Translated by: Peter van de Ven Checked by: Desiree Kramer
Most people must have nothing of death,
but that’s what I have with parties.
(Laughter)
I’m not a kittens-and-calf person,
so pour in a few drinks
and you never know what comes out.
(Laughter)
So that happened on such an occasion,
halfway through the second martini.
I got into conversation
with someone who thinks you can stay young forever
you know that, visions of an extremely long life
from Silicon Valley billionaires who think they should never die.
One of them was even prided
that he took 150 food supplements every day
to escape death –
it must have cost him at least one hour a day,
let alone his stomach wall.
(Laughter)
The guy I spoke to did not seem surprised.
He was half my age –
no, something younger.
I was clearly more certain that he would die than himself,
where he mistakenly concluded that I would be terrified of it.
It surprised him that it was not.
He seemed to take my nonchalance more seriously
as a confession of a kind of failure on my part.
“Why would you accept avoidable limits?” he said.
“Biotechnology can put an end to aging,
maybe even die of it. “
And then it popped out.
(Laughter)
“But what is wrong with dying?” I asked.
He was struck dumb,
and I actually too.
I never intended to ask this specific question.
I had never formulated it so directly,
but now that it hung there, in the liquor air between us,
(Laughter)
it seemed to hit the nail on the head,
because we are afraid of death is assumed to be self-evident.
Ask people –
and I did that,
they usually do not at parties –
and most say: “Yes, of course!”
and would prefer to work straight away.
The psychologist William James
called death “the ominous decor”
and “the worm in the core of the human pursuit of happiness.”
Or the poet Philip Larkin,
which was very good at worming at the core of things
and wrote about awakening in horror of the “total eternal emptiness”.
I seem to be just as bad in taking things for granted
when I’m in parties.
If something is so obvious that you do not think about it anymore,
I start asking questions;
because if we take something for granted
Maybe that means that we have not thought about it properly.
You could say
that I had little choice to think about my death,
because I’ve been close to it a few times.
In the Middle East I was shot as a journalist,
I was bombed as a citizen
and threatened by right-wing villains.
But I came the closest by my own actions.
I lost control of my car
in corner three of a circuit in the Midwest of America
and it was like being in a painfully slow slow motion
turned upside down,
and again, and – yes – again.
And when I went through the air like that, I only had one thought
who repeated himself as a mantra:
“This”, I thought again and again, “is a very stupid death.”
(Laughter)
My first reaction,
when the car came to a stop and I was still alive,
was astonishment,
followed by a wave of gratitude
for who ever invented the crash helmet.
(Laughter)
Later I started to wonder:
“What is so stupid to die in such a way?”
What is actually an intelligent way to die?
(Laughter)
Why did I ask myself that question?
I could not think of anything other than: intellectual vanity.
After all, I was far too intelligent to die in a stupid way.
(Laughter)
It seems that not only my life is very dear to me,
but my death too –
even if I died once
unfortunately we can not enjoy it anymore.
I would then be able to enjoy more fun
and that is why it is good that I am not a believer.
Otherwise I would still be there,
in something called the ‘afterlife’.
And that is, with caution, a little pleasant prospect,
because that would not only mean that you never die,
but that which you do in this life
your destiny determines for your assumed next.
In other words: the life that you live now,
does not have intrinsic value in itself;
or, not in other words,
but in the words of motivational mega-preacher Rick Warren,
author of The Purpose Driven Life:
“Earth”, he says –
and I do not make this up, do you –
“Earth is the gathering place, the crèche, the training place for your eternal life.”
Life is only exercise material?
How insignificant can you make it?
Here is another one,
for what the immortal apostles of Silicon Valley can offer us,
is actually a worldly version of the same.
Even if you stay in your body according to them
instead of evaporating to a higher reality.
There is Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal,
that says – literally –
“If people think they will die, that will be demotivating.”
(Laughter)
There will be more!
(Laughter)
“The idea of immortality,” he says, “is motivating.”
As one of the people who is crazy enough to believe that they will die,
I find his nonchalance baffling.
He reduces human existence to his management jargon,
to tjakkaa level.
He seems to think that our lives do not matter because we will die
and assumes that life can be captured in a spreadsheet,
in which you can simply calculate its value in years.
What brings us out of bed in Thiel’s world,
is not that we want to enjoy this life,
but the hope that we will stay out of bed forever in the morning.
Personally, I think that is a very depressing thought.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thiel’s dream is my nightmare.
(Laughter)
And if you think about it
maybe yours too.
Practical considerations aside,
like who can afford an eternal life?
Maybe you worry less about it as a billionaire,
but still:
how many billion you have,
it is only a drop in the financial ocean of eternity.
Let us imagine an eternal life instead,
what it would be like to keep going,
like that pink toy bunny in those old battery ads
which continued to hit his drum.
(Laughter)
In fact, we also have an idea of what that would be like.
You hear it from how we talk.
When we tell that we were at a lecture
which did not seem to end,
or complaining about endless chattering,
or describe a bad movie as an incense.
Consciously or not, we realize that without end
life would become a matte, characterless plain,
an endless series of events, literally ad infinitum.
Endlessness would suck the vitality out of our existence,
to remove the sentence.
What would be left is a feeling of boredom and futility,
so typical of chronic depression.
So never dying is the last thing I want.
I have no desire for eternal life,
for immortality is not something to be worshiped;
on the contrary, it is just a curse.
Think of that Greek myth
in which Sisyphus pushes his boulder infinitely against the hill
and never reached the top.
Or to ghost and vampire stories,
in which the living dead are doomed to endless, shadowy sham lives.
Or even a cartoon character like Superman,
doomed to never be able to lead an ordinary Clark Kent life,
never being able to live, love and die as a normal person.
We can not live without endings,
because the most fundamental end is in us ingrained:
our ability to die,
our mortality,
makes humanity just as special.
We are finite beings in eternity,
and if we have an eye for this,
reinforces our appreciation for the fact that we exist,
gives the floor to the idea of life as a journey.
Mortality does not invalidate the sentence.
It produces meaning.
It keeps me in the lesson.
It says:
“Enjoy it!
It is not obvious!
Write the next book!
Laugh with your friends!
Get out!
Eat another dozen oysters! “
(Laughter)
Because it’s not about how long I live,
but how I live
and I’m going to do my best –
until the end.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Most people must have nothing of death,
but that’s what I have with parties.
(Laughter)
I’m not a kittens-and-calf person,
so pour in a few drinks
and you never know what comes out.
(Laughter)
So that happened on such an occasion,
halfway through the second martini.
I got into conversation
with someone who thinks you can stay young forever
you know that, visions of an extremely long life
from Silicon Valley billionaires who think they should never die.
One of them was even prided
that he took 150 food supplements every day
to escape death –
it must have cost him at least one hour a day,
let alone his stomach wall.
(Laughter)
The guy I spoke to did not seem surprised.
He was half my age –
no, something younger.
I was clearly more certain that he would die than himself,
where he mistakenly concluded that I would be terrified of it.
It surprised him that it was not.
He seemed to take my nonchalance more seriously
as a confession of a kind of failure on my part.
“Why would you accept avoidable limits?” he said.
“Biotechnology can put an end to aging,
maybe even die of it. “
And then it popped out.
(Laughter)
“But what is wrong with dying?” I asked.
He was struck dumb,
and I actually too.
I never intended to ask this specific question.
I had never formulated it so directly,
but now that it hung there, in the liquor air between us,
(Laughter)
it seemed to hit the nail on the head,
because we are afraid of death is assumed to be self-evident.
Ask people –
and I did that,
they usually do not at parties –
and most say: “Yes, of course!”
and would prefer to work straight away.
The psychologist William James
called death “the ominous decor”
and “the worm in the core of the human pursuit of happiness.”
Or the poet Philip Larkin,
which was very good at worming at the core of things
and wrote about awakening in horror of the “total eternal emptiness”.
I seem to be just as bad in taking things for granted
when I’m in parties.
If something is so obvious that you do not think about it anymore,
I start asking questions;
because if we take something for granted
Maybe that means that we have not thought about it properly.
You could say
that I had little choice to think about my death,
because I’ve been close to it a few times.
In the Middle East I was shot as a journalist,
I was bombed as a citizen
and threatened by right-wing villains.
But I came the closest by my own actions.
I lost control of my car
in corner three of a circuit in the Midwest of America
and it was like being in a painfully slow slow motion
turned upside down,
and again, and – yes – again.
And when I went through the air like that, I only had one thought
who repeated himself as a mantra:
“This”, I thought again and again, “is a very stupid death.”
(Laughter)
My first reaction,
when the car came to a stop and I was still alive,
was astonishment,
followed by a wave of gratitude
for who ever invented the crash helmet.
(Laughter)
Later I started to wonder:
“What is so stupid to die in such a way?”
What is actually an intelligent way to die?
(Laughter)
Why did I ask myself that question?
I could not think of anything other than: intellectual vanity.
After all, I was far too intelligent to die in a stupid way.
(Laughter)
It seems that not only my life is very dear to me,
but my death too –
even if I died once
unfortunately we can not enjoy it anymore.
I would then be able to enjoy more fun
and that is why it is good that I am not a believer.
Otherwise I would still be there,
in something called the ‘afterlife’.
And that is, with caution, a little pleasant prospect,
because that would not only mean that you never die,
but that which you do in this life
your destiny determines for your assumed next.
In other words: the life that you live now,
does not have intrinsic value in itself;
or, not in other words,
but in the words of motivational mega-preacher Rick Warren,
author of The Purpose Driven Life:
“Earth”, he says –
and I do not make this up, do you –
“Earth is the gathering place, the crèche, the training place for your eternal life.”
Life is only exercise material?
How insignificant can you make it?
Here is another one,
for what the immortal apostles of Silicon Valley can offer us,
is actually a worldly version of the same.
Even if you stay in your body according to them
instead of evaporating to a higher reality.
There is Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal,
that says – literally –
“If people think they will die, that will be demotivating.”
(Laughter)
There will be more!
(Laughter)
“The idea of immortality,” he says, “is motivating.”
As one of the people who is crazy enough to believe that they will die,
I find his nonchalance baffling.
He reduces human existence to his management jargon,
to tjakkaa level.
He seems to think that our lives do not matter because we will die
and assumes that life can be captured in a spreadsheet,
in which you can simply calculate its value in years.
What brings us out of bed in Thiel’s world,
is not that we want to enjoy this life,
but the hope that we will stay out of bed forever in the morning.
Personally, I think that is a very depressing thought.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thiel’s dream is my nightmare.
(Laughter)
And if you think about it
maybe yours too.
Practical considerations aside,
like who can afford an eternal life?
Maybe you worry less about it as a billionaire,
but still:
how many billion you have,
it is only a drop in the financial ocean of eternity.
Let us imagine an eternal life instead,
what it would be like to keep going,
like that pink toy bunny in those old battery ads
which continued to hit his drum.
(Laughter)
In fact, we also have an idea of what that would be like.
You hear it from how we talk.
When we tell that we were at a lecture
which did not seem to end,
or complaining about endless chattering,
or describe a bad movie as an incense.
Consciously or not, we realize that without end
life would become a matte, characterless plain,
an endless series of events, literally ad infinitum.
Endlessness would suck the vitality out of our existence,
to remove the sentence.
What would be left is a feeling of boredom and futility,
so typical of chronic depression.
So never dying is the last thing I want.
I have no desire for eternal life,
for immortality is not something to be worshiped;
on the contrary, it is just a curse.
Think of that Greek myth
in which Sisyphus pushes his boulder infinitely against the hill
and never reached the top.
Or to ghost and vampire stories,
in which the living dead are doomed to endless, shadowy sham lives.
Or even a cartoon character like Superman,
doomed to never be able to lead an ordinary Clark Kent life,
never being able to live, love and die as a normal person.
We can not live without endings,
because the most fundamental end is in us ingrained:
our ability to die,
our mortality,
makes humanity just as special.
We are finite beings in eternity,
and if we have an eye for this,
reinforces our appreciation for the fact that we exist,
gives the floor to the idea of life as a journey.
Mortality does not invalidate the sentence.
It produces meaning.
It keeps me in the lesson.
It says:
“Enjoy it!
It is not obvious!
Write the next book!
Laugh with your friends!
Get out!
Eat another dozen oysters! “
(Laughter)
Because it’s not about how long I live,
but how I live
and I’m going to do my best –
until the end.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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