It feels like we are closer than ever to solving longevity. My guess is that there is a day in the next 5-20 years that we'll consider aging solved. The idea of longevity can sometimes get a surprising amount of pushback and negative reaction.

One misconception and reason for a negative reaction is assuming that you live a really long time in an elderly state that isn't worth living. Which, to be fair, is reasonable given that's more or less the current state of the world. But in reality, a huge focus and goal is age reversal. So you can be 100 or older in the state of a 25-year-old.

There's also the occasional and weaker line of thinking that we'll run out of space on the planet. If we do, it would be an impressive feat since we are only occupying a small percentage of habitable land on Earth currently.

Generally speaking, the aesthetics around the current movement come off as extremely nerdy, biohacker-core and also mostly unaffordable too. All of which don't help that much. Although I can imagine this changing rapidly as the science gets better known and technology improves and becomes more accessible. Also waves like looksmaxxing eventually need to reconcile with achieving this goal over a long-term time horizon.

One more interesting and nuanced negative reaction is around this idea of living forever. Basically, having to think about living forever is like thinking about infinity. It's pretty unfathomable. Even trying to imagine living 1 million years kind of makes you question the self at that timescale. Not to say it's impossible, just saying we don't have much to go off to even think about it. If you ask someone "would you like to live forever?", you start confronting ideas like the end of Earth, the sun, the universe and so on. In practice, an insane question, but I believe this does impact the perception of longevity on some deep level.

Now let's try a different variation of the question:

Would you like to live for longer?

Perhaps you can be more specific and add the clarification that you live for longer in a youthful state just to cover off the misconception I mentioned earlier. I think in almost all cases people would say yes. Or at the very least, a lot more yeses than for the forever version of this question. Living for longer sounds amazing and comprehensible and avoids (or at least kicks the can down the road on) this existential notion of living forever. For what it's worth, the forever notion is quite metal, because to pull it off you'd need to figure out how to defeat the heat death of the universe, but that's a whole thing.

With all that being said, I like the idea of having some new language to give us a new tool going into the world where longevity becomes solved. That new word can be "Forlonger".

Forever = all of time

Forlonger = for more time

You'd use it in a sentence like "the goal isn't forever, it's forlonger". It gets at this feeling and idea that permanence is perhaps impossible, but extending is possible, meaningful, and worth doing.

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