If you don't want eternal life, then what do you want? What are your terminal goals/values? What are you ultimately aiming for? What is your existence reduced to? My point is that there is no worthy alternative to eternal life. At best, you'll just want to live forever under condition X. This could be, for example, health or happiness. But the truth is that maximizing lifespan involves not just health or happiness, but becoming techno-gods, conquerors of galaxies, beings of entirely new intellectual horizons. In the short term, in theory, it may be necessary to sacrifice something, but eternity is worth it. In practice, I think that the pursuit of eternity is a win-win. We will not lose anything, we will only gain. It is very unlikely that efforts to prolong life will lead to prolongation of an unhealthy period of life, most likely the opposite. And the willingness to be unhappy makes happy. There is nothing that so clearly points the way for humanity and for each individual in particular as immortalism.

A week ago it turned out to be a cool day by summer standards, it was +28°C, I decided to organize a Say Forever campaign. Hired a photographer. It was 11 am, there weren’t many people and part of the time was spent on a photo shoot, but we still managed to interview 35 people in exactly an hour. I think it is quite possible to interview 100 people per hour. 9 out of 35 people, when asked how many years they would like to live if scientists found a cure for old age, answered - forever. It is important to understand that you should not attach too much importance to these statistics, because when I asked one person if he knew what transhumanism was, he replied that he did not. And in general, I most likely already know the majority of people who want to live forever, there are no more than a thousand of them, because such a person will do something for this. Nevertheless, surveys show that we are not in a hopeless situation, there is something to work with. In my opinion, if you spend $100,000-200,000 on the development of Say Forever, hire a couple of dozen full-time activists, establish organizational processes, maintain social media and regularly create content, then Say Forever can change the world.

What kind of person are you? Let's get acquainted, tell your story. We need to increase the connectedness of the life extension community. My name is Yan Granat, I am from Kharkov, Ukraine, I am 25 years old. I have long been interested in the topic of radical life extension. Even as a child, I loved programs about space and quantum physics, and since then I have had a very physicalist view of the world. Man is a set of atoms. We (humanity), thanks to science and technology, are learning better and better how to manipulate matter. We can do stuff with photons, ions, electrons and other very small particles. Therefore, there was nothing strange for me in thoughts about somehow transforming the cells of my body in the future so that it would become better, for example, stop aging. I don't even know when I became an immortalist, the desire to improve myself on a cellular/molecular level to stop aging, it's such an obvious thought that I don't know when it came to my mind, it feels like I've always thought that way, just as I always knew that things are attracted to the Earth, and day follows night. What surprised me was that many people not only don’t believe in victory over aging, they are against it. I learned about the existence of such people probably 6-8 years ago, it really surprised me. People often become an immortalist not when they learn about the possibility of immortality (non-aging), but when a person finds out that someone does not believe in this possibility and there are even those who actively resist it. I used to think that I was just an ordinary person, that like everyone else I didn’t want to die, but it turned out that this is not a very popular point of view. And around the same time, I learned that scientific and technological progress was not moving as well as I thought. Apparently, there is no reason to believe that aging will be defeated in my lifetime. Then I began to slowly think about how to change the situation. After some time, I came across lectures and articles by @MikhailBatin. There is no turning back after several years of reading Mikhail, you become a hardened immortalist, you begin to want to act. A year ago, in January 2023, I began volunteering with @OpenLongevity. Namely, to generate transhumanistic pictures in Midjourney. Then I was very interested in it. I still do this sometimes. I began to communicate very closely with @DanilaImmortal and Misha, and also spend a lot of time in our chats and forums. I began to have new responsibilities and I asked for a job. I don’t have any expertise or hard skills, so the salary is modest, $150-300, but this allowed me to quit the factory where I worked before the war and to which I had to return after 8 months of the war, when the money accumulated from cryptocurrency trading ran out . I once managed to make about $1200 from $100. It was luck, I don't understand cryptocurrency, I'm just an enthusiast who got a little lucky. I ended up at the plant after I had to leave the University, where I was studying to become a programmer, due to hydronephrosis of the right kidney. This illness greatly reduced my productivity and drove me into depression due to constant severe pain (which I still have, but every year it bothers me less and less), so I lost my scholarship and I had to look for a job. Then the person closest to me died - my grandfather. It was a difficult time. Only now I understand how bad I felt then, at that moment I did not realize how suppressed my desire to live was, it seemed to me that everything was normal, that I was coping, but it was not so. Now, although there is a war, I am much happier because I am doing what I love - the fight for radical life extension, this really saved me: promoting the idea of ​​radical life extension on Twitter, building the Open Longevity community, organizing lectures and public discussions at our YouTube channels and the development of the @SayForeverOrg project. There are still many projects that are at the stage of internal discussion and planning. But now there are financial difficulties in their implementation and financial instability with salaries. I wouldn’t really want to go back to my old life, now I’m doing what I believe in and I’m doing pretty well. Unfortunately, there is no certainty that this will last long; it is a little demotivating. Having a regular income of $150 would help me a lot. I need $300 to live, I already have $150 a month, I agreed with @SF_Longevity for this amount in exchange for help in developing his account. If I had another $150 in regular income, I could focus 100% on what I consider important, fully devote myself to the fight for radical life extension. This is my story, to keep it going please consider supporting me on Patreon: patreon.com/yangranat ❗️ And tell us about yourself in the comments, how you came to the idea of radical life extension, what are you doing now, what are your plans?

The highlight of 2023 for me was meeting @MikhailBatin, volunteering at @OpenLongevity, and participating in the creation of @SayForeverOrg. Meeting with Mikhail is the most important event in my life at the moment. He is a sincere radical transhumanist who has been calling for the fight against death for many years. There's something sad about it, too, because what Mikhail wrote 15 years ago is not outdated to this day. And the point here is not that Misha wrote about the “eternal”: about the value of life and the unacceptability of death. No, Misha was also describing the field of life extension and trends in the science of aging. I was horrified when I decided to read his old materials, because what was described there is still relevant to this day. The search for biomarkers of aging, etc., all this was in trend even then and nothing has changed since then, not even the names of scientists. The field of life extension is in deep crisis. Even if there are some results, they do not correspond to the scale of the problem being solved. We, living people today, will not live to see a cure for aging. You need to realize this and give up all unimportant matters and start fighting death. Even if you are, for example, 25. I'm 25, and I think the likelihood of beating aging, in my lifetime, is extremely slim. Behind a bunch of marketing and wellness, there are no real breakthroughs or at least promising hypotheses; the science of aging is developing extremely slowly. Where is the 10-fold increase in the duration of mice? You can do almost anything with them, there are no ethical barriers. We need to try to do what the immortalists of the past could not - a mass movement to extend life. The task turned out to be more difficult than anyone thought; we need to try to focus our efforts not on the fight against aging itself, but on increasing the scale of this fight. 2 million dollars for science is almost guaranteed to yield no results. But if the same money is used for lobbying or the creation of immortalistic media, then the chances of changing something are more than zero. The same goes for effort and time spent. I'm going to focus my attention and time on activism, social media, community building, etc. Many people do not share this approach; they consider everything other than doing science to be useless. But it seems to me that this is the only way to really do something, because a lot of people who bet on science lost. Because there were too few of them, it is normal when 9999 out of 10,000 hypotheses do not work, it is not normal that in the field of aging there are so few people with any worthwhile hypotheses. One day someone will actually come up with a good theory/technology, but before that there will be 9999 failures. We need to find funding for 9999 failures. Some of these hypotheses are worth millions to test, so we really need to create a public demand and start funding these failures from government budgets. If you have an idea on how to defeat aging, believe in it, do everything to try to implement it. But if you are watching this from the outside, then understand that no matter who tells you that aging is about to be defeated, most likely it is not true. Most likely this is hypothesis number 2398, which really needs to be tested, it’s just absolutely incredibly important to test it, but which most likely will not work. Get ready to work, we will have to work very hard. In the field of social change, we will also need to try many hypotheses before we know what to do. I don't believe in a simple solution, even if there is one, it's not easy to find, I believe in long-term will + hard work.