Hanna Thomas Uose on Immortality and Tech Bros
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Your debut novel Who Wants to Live Forever is out now with Brazen Books. Having come to the end of the process, would you recommend writing a novel?
It depends on who’s asking. I had never entertained the idea of writing a novel until I came up with the concept for Who Wants to Live Forever, and then it felt urgent that I kind of download it from my brain, because otherwise it would just go round and round in there.
So I recommend writing a novel if there is a topic or looping thought or rumination. But otherwise, if you don’t have that feeling or experience, I don’t know why you would write one, because it is very hard.
Before this, I mainly associated writing with a persuasion technique. Most of the other writing I had done before was for non-profits and campaigns, so the aim there was to persuade. This novel isn’t persuasive – it’s an expression and it’s asking a question.
Your novel raises questions about time. A new drug, Yareta, can extend lives from the current 80 years to as many as 200. It splits society apart, destroys relationships and has a huge impact on the formation of power and identity. It’s an amazing concept. How did you come to it?
It was the end of 2017. I suddenly had a question: what would happen if people started living much longer? I was thinking about the effect it would have on society and the implications on relationships.
How willing are we to let go of past versions of ourselves, and how much are we trying to grip onto what we think we have?
But then the second thought I had was, that would make an amazing story. And so I was just going around and talking about it a lot. I was preoccupied with all those themes about time passing and how much are we supposed to do with our lives, and by when. The idea engages with all those preoccupations in such a neat way that it took up all my attention.
In the book, there’s this ‘banana theory of time’ mentioned. Can you explain that a little?
That comes from a professor at Cambridge called Dr Ankur Barua. For him, it’s a pumpkin not a banana. He talks about the pumpkin and how overtime the pumpkin ripens. So if at one point you have a green pumpkin and at one point you have an orange pumpkin, how do you know that it’s the same pumpkin? Depending on your religious or philosophical worldview, there are two possibilities. One is that there’s an essence of the pumpkin that remains true over time. It doesn’t matter how it changes, there’s always some integral pumpkinness to it. The other side is that there are many different pumpkins that are sort of separated out into moments, connected by a string of time. This maps onto different world views and questions like ‘do we have a soul’. Most religions are probably a blend of the two theories. How willing are we to let go of past versions of ourselves, and how much are we trying to grip onto what we think we have?
I liked the way that was reflected in the texture of the prose. The characters bring in so many different memories as they’re moving through each scene so the past and present are always very close together.
The structure changed a lot during the editing process. The early drafts were told in linear time; it went from 2016 straight through to 2039. And then, because one of the major themes of the book is obviously time, my editor thought the form should represent this by switching in and out more.
Overall, I wanted to demonstrate how the choice to take the drug doesn’t necessarily result in a feeling of abundance of time, and that our sense of how much time we have left isn’t actually connected to reality. Which I think we know anyway, right? That as we age, our perception of time changes a lot. I didn’t want it to feel very straightforward that you took this drug and then you’re like, brilliant, or swimming in spare time.
By the end of the novel, I felt relieved that the drug didn’t exist. I like to believe that age happens to everybody, and that it is an equalizer, that it’s kind of irrevocable. Do you think that’s still the case?
No. There’s a research lab in Harvard dedicated to creating a drug like this. There’s a lot of money going into longevity research, by people like Bryan Johnson, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos. People are working very, very hard for something like this to come onto the market. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was available in the next 20 years.
For me, part of the urgency of writing this was because I do think it’s coming down the pipeline – certainly not for everyone, though, because it’ll be very inaccessible. Within the next 15 to 20 years, I would bet there’s going to be a group of people who are on some form of fairly effective longevity medication.
What do you think about our obsession with appearance?
I read something recently that I thought was really astute, that the tech bro quest for longevity is actually a lot about aesthetics, but they wrap it up in a moral and ethical question about legacy and how much they achieve. But then all the pictures they post are of their abs, or their very smooth skin and hair implants. It’s quite strange. So I think as a culture, we’re pretty confused because we’re incentivised to connect the idea of youth with the idea of goodness, which is such an old idea.
You can see it now with people taking Ozempic or with certain celebrities’ careers being revived. Christina Aguilera is freaking me out so much. You know, she looks exactly the same as she did 20 years ago.
In the world of the novel, ‘older age’ becomes the third most searched category on Pornhub. Fewer and fewer people look old so it becomes taboo, and therefore a fetish. Can you talk about the relationship between age and taboo?
In that particular instance, I was just thinking about how kinks or fetishes are created. That often it’s things that are sidelined or publicly shamed that will then be pursued in the shadow. If a drug like Yareta was widespread and there was less acceptance of aging, then I can see how old age might be pushed towards a niche sexual fetish. I mean it probably already is to some extent, but I just extrapolated out.
But I don’t think the novel contains predictions or recommendations. It is speculative. It’s just a thought experiment, you know, it’s like, oh, what would happen if this? Here’s one potential pathway. If the drug existed, loads of subcultures could crop up. There wouldn’t be one wholesale reaction. Everyone would react differently and so it would just add a whole lot of complexity, more than we have now, in terms of how death is treated in society.
It’s easy to understand that the people around you might die: it’s just much harder to understand that you will yourself.
And I’m not sure that there’s anything taboo about death and its processes, aside from general denial and a culture wide reluctance to admit that we as individuals will cease to exist, especially in the sense of our consumption habits – wanting to buy the next thing, and the next thing after that. Every time I buy something, now I just think, well this will probably be intact in like, 40 years, and I might well have died.
I think it’s easy to understand that the people around you might die and it’s just much harder, perhaps, to understand that you will yourself.
You’ve got a lot of experience in media and campaigning, and the novel really focuses on the behind-the-scenes aspect of publicity: the cameraman, the wires, the makeup artist. As somebody who is now coming into the limelight, how do you feel about having to communicate your ideas to the public?
I mean, it’s great. The whole aim of writing is to hear back, and to get the chance to engage in a discussion about it. I think it’d be very lonely to spend all this time writing something and then never know what other people were thinking as they read it. So I really appreciate it.
But maybe what does feel strange about it is that reading is a collaborative act, and the reader brings themself to it. And so what gets mirrored back is one step aside from what the author wrote. That’s hard to engage with, because it’s difficult to bridge the distance between what you meant when you wrote it, and what they’re taking from it now.
The whole novel seems obsessed with productivity, with people who are driven to make the most out of their lives through their career. What value do you think work brings to our lives?
I think it completely depends on what the work is. Is it work that we love or is it work that is foisted upon us for us to survive? It could be anything on that spectrum. It’s helping you pay your bills or helping you fulfil what you might consider to be your purpose in this lifetime.
But in terms of my own work ethic, I’m a real millennial. I’ve internalised the workings of capitalism and it’s hard to dig it out. I’m not sure how I can separate that out from my understanding of the world.
So on the one hand, I think you do have to be disciplined. When I am in a project, I don’t find it that hard to make myself work. I can be quite militaristic. You see progress, and it’s really satisfying.
On the other hand, if I just spend all year behaving like that, at the end of the year I can feel quite despondent that I haven’t had enough fun or enjoyed my year. Hard work is great if you’ve also got the time around it. But I think it’s very hard to have that time around it in our current political context and with the constraints of capitalism.
This all relates to how the drug heightens or concentrates power – rich people get richer. Are you worried about how innovations in technology and science can lead to oppression?
When I first thought of the idea, I wanted to feature both the rise and fall of this drug. In an ideal world, I would have included a sort of mass awakening and revolution.
But when I did try and map it out, I found that I couldn’t think past the near future in relation to a life-extending drug, because the consequences are so unpredictable. It has so many far-ranging effects.
I find it very easy to extrapolate out from the present moment and just think everything is shit and will be shit forever, but history shows us things don’t work like that. Mad things happen all the time that change the course of history. One hopes that there are not only technological innovations, but also social innovations, and those can come from anywhere.
So you’re not wholly pessimistic about it. That’s nice. The novel spans from Japan to LA but it’s mostly set in London and there’s an extremely tight Brexit-esque referendum on whether the drug should be legalised in the UK. How do you feel about the UK and its position in the world at the moment?
Not great. Everything’s falling apart, and it’s very hard to see how that trajectory will be reversed in the short term. I was just in Japan, and it’s a completely different political context and history, but things really work there. My father has really decent health care. The streets are clean. The quality of life is good, and the food’s amazing, and then coming back to London is a bit like, what a bummer.
Zadie Smith talks about this all the time, because she lived in New York for 12 years and now she’s back in London. That gap made the decline so obvious.
You’ve been writing this novel for quite a long time, so has your attitude towards time itself changed over the last few years?
I’ve worked through a lot of it. I don’t feel the same urgency around those questions about mortality and aging as I used to, which is great. I think the novel served its function because by writing it all down, it does feel like something I’ve now moved on from. And although I’ve moved on to other related questions, I’ll always be obsessed with the broader sense of what makes a good life and what we want to achieve in life.
The characters in the book who take the drug are frustrated; one wants to do a big thing with his music career and he can’t quite pull it off. And in writing the book, I really empathised with him, because I was hopeful that my own project could work out. Then when I actually sold the book, it felt like a full circle. It scratched that horrible, productivity itch. It was a ‘milestone achieved’ kind of thing.
There’s a line in the novel – ‘the flirtation with the imminent spectrum of oblivion’ – that summarises for me a YOLO attitude: the decision to go ahead and have the cigarette, that can make me feel younger, more so than the careful and studied application of moisturiser, mouth tape and sunscreen etc that people recommend online. Do you relate to that?
It’s just the human condition, isn’t it? Trying to accept the fact that you only ever get to be one person. As a child there’s not so much fear; you throw yourself off monkey bars or whatever, maybe because you have just emerged from the abyss, so the stakes are not very high. And then, as I got older, and I think this is common, you have a sense that there is more to lose. It suddenly becomes very frightening.
I had a phase in my 20s of only reading things on mountaineering, like Touching the Void, and Into Thin Air, about the biggest mountaineering disaster that ever happened on Everest. I was fascinated by it because this death wish was so alien to me. I was reading all this stuff to try and understand that mindset, especially when I had become quite risk averse myself, because I couldn’t relate to a desire to be very close to that physical and metaphysical abyss.
As a teenager, I was very militantly atheist, and that was partly why I was preoccupied with it. I had been raised to be Christian and go to Sunday school, but in my teen years I parted from that and had an atheistic revelation which left me very scared about what happens after life. Interestingly, Bryan Johnson, the tech guy interested in longevity, was raised as an evangelical Mormon, but then he basically just realised he didn’t believe in God. Effectively he freaked out, and then all this desperate search for immortality came out of it.
I wasn’t an evangelical Mormon, by any means, but we’re actually quite similar, and have the same preoccupations, except he’s taken it in a really extreme direction and I’ve pivoted towards a much more Buddhist perspective which I try and bring into the novel: how all of these questions or preoccupations are actually limited by our human perspective. I mean, ultimately, we’ve got no idea. There are way more possibilities than we might realise.
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Hanna Thomas Uose was born in Tokyo and grew up in Essex, Birmingham and Oxford. She attended the University of East Anglia and received an MA in Prose Fiction. Prior to that, she worked in campaigns and advocacy. Who Wants to Live Forever, her first book, won the Morley Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour, was shortlisted for the Space to Write Project (Orion/David Higham Associates/Arvon/Metro) and was selected for the Asian Women Writers mentorship programme. She lives in London.
Isabel Brooks is a writer living in London.
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