Who wants to live forever?

I made a joke, last year, about philosophy’s failure as a pedagogy of death: if it was meant to teach me how to reconcile with mortality, it doesn’t seem to have done its job.

Not that philosophers haven’t tried. Some make the case directly, arguing that, since being dead is painless, it cannot harm us, or that it makes no more sense to mourn post-mortem non-existence than it does the time before we were born.

But some approach the problem back-to-front. If the opposite of dying is living forever, they reason, we can reconcile with mortality by showing that immortality is worse. Thus, Bernard Williams argued in “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”—the spoiler is in the title—that immortality would be tedious to the point of becoming insufferable. Even if we took the precaution of stipulating endless youth and health as well as endless life, we would simply run out of things to do. Boredom would consume us like a never-dying flame, and we would long for death.

I…