On his Substack, Christopher Gage discusses how to shorten your life (but not for the usual reasons):
St George’s Nursing Home in Weston-Super-Mare. I’m sure the staff are fine, but this reminds me strongly of the hospice my grandmother ended her days in.
My Dharma or reason for being is devilishly simple: to maximise pleasure and to shuffle off this mortal coil before the nursing home beckons.
Fatally, at least for those with a yen for acronyms and self-hatred, my ultimate goal corrupts their hallowed SMART strictures. It is not quite specific. It is measurable. It is attainable. It is relevant. It is not time-based. I’m not resolved to stubbing out the fags, abandoning the booze, or chasing around Soho the doomed affections of neurotic artists. I refuse to wake at 5 a.m., invest in crypto, or bore my tastebuds with rainbow carrots.
I’ll take my cue from the great novelist, ardent womaniser, and prodigious piss artist, Kingsley Amis: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-Super-Mare”.
In an age which toggles between grind-culture puritanism and brain-rot hedonism, we must chart a more amenable path. So, the pursuit of pleasure, it is. I resolve to pursue pleasure deliberately, intelligently, doggedly, ethically and without apology — not to escape but to evolve.
Pleasure gets a bad name. What, with all our competing isms and illities. Those journeys of immiseration and self-loathing. One cannot move for ice baths and magnesium supplements and alcohol-free and protein-rich and wellness retreats and fucking motivational podcasts. Antisocial tech billionaires inject the blood of teenagers in a demented bid to live forever. It is a new secular puritanism. These longevity bros trade the profound depth of life for its mere length. They are terrified of death, yet terrified to actually live. It must stop.
For myself, I’m not at all eager to die, but I don’t view the mechanical prolongation of life as a worthwhile end in itself. Living a bit longer, but at the cost of giving up some or all of the things that make life worth living seems a particularly bad bargain. I’ve never smoked, so that quick’n’easy “stay healthy” recommendation doesn’t apply, but I enjoy drinking wine and beer. Not to excess, as I don’t enjoy being drunk, but as a social relaxant, a pleasure in its own right, something to look forward to at the end of a long day. Matching the right wine to the food on your plate is a worthwhile skill to develop, as it increases two pleasurable things at the same time.
