Medical Technologies, Time, And The Good Life Part 2

The repression of the fact that our life is passing, which anti-aging medicine abets through its means of masking and concealing the signs of aging, is also not a satisfactory solution. This is because it is, at its very core, based on an illusion. At least until now, the passing of time alias the aging process cannot be arrested or reversed. It is true that the mean life expectancy has grown and that more and more people reach an older age in a healthy condition. This is undoubtedly an advance that owes much to medical and economic developments. If anti-aging medicine is understood as a way of shaping good aging, it can certainly make an important contribution to more and more people reaching a healthy and good old age.  However, this is not the same as promising that the aging process can be arrested or reversed. The youthful and attractive appearance and the health and fitness that aging people can obtain through anti-aging treatments and regimes are still different from the beauty, attractiveness, and health that the young enjoy. Older people must always fight against aging to maintain their youthful appearance. The youthful mask must constantly be touched up and done so ever more frequently because whilst time may have been concealed, it has in no way been suspended. The individual who wants to suppress time risks ending up becoming the slave of passing time in that they are always trying to get ahead of time to sustain the illusion (Bozzaro, 2014). To bring about this standstill of appearance and maintain it-the aging person can no longer stand still. The individual is in danger of falling into a spiral that constantly accelerates. Once in it, there is no escaping this spiral as long as a person wants to maintain the illusion of eternal youth. The paradox and actual danger of this effort of repression ultimately stem from this: Individuals desperately trying to stop time eventually find they have squandered away the life that is present in exchange. In a way, they subject themselves to the dominion of time, as in their attempt to ´trick time´, they take on its restless movement. This becomes clear, for example, when we use Botox and can’t stop because then the youthful appearance crumbles right away. We have to spend more and more time performing procedures,   which paradoxically leads to a constant preoccupation with our aging process.

Glycoside of cistanche can also increase the activity of SOD in heart and liver tissues, and significantly reduce the content of lipofuscin and MDA in each tissue, effectively scavenging various reactive oxygen radicals (OH-, H₂O₂, etc.) and protecting against DNA damage caused by OH-radicals. Cistanche phenylethanoid glycosides have a strong scavenging ability of free radicals, a higher reducing ability than vitamin C, improve the activity of SOD in sperm suspension, reduce the content of MDA, and have a certain protective effect on sperm membrane function. Cistanche polysaccharides can enhance the activity of SOD and GSH-Px in erythrocytes and lung tissues of experimentally senescent mice caused by D-galactose, as well as reduce the content of MDA and collagen in lung and plasma, and increase the content of elastin, have a good scavenging effect on DPPH, prolong the time of hypoxia in senescent mice, improve the activity of SOD in serum, and delay the physiological degeneration of lung in experimentally senescent mice With cellular morphological degeneration, experiments have shown that Cistanche has the good antioxidant ability and has the potential to be a drug to prevent and treat skin aging diseases. At the same time, echinacoside in Cistanche has a significant ability to scavenge DPPH free radicals and has the ability to scavenge reactive oxygen species and prevent free radical-induced collagen degradation, and also has a good repair effect on thymine free radical anion damage.

Click On Cistanche Herba

【For more info:george.deng@wecistanche.com / WhatApp:86 13632399501】

As mentioned above, anti-aging medicine is not a homogeneous field. While some only aim to postpone aging, others explicitly aim to avoid death by aging and wish to gain the possibility of reaching the age of 200 or even 500 years. Regarding the latter, a further remark is needed: The wish for immortality has always been present in the history of humankind. It was there when The Epic of Gilgamesh was written, and at the time when Lucas Cranach the Elder painted his famous The Fountain of Youth. In many nations, medical and technological progress, such as the development of antibiotic therapy and vaccines, has helped to achieve an average life expectancy that is already twice that of our ancestors, just in the last century. None would question that this is a great, even amazing development. But the fact is: Despite the advancements already made, humankind still wants to gain even more time. This demonstrates that, in the end, we remain unsatisfied. Perhaps one might consider that gaining more and more time is not what matters.

The attempts at using physical-/neuro-enhancement and other technologies to gain time by speeding up the processes involved in our work and actions have certainly been successful when it comes to some activities. Writing a text on a computer is faster than with quill and ink, whereas taking Ritalin can help one to prepare better and faster for an exam. Nevertheless, it does not appear that such technologies decelerate the rhythms of an individual life or those of society. Rather, the opposite seems true. The problem with the logic of modern capitalism and societal acceleration is that these become more and more self-reinforcing. As individuals evolve to keep up with societal acceleration, the number of tasks expected of them increases  - as do the ´must-do´ experiences they should not miss out on. For example, although the use of Ritalin makes exam preparation go faster, what students are expected to accomplish has changed, too. Students are supposed to graduate as soon as possible to then get a good job. The time “saved” by acceleration, by being able to prepare faster for an exam, is immediately ´consumed´ as the next exam is waiting. The problem of the economic principle and acceleration is that they have no end goal but tend to become an end in and of themselves.

The strategy of increasing acceleration and maximization is effective from the perspective of an economic system that tends just to gain more and more from an individual’s work. But at least from the perspective of the individual  “caught up” in the system, this strategy can turn out to be dangerous. Contemporary individuals must rush through their lives to gain more time and meet more and more expectations up to the point of exhaustion, or until they are completely spent and collapse. The spread of ´epochal illnesses,´ such as depression or burnout, could be interpreted as the downside to this acceleration (Ehrenberg, 2009; Han,  2015).

4 The passing of time is a chance to pose the question of a good life

As we have seen, the problem with the finitude and fugacity of time in individualized and consumerist societies becomes a problem of choice. It is a problem of an overload of possibilities of choice in the face of a limited time window in which to realize them. Thus, the anguish of missing out on the most important, or ´the best´ is even becoming a basic feeling in the lives of contemporary individuals. The suffering from the passing of time is due to several factors: the fear of making the wrong choice;   the frustration of having to choose at all; not being allowed to learn through trial and error; not being able to do all the things we want due to a lack of time; and the overwhelming number of possibilities there are to choose from. Concurrently, the passing of time also makes reaching a decision urgent, and among other things,   painful. Since time cannot be turned back, decisions cannot simply be undone. Moreover, missed opportunities often do not return. This, as Thomas Fuchs (Fuchs, 2013)  demonstrated, is exactly the ´unlived life´ that can become the cause of new suffering in the form of failure and regret.

We have seen that attempts to use medical technology to buy more time and alleviate decision-making pressure have met with only limited success and cannot be seen as a means of achieving a good life. Is there a different way to deal with the finitude and fugacity of one’s lifetime to reach a good life? To answer this question, we need to first clarify this: When it comes to making choices about our lives, the real challenge is that we cannot foresee the consequences and impact our decisions will have in the future. Further, we also do not have an overview of, and cannot predict, the entire scope of future scenarios and events in our lives. We must design our lives blindly and we often can only judge in retrospect what consequences a decision has had, and the entirety of the worth of what we have experienced. The future-oriented perspective of our own life changes when we reach old age. Old age is often seen as a phase of life where, due to typical age-related actions and constraints, we can no longer actively participate in life. Through the distance that we gain - or are forced to take - towards active life, we can gain a more comprehensive view of our life’s course (Rentsch, 2016). When we have this distanced view of our own life story, we can begin to realize what was right and important, and also what was wrong or irrelevant. Admittedly, such insights seem useless for one’s existence if one only derives them at the point when one’s own life that has been crafted is ending - and it is no longer possible to live that particular life differently. But for those still young enough to shape their way of life, it could be important to know how to anticipate this knowledge. Could this be possible?

To answer this question, some of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s thoughts are relevant. Kierkegaard can be considered the founder of existentialism, a   philosophical tradition concerned with the individual and his attitude and responsibility toward his own life. He was one of the first philosophers to address existential states of anxiety or despair. He dealt extensively with the existential challenges of  Either/Or in the face of the finitude of human life (Kierkegaard, 2004) and inspired many other existentialist philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. In doing so, Kierkegaard developed some ideas that are relevant to the question of the good life lived under the conditions of late modern and contemporary societies. In his short essay At a Graveside (Kierkegaard, 2000), Kierkegaard invites the individual to take an earnest attitude towards their temporality. By this, he means each individual must “rehearse thinking about their death” - about their finitude. In the passage, The Decisiveness of Death, a subsection of his book Three Discourses on  Imagined Occasions, Kierkegaard introduces three important aspects relevant to his understanding of the concept of time and the perception of the role of death, or more specifically, of the awareness of finitude. First, he notes that the passing of time cannot be arrested and that all human efforts to bring time to a standstill are destined to fail. Accordingly, he would also understand the attempts described above to influence the passing of time through medical technology as useless. The second aspect is that time not only passes relentlessly, but it also sweeps the individual away with it. This means, as already noted above, that time forces one to follow its course in that the individual must continuously handle what comes and goes with time. In other words,   one cannot put one’s life on ´hold´; it is not possible to just step out of the own temporal course of life. Accordingly, Kierkegaard would probably consider it ridiculous to attempt to stop the passing of time, for example by masking aging. Thirdly, the philosopher wrote that death itself has an earnest attitude, as ´its decision´ is always a final one. Whilst the living believe they can always revise, suspend, or postpone decisions, death is radical and non-negotiable. The ´earnest person´ understands that in the moment of death, everything is over. The earnestness of death rouses the living to wakefulness because it signals us that our time is limited and therefore, worthwhile.  It also gives us the responsibility of investing our time wisely.

Here, Kierkegaard transforms the negative domination of passing time into something positive by showing that a lifetime is something precious precisely because of its finiteness, and that time, through its transience, allows us to determine for ourselves how we want to deal with this rare commodity. What Kierkegaard proposes with his thought on the earnest is a form of meditation mortise. But his proposal differs from the meditation Mortis tradition of the Baroque period because it is life oriented. His thinking about earnestness is a temporal movement of repetition.  This is indeed oriented at the beginning towards the future and its ending - death -   but only up to a turning point. After arriving at this turning point, we are to turn our attention back to life, meaning to our present. Anticipating the future here does not mean sorrowfully expecting what the future will bring, and neither is it to be understood as anticipatory planning for one’s future. Repetition is a dual movement:  The goal that it is striving to achieve - an overview of the entirety of one’s own life  - will never be reached completely, or once and for all, as this would mean one’s own life has ended. On the contrary, the movement will always refer to the place of its beginning: the present where an individual currently funds themselves. However, the goal is constantly being reached in that it lies in the repetition itself, which is always gaining something new by assimilating the anticipated. Through identifying the dual movement with the successful relationship to the self, Kierkegaard raises the present above the other two aspects of time, the future and the past. He does this because it is only in the present that the synthesis - the dual movement - always returns anew to its beginning and endpoint. When broken down, this means that mentally anticipating one’s future, which is a confrontation with one’s ideas of what that future should be and what one would like to look back upon one day, can be helpful to craft our presence accordingly. In doing so, it would certainly make sense to also keep in mind the partially unavailable nature of life. A life can only be good, or well-lived, when its subject neither persists in remaining in the past, nor gets lost in the future, but rather lives in the present that holds both past and future. While the technologies described above assume the individual must struggle against time and its passing to wrest more life from temporality, Kierkegaard is concerned with appropriating the temporality of one’s own life.

5 Conclusions

The described suffering from the passing of time is an expression of suffering from the finitude and fugacity of the individual possibilities in a lifetime and the accompanying necessity of making decisions - and when doing so, irreversibly discarding other options.

Regarding the question of how to deal with the temporal structure of one’s own life: What matters is not - or at least not solely - the quantity, but the quality of the own lifetime. One important aspect which causes suffering due to our finite and fugacious lifetime is the fact that time passing by forces people to choose between some life projects and experiences, while consequently having to exclude others. In individualist and consumerist societies, more and more people seem to find it difficult to make choices in the face of the unlimited possibilities of self-fulfillment they are confronted with. The necessary condition for being able to make good choices is to have an idea of what is ´good´ or what a good life is. It is a matter of course that especially in pluralistic societies, the question of criteria that can be used to make a ´good choice´   in life is difficult to explore since there are very different ideas of what is good.

Nevertheless, even if the use of techniques like social egg freezing, anti-aging medicine, and physical- and neuro-enhancement can, in some individual cases, free people from the challenges of temporality, this does not necessarily mean that those are good means to achieve a good life. This is because the question of the good life is not dependent on merely expanding a lifetime. That would instead make it possible to postpone the connected challenge of confronting ourselves with the question of what a good life is repeatedly. There are of course people who are not interested in realizing a good life, and thus are concerned with temporality only under the motto carpe diem. For those who just want to ´seize the day´, the use of enhancement techniques might bring the ´benefit´ of gaining more time for experiencing delight. However as already described, people like this should keep in mind that such techniques also contain the risk of undesirable side effects.

For people, though, who are concerned with the question of a good life and aim to live one, it is not possible to avoid confrontation with their temporality.  Even if this confrontation can be experienced as a painful one, it can also represent an opportunity. When confronted with the necessity of making valuable choices, one must pose the question: What is good, meaningful, and valuable for one´s own life?  Temporality does not answer, but it allows us to pose this question. Confronting oneself with this question is surely not the guarantee for a good life,   but it is perhaps the first step to achieving one.

Declarations

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,   which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative  Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

References

1. Abbott, A. (2019). The first hint is that body’s ‘biological age can be reversed. Nature, 573(7773), 173. 

2. Allhof, F., Lin, P., & Steinberg, J. (2011). Ethics of human enhancement: An executive summary. Science and engineering ethics, 17(2), 201–212 

3. Alteri, A., Pisaturo, V., Nogueira, D., & D’Angelo, A. (2019). Elective egg freezing without medical indications. Acta obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 98(5), 647–652.

4. Amir, M. (2007). Bio-temporality and social regulation: The emergence of the biological clock. Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, 18, 47–72 

5. Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). Modern moral philosophy1. Philosophy, 33(124), 1–19 

6. Baldwin, K. (2019). Timing motherhood. In Egg freezing, fertility, and reproductive choice. Emerald Publishing Limited. DOI 

7. Baldwin, K., Culley, L., Hudson, N., & Mitchell, H. (2019). Running out of time: exploring women’s motivations for social egg freezing. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology, 40(2), 166–173.   

8. Bauman, Z. (2013). The individualized society. John Wiley & Sons 

9. Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences. Sage 

10. Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1988). Die Kinderfrage: Frauen zwischen Kinderwunsch und Unabhängigkeit. Beck 

11. Binstock, R. H. (2003). The war on “anti-aging medicine”. The Gerontologist, 43(1), 4–14. 

12. Bozzaro, C. (2014). Das Leiden an der verrinnenden Zeit: Eine ethisch-philosophische Untersuchung zum  Zusammenhang von Alter, Leid und Zeit am Beispiel der Anti-Aging-Medizin. Frommann-Holzboog  Verlag 

13. Bozzaro, C. (2018). Is egg freezing a good response to socioeconomic and cultural factors that lead women to postpone motherhood? Reproductive Biomedicine Online, 36(5),594–603.

14. Budds, K., Locke, A., & Burr, V. (2013). “Risky Business” constructed the “choice” to “delay” motherhood in the British press. Feminist Media Studies, 13(1), 132–147. 

15. Callahan, D. (2009). Women, work, and children: Is there a solution? Reprogen-ethics and the future of gender (pp. 91–104). Springer

16. Carroll, K., & Kroløkke, C. (2018). Freezing for love: Enacting ‘responsible’ reproductive citizenship through egg freezing. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 20(9), 992–1005. 

17. Coontz, S. (2004). The world-historical transformation of marriage. Journal of Marriage and the Family,  974–979. 

18. Daly, I., & Bewley, S. (2013). Reproductive aging and conflicting clocks: King Midas’ touch. Reproductive Biomedicine Online, 27(6), 722–732. 

19. De Grey, A., & Rae, M. (2007). Ending aging: The rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime. St. Martin’s Press 

20. DuPont, R. L., Coleman, J. J., Bucher, R. H., & Wilford, B. B. (2008). Characteristics and motives of college students who engage in nonmedical use of methylphenidate. American Journal on Addictions,  17(3), 167–171. 

21. Ehrenberg, A. (2009). The weariness of the self: Diagnosing the history of depression in the contemporary age.  McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP 

22. Eriksson, C., Larsson, M., & Tydén, T. (2012). Reflections on having children in the future—interviews with highly educated women and men without children. Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences, 117(3),  328–335. 

23. Fries, J. F. (2005). The compression of morbidity. The Milbank Quarterly, 83(4), 801 

24. Fuchs, T. (2013). Temporality and psychopathology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12(1),  75–104. DOI 

25. Goldin, C. (2006). The quiet revolution transformed women’s employment, education, and family.  American Economic Review, 96(2), 1–21. 

26. Goold, I., & Savulescu, J. (2009). In favor of freezing eggs for non-medical reasons. Bioethics, 23(1),  47–58. 

27. Han, B. C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press 

28.Hayek, F. A. (2012). Law, legislation, and liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy. Routledge 

29. Hodes-Wertz, B., Druckenmiller, S., Smith, M., & Noyes, N. (2013). What do reproductive-age women who undergo oocyte cryopreservation think about the process as a means to preserve fertility? Fertility and Sterility, 100(5),1343–1349. e1342. 

30. Illouz, E. (2012). Why love hurts: A sociological explanation. Polity 

31. Jones, B. P., Kasaven, L., L’Heveder, A., Jalmbrant, M., Green, J., Makki, M. … Saso, S. (2020). Perceptions, outcomes, and regret following social egg freezing in the UK; a cross-sectional survey. Acta  Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 99(3), 324–332. 

32. Kierkegaard, S. (2000). Three discourses on imagined occasions 

33. Kierkegaard, S. (2004). Either/or: A fragment of life. Penguin UK 

34. Klatz, R. (2009). The official anti-aging revolution: Stop the clock time is on your side for a younger,   stronger, happier you: Easyread edition. 

35. Lad, M., & Harrison, N. (2012). Smarter, faster, harder. BMJ, 345. 

36. Lockwood, G. M. (2011). Social egg freezing: The prospect of reproductive ‘immortality or a dangerous delusion? Reproductive Biomedicine Online, 23(3), 334–340.

37. MacIntyre, A. (2013). After virtue. A&C Black 

38. Marquard, O., Gadamer, H. G., Baumgartner, H. M., Zimmerli, W. C., Wagner, B., & Liebel, H. (1995).  Menschliche Endlichkeit und Kompensation: Bamberger Hegelwochen 94’. Opus 

39. McDermott, H., Lane, H., & Alonso, M. (2021). Working smart: The use of ‘cognitive enhancers’ by UK   university students. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 45(2), 270–283. 

40. Mills, M., Rindfuss, R. R., McDonald, P., & Te Velde, E. (2011). Why do people postpone parenthood?  Reasons and social policy incentives. Human Reproduction Update, 17(6), 848–860. 

41. Myers, C., Daily, Z., & Jain, J. (2015). Why do so few women return to utilize cryopreserved oocytes?  Qualitative insights into elective oocyte cryopreservation. Fertility and Sterility, 103(2), e30.  

42. Perrier, M. (2013). No right time: The significance of reproductive timing for younger and older mothers’   moralities. The Sociological Review, 61(1), 69–87.

43. Peterkin, A. L., Crone, C. C., Sheridan, M. J., & Wise, T. N. (2011). Cognitive performance enhancement: Misuse or self-treatment? Journal of Attention Disorders, 15(4), 263–268. 

44. Rentsch, T. (2016). Aging as becoming oneself: A philosophical ethics of late life. In The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging (pp. 347–364). Springer 

45. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press 

46. Sandel, M. (1982). Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge University Press 

47. Schöne-Seifert, B., & Talbot, D. (2010). (Neuro-)enhancement. In Ethics in Psychiatry (pp. 509–530). Springer 

48.Schües, C. (2014). Improving deficiencies? Historical, anthropological, and ethical aspects of the human condition. In The human enhancement debate and disability (pp. 38–63). Springer 

49. Schwartz, B., & Cheek, N. N. (2017). Choice, freedom, and well-being: Considerations for public policy. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 106.

50. Shkedi-Rafd, S., & Hashiloni-Dolev, Y. (2011). Egg freezing for age-related fertility decline: Preventive medicine or a further medicalization of reproduction? Analyzing the new Israeli policy. Fertil Steril, 96(2), 291–294.

51. Smajdor, A. (2009). Between fecklessness and selfishness: Is there a biologically optimal time for motherhood? In Reprogen-ethics and the future of gender (pp. 105–117). Springer 

52. Stein, F. (2018). Selling Speed: Management Consultants, Acceleration, and Temporal Angst. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 41(S1), 103–117. 

53. Stoop, D., Maes, E., Polyzos, N. P., Verheyen, G., Tournaye, H., & Nekkebroeck, J. (2015). Does oocyte banking for anticipated gamete exhaustion influence future relational and reproductive choices? A follow-up of bankers and non-bankers. Human Reproduction, 30(2), 338–344.

54. Taylor, C. (1992). The ethics of authenticity. Harvard University Press 

55. Ullis, K. (2012). Age right: Turn back the clock with a proven, personalized, anti-aging program. Simon and Schuster 

56. Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and politics: An essay on dromology, Mark Polizzotti (Trans.) New York: Semiotext (e), 52 

57. Waldby, C. (2015). ‘Banking time’: egg freezing and the negotiation of future fertility. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 17(4), 470–482. 

58. Weber-Guskar, E. (2018). Debating social egg freezing: Arguments from phases of life. Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy, 21(3), 325–333. 

59. Weistuch, C., Mujica-Parodi, L., Amgalan, A., & Sultan, S. F. & Dill, K. A. (2020). Ketone Diets can reverse some brain activities that are lost in aging. Biophysical Journal, 118(3), 288a

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral about jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

【For more info:george.deng@wecistanche.com / WhatApp:86 13632399501】