The Age of Immortality: On the Vanity of Fearing Death and Wanting to Live Forever

Text by Mikkel Lind Sorgenfrey

“Would you be interested in getting Botox?” a nurse asks me during a consultation for a simple vascular laser treatment on the nose.

“Uhm, no?” I reply, feeling slightly offended, as that’s not what I’m here for.

“It’s important to begin early,” she insists.

Clearly, to everyone, apparently, I’m getting older. Early signs of ageing now appear when I look at myself in the mirror. Yes, I don’t look like a twenty-year-old any longer, and that’s okay—I’m thirty-two.

I study my face in the mirror. I trace the lines around my eyes and in my forehead. It’s vain, but it’s also brutally honest. My wrinkles remind me that the world keeps moving without permission. That I am temporary. Which is beautiful, but also a reminder that I’m moving closer to death.

Back in 2014, my father died from cancer at the age of fifty-five, when I was twenty-one, and it has left its mark. I can’t help but think I’ll suffer the same fate.

Now, I’m thirty-two, so if that’s the case, if I’m going to die at the same age as my father, I have twenty-three years left. Twenty-three! I know it’s not rational, I’m not even sick, but that’s how I think, and it controls my life.

The exits are visible, they’re moving closer, and it terrifies me. I don’t want to die.

I used to think I was immortal. Not literally, of course, but in that invincible way of youth, where you run through cities without maps, sleep on strangers’ couches, take red-eye flights just to feel the pulse of another city, another night out. I jumped off cliffs and went paragliding.

Death was something abstract. Something that happened to others, to old people, to characters in novels. Now, it feels suicidal just thinking about going paragliding again. Even travelling by plane feels risky. It’s irrational, I know, planes are safe, but what if an accident happens?

Somewhere between then and now, mortality stopped being an idea and became a sensation, physical, intrusive, impossible to shake off.

It’s not only the fear of death–it’s the knowledge that everything we touch, every moment we live, is vanishing as we live it. The fact that there’s no rewind. The moments that can’t be undone, the choices that can’t be unmade. It almost feels cruel.

I have so much left to do, so much to achieve, and I don’t have time for an early death like my father’s. I simply don’t.

But that’s not up to me to decide, I guess–or is it?

The War on Death

It’s a strange time to fear death, because the world no longer believes in it. Not really. Our culture is obsessed with staying alive, or at least with appearing to do so. Death is one of the last taboos in an age where everything else is visible, shareable, optimised. The algorithm loves vitality—youth, fitness, productivity—not decay. Even the concept of ageing gracefully has been replaced by the idea of anti-ageing. We no longer grow old; we fight it.

Botox injections and face lifts are the new normal, and I believe that’s the way it all goes. New boobs and hair transplants will soon be the same as a new sweater.

In October, Kim Kardashian arrived at Paris Fashion Week with a pixie cut reminiscent of her mother, Kris Jenner, who had recently undergone a facelift, making her look almost as young as her daughters. People on social media, including myself, initially mistook Kim Kardashian for her mother, and you can’t blame us.

The modern human being doesn’t want to grow old, doesn’t want to look old. We feel young, also when we are old, and we want our appearance to reflect that.

Millennials, like myself, are often referred to as the Peter Pan generation due to our perceived reluctance to grow up and assume adult responsibilities.

I sometimes think of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, where youth becomes a moral ideal and ageing a punishment. We’ve all become Dorian now—trapped in our portraits, endlessly refreshed. But while Dorian’s decay is confined to the canvas, ours is merely postponed through creams, filters, and injectables. I scroll through Instagram and see the same face in different people: ageless, smooth, eerily void of story.

As South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes: “The smooth is the signature of the present time.” We have polished ourselves into oblivion.

Meanwhile, billionaires and autocrats declare war on death.

Elon Musk dreams of building a colony on Mars, which seems like some sort of escape strategy. German billionaire Peter Thiel has invested in cryonics, the practice of preserving a deceased person’s body at very low temperatures in the hope that resurrection may be possible in the future, as seen in the 1992 film Forever Young starring Mel Gibson.

With advances in technology, Russian President Vladimir Putin assured China’s leader, Xi Jinping, via his translator that “human organs can be constantly transplanted, to the extent that people can get younger, perhaps even immortal,” The Guardian writes of a meeting between the two autocrats.

The Chinese leader replied: “By the end of this century, people may live to be 150 years old.”

Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, a trained endocrinologist, has received large government grants to study extending human health and longevity, and is involved in a genetic research programme.

Longevity is a trend in time. It’s about optimising and perfecting health and physique, and is often personified by Bryan Johnson, an American tech entrepreneur who is famously spending millions each year on a rigorous, data-driven program called Project Blueprint to reverse his biological age.

And the trend is spreading, making excessive exercise, rigid skincare routines and intake of enormous amounts of supplements the new normal.

Most likely, another trend will take over sooner or later–probably making it trendy to enjoy life while we can—but the pursuit of longevity is definitely here to stay. Like me, people don’t want to die.

And the world leaders’ drive to avoid death is not new. Rulers before them have also sought ways to extend their lives and their rule.

The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (259-210BC), sent expeditions to the mythical Mount Penglai in search of elixirs of eternal life–though the mercury brews he swallowed may actually have hastened his death. Alexander the Great, legend has it, roamed the Land of Darkness, a mythical and perpetually dark forest, in his quest for the water of life.

The language of immortality has become a geopolitical issue. Living longer is not just a fantasy; it’s a strategy. It’s comparable to the moon landings and plans of going to Mars. It’s about taking humanity further to unlock new potential—the next step of civilisation.

A Cursed Half-Life

Mary Shelley foresaw this two centuries ago in Frankenstein and wasn’t too positive in her predictions: man’s desire to conquer nature inevitably ends in monstrosity. We resurrect ourselves through machines, and call it progress, and the result is inhumane.

In Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, Voldemort drinks unicorn blood in the Forbidden Forest through his host, Professor Quirrell, to stay alive in his weakened, disembodied state, but killing a unicorn for its blood is an evil act that results in a cursed, half-life for the drinker.

Even the better stories of immortal souls don’t paint a perfect picture of eternal life. In Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings, elves are immortal, meaning they do not die from old age or sickness, but they can be killed by violence or extreme grief–and they can become weary of the world and its sorrows, which can lead them to leave Middle-earth for Valinor to find peace. Some sources also suggest that their spirits can eventually fade if they are not killed, though this is a very long process.

In Melancholia, Lars von Trier stages the end of the world as a slow dance. The planet collides, but there is no panic–only an eerie calm, a beautiful resignation. The film haunted me for years, and now I understand why. It’s not about the apocalypse; it’s about acceptance, about what it means to live knowing the end is inevitable.

There’s something both terrifying and tender in that thought. My fear of death isn’t purely fear–it’s also vanity.

To be Remembered

I sometimes imagine what it means to be remembered. My father is remembered by his family, but I have no children. Does that mean no one will remember me when I’m gone? Should I have children, so that someone will carry my name? Or is that just a biological backup of the ego?

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy wrote that: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” I wonder if the only worse thing than dying is dying without having lived meaningfully enough to be missed.

Art has always been humanity’s answer to this terror: the attempt to leave traces. From ancient tomb paintings to Nan Goldin’s photographs of her dying friends, from Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, to the music of Nick Cave after the death of his son, art is where mortality becomes visible without being annihilating. It’s not immortality–but an echo; a continuation.

That’s also what graveyards and tombstones are for. To remember the dead. To mourn them and have somewhere to go to talk to them. Humankind has always needed ways, portals to bridge this world with the afterworld.

Still, there are days when I wish I could believe in forever. When I see billionaires chasing eternity, I understand them. The fear of leaving mid-sentence. Of not being able to finish the story.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that civilisation itself is a collective defense mechanism, that everything we build, every empire, every poem, every post, is an attempt to escape mortality. Yet, the more we resist death, the more it defines us.

Ten years ago, I said yes to everything: invitations, people, ideas. I wanted to live fast, to collect experiences as proof that I was alive. Now, I avoid it. I drink less. I can’t waste time on parties that don’t matter, or on people who drain rather than fill. I want to spend my time well. But there’s also fear in that control–fear of loss, fear of wasting what remains.

In Greek mythology, Atropos, the eldest of the three Fates, is the goddess who cuts the life line. She uses her shears to cut the thread of life, which determines the moment of death for mortals. What if there’s only a short part of the thread left?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger talked about a state he called being-toward-death: the idea that authenticity begins the moment we are able to confront finitude. It’s a strange comfort—that death might not be the enemy but the teacher. It tells us what matters and pares everything down to essentials. The rest is noise.

It’s about awareness. A way of being fully awake to the fragility of things. Because if everything ended tomorrow, would I be content with how I’ve lived?

When I look at my reflection, I also see a certain grace. The fine lines are not only reminders of time lost, but of time lived—a souvenir of laughter, concerns, intimacy.

I’m marked by my father’s early death–but a changing view on life and death is also normal.

The human frontal lobe reaches full maturity only during your mid-to-late 20s. As long as they’re not fully developed, your behaviour can be overconfident, impulsive and risk-taking. After that, you become better at assessing risks. You understand that decisions have consequences.

So when I went paragliding, my brain wasn’t fully developed. I’m happy I did it when I wanted to, I’m happy I lived my life when I dared to, and I will keep doing so with what’s important to me now.

And perhaps that’s all the legacy anyone needs. Not to be remembered forever, but to have lived well in the time we were given, until our thread is cut.

And when a life-extending pill becomes available on the market, I will go buy it.