events can be replayed. If my goal is to understand Italian culture and enjoy living there, the simulation wins on every metric.
Better still, I can run the simulation at ten times normal speed. I could spend what feels like twenty years there while only two years pass outside. If my goal is to experience new things and to indulge in a foreign culture, it makes logical sense to do it with as little delay as possible.
The same would apply to Tokyo, Tanzania, Antarctica, or anywhere else.
But this is only the beginning. After living the equivalent of a century across dozens of simulated lives, I would eventually notice the one constant present in every experience, and the one thing that is holding me back: me.
My personality, interests, ambitions, and sense of beauty all arose from an accident of genetics combined with the circumstances of my upbringing. Had I inherited different genes or been raised elsewhere, I might have despised travel and instead found perfect happiness watching football games at a neighborhood bar every weekend.
So why stop at changing my environment? Why not change myself?
If future technology allows me to safely and reversibly alter the architecture of my own mind, I would certainly try it. I could temporarily become someone with an entirely different personality. For example, rather than experiencing Italy as an American outsider, I could experience it through the mind of someone born there. I could live as a woman, as a mathematical genius, or as an ancient military commander. As someone whose greatest joy comes from creating art rather than studying technology. I’ve long observed that many other people are more upbeat than I am and get more pleasure from life, so I’d want to try being naturally optimistic.
After enough centuries, my original personality would become only one possibility among countless others. This is why I believe speculations about the post-Singularity future are misguided: People usually assume that while technology will change, human desires will stay the same. Machines will perform all labor, leaving us free to spend eternity enjoying today’s pleasures: eating wonderful food, traveling the world, falling in love, having sex, raising families, playing games.
But why should we assume that? Human pleasure is not objective; it is contingent.
What we find beautiful, meaningful, or enjoyable is largely the product of the particular brains evolution happened to give us. As argued in the essay Circuits – and the Arbitrariness of Beauty and Value, there is nothing inherently beautiful about trees, sunsets, or flowing water. Had we evolved from flies, perhaps our greatest works of art would celebrate rotting carcasses. Had we evolved from spiders, perhaps poetry would glorify the perfect web or the exquisite struggle of trapped prey.
Beauty is subjective.
A posthuman mind would not simply think faster or remember more facts. It would likely possess entirely new categories of sensation and experience that Homo sapiens literally cannot imagine. Just as a bat perceives aspects of reality unavailable to us through echolocation, or a mantis shrimp experiences colors beyond human vision, posthumans may inhabit experiential worlds inaccessible to ordinary human consciousness.
Science fiction occasionally hints at this possibility. In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Favor the Bold,” the shapeshifter Odo and the Female Changeling have sex while both are in humanoid form. Afterwards, the Female Changeling dismisses the encounter as only “a shadow” of the experience of linking—when Changelings merge together in their natural liquid state, sharing thoughts, emotions, and identities directly. Human sex, perhaps the most intimate experience our species knows, is revealed to be only a pale imitation of something categorically richer.
If posthuman minds discover analogous forms of experience, then our greatest pleasures may eventually appear as primitive as finger painting appears to an accomplished artist.
Even humans who refuse to become posthuman may not escape this conclusion. Many people imagine that “unaltered” humans would continue enjoying ordinary pleasures while only enhanced humans drift into strange new forms of existence. But advanced technology may offer ordinary humans something even more seductive.
In the 1950s, neuroscientists James Olds and Peter Milner implanted electrodes into the brains of laboratory rats, allowing the animals to stimulate parts of their own reward circuitry by pressing a lever. The rats repeatedly activated the stimulation, neglecting food, water, and rest in favor of obtaining another pulse of pleasure. The experiments demonstrated that directly activating the brain’s reward systems could overwhelm many other motivations.
Future technologies—whether brain-computer interfaces, cybernetics, or medical nanotechnology—may eventually stimulate human reward circuits directly while preventing habituation. If so, eating, travel, relationships, and every other natural pleasure might become hopelessly inefficient compared to continuous engineered bliss. The result could be a civilization whose members voluntarily spend centuries immersed in uninterrupted ecstasy, scarcely interacting with the outside world at all.
So what will posthumans actually do for fun?
I suspect there are only three broad possibilities:
The first is the Pleasure Machine. Through countless small modifications, people gradually strip away everything except raw pleasure itself. Every intermediate activity—food, games, travel, conversation—is eventually recognized as merely an inefficient path toward the neurological state they actually desired all along. Pleasure becomes the destination rather than the reward for reaching it. You’re the lab rat eternally pushing the button so you can feel the best orgasm or first hit of heroin. Your shallow but incredibly blissful existence renders you a defenseless parasite that the AGIs and posthumans who still work for a living will be tempted to kill to free up resources.
The second is the Incomprehensible Life. Posthumans discover forms of experience that are deeper, richer, and more meaningful than anything available to Homo sapiens. Just as a Changeling’s “Great Link” surpasses human intimacy, posthuman existence may consist of experiences we cannot even describe because our brains lack the conceptual vocabulary to represent them. The closest analog we might have is a math genius experiencing a moment of insight in how to complete an important theorem.
The third possibility is the Ascetic Intelligence. After centuries or millennia of experimentation, some individuals may conclude that pleasure itself is merely an evolutionary tool rather than life’s highest purpose. They may deliberately reconfigure themselves to desire understanding, creativity, or civilization-building instead of happiness. With sufficiently advanced control over one’s own mind, even anhedonia could become not a disorder but a chosen mode of existence. Such beings might resemble Buddhist sages crossed with superintelligent scientists—nearly devoid of ordinary human wants and in fact shorn of most of what it means to be human, yet capable of extraordinary insight. Since these individuals would still be thinking, working assets, they would be less vulnerable to marginalization and destruction than the previous two kinds.
The irony is hard to escape: The technology that grants my dreams will also transform the dreamer.
When people ask what posthumans will do for fun, they assume the beings inheriting our civilization will still share our concept of fun. I doubt they will.
Links:
- A discussion of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode where two aliens capable of shapeshifting into anything decided to turn into humans so they could have sex. They didn’t like it.
https://www.startrek.com/news/when-sexuality-is-literally-fluid - Dan Faggella’s essay “Circuits – and the Arbitrariness of Beauty and Value” https://danfaggella.com/circuits