‘Longevity’ is the buzzword of 2026, dividing the marie claire office in two: those who want to live forever, and those who absolutely do not.
Here, two opponents hash it out on the page.
Harriet Sim Is Deathly Afraid Of Death
I was eight when I developed a fear of death. There was no life-altering, earth-shattering event. In fact, conversations about death weren’t scary or taboo at home: Mum was 21 when she lost her mother, and I knew the story well.
But the realisation that death was inevitable and uncontrollable caught me suddenly and entirely off guard. To think that one day I would be nothing and nowhere on this earth was simply incomprehensible. The existential anxiety paralysed me.
The discovery was a turning point in my life. Even while watching movies, I could no longer laugh when a character died a comical death.
The permanence of death, even when fictional, left a heavy pit in my stomach. Death was not something to joke about.
At night, before I fell asleep, the same thought-spiral plagued me: one day, I will not exist. The inescapable nature of this reality was unbearable, yet I could not stop the thoughts. I had allowed the death discovery into my mind and now it had taken root.
As I got older and experienced the death of loved ones – my aunt when I was 13, my grandparents, and I lost my dad to cancer a couple of years ago – I felt more alone in my fear. I looked around and could not understand how everyone else appeared to accept death.
When I asked friends if they were afraid to die, the response was either a joke, that it couldn’t come soon enough because whatever they were going through was so unbearable, or that death is a future problem, so far away that it wasn’t worth thinking about.
I’ve since learnt that I have thanatophobia: a fear of death that means I’m not just a normal amount of anxious, I’m scared in a way that’s intense, irrational and can push me into a state of sweaty, panicked dread if I think too hard about it.
People with arachnophobia are advised to hold a spider, people with acrophobia are told to peer off the edge of a tall building. What am I supposed to do? I can’t face my fear without actually, you know, dying.
And so it stands to reason that I will have to live forever. Don’t get me wrong. From a practical standpoint, I understand that we must all die eventually.
A world where everyone lives forever is simply unsustainable. How would we all fit? What would the resource drain from overpopulation do to the planet? Would we all just end up killing each other off anyway?
It sounds like a dystopian horror story. Unfortunately, knowing this doesn’t lessen my fear of death (nor my resulting desire to never have to face my fears by living forever). Personally, I’d only want to live forever if I could do it like vampires or witches: at a snail’s pace, so when I’m 300 years old I still look 30.
While I hope the biohacking bros like Bryan Johnson might one day find the secret to longevity, I don’t wish to condemn myself to living off the blood of my first born to achieve it. I also don’t want to be on this planet alone, and I fear it would be too difficult to convince my family and friends to commit to a very extreme lifestyle for my own, selfish gain.
I do take some comfort in knowing that perhaps the 6.5 billion people who follow religion are onto something, and that there may well be an afterlife.
But for now, I’m trying to embrace the very few positives of death. In moments when I get embarrassed or stressed, I remind myself that one day I will be dead, so in the end nothing really matters. And that, I’ve found, has brought me a lot of comfort.
Caitlin Napier Has No Interest In Living Forever; Thanks Anyway
I am not excited about dying, let’s be clear. I do not relish the idea of losing the people I love, of ageing into a body that fails, of lying somewhere quiet and hoping I made the most of it.
The speed at which time already moves feels faintly alarming, and the knowledge that it will one day simply stop adds a layer of existential vertigo that never quite goes away.
And yet, I am not afraid of death, and the idea of living forever holds no appeal. Death has always registered less as a threat and more as a concept, something to contemplate rather than to fear.
I imagine it as being like before birth, which is to say, nothing at all. No awareness, no darkness, no sense of absence, just non-existence.
There will be no version of me left to register what has been lost, no consciousness hovering nearby to grieve itself, and that, to me, is comforting. In fact, I am glad that we die, that we are given such short, precious lives.
If immortality or even a significant extension of time were offered to me tomorrow, I would decline without hesitation, not because life is disappointing, but because it is meaningful, “Without an ending, everything becomes optional, and optional things are rarely cherished” and meaning relies on limits.
Permanence would flatten it. Endlessness would dilute it. The urgency that gives choices their weight and moments their intensity would dissolve into something vague and unpressured.
Without an ending, everything becomes optional, and optional things are rarely cherished. We already live in an age of extraordinary abundance. We can still swim in clean oceans, harvest the land and breathe fresh air, and opportunity remains theoretically endless if we have the means to reach it.
But we are also living on a planet that is visibly strained, its resources finite, its systems under pressure, its future increasingly uncertain, and I am not comforted by the idea of watching that deterioration unfold over centuries. If anything, I am relieved. There is a mercy in not having to witness the fallout of our own excess.
Which brings me, improbably, to Miley Cyrus, an unlikely oracle in my thinking about death. She has said she does not want children because she does not want to bring them into a world that cannot sustain them.
I may not share her choice, but I understand the logic: capacity matters, and desire alone is not a justification. The same reasoning shapes my relationship with mortality.
There is also the emotional arithmetic of immortality, which is rarely addressed with any seriousness. I do not want to outlive everyone I love and accumulate grief as a byproduct of staying. I do not want to become a kind of emotional archive of people and places that no longer exist.
There is something deeply unsettling about the fantasy of forever when it is paired with inevitable loss. The 2025 Bondi Beach shooting only sharpened that clarity. Watching the aftermath, the grief, the randomness of it, I was struck by how much violence and loss a single moment can carry.
With the population growing, conflict escalating and the world feeling increasingly volatile, I do not find comfort in the idea of witnessing centuries of that, and I find relief in knowing I will not. I do not believe we are built for endless experience or infinite accumulation.
We are built for phases, for seasons, for beginnings and endings, for the quiet dignity of closure. A life without edges would lose its shape.
I am glad that we die because it forces me to live with intention rather than postponement. This is a brief window in an enormous universe, and I would rather move through it awake, aware and unfinished than linger indefinitely, waiting for something that never needs to arrive.
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