Death Has Terrible Customer Service

Diego’s worldview on longevity and mortality

Most people enter a conversation about death expecting a certain amount of dignified acceptance. There will be seasons. There may be a candle. Someone will explain that the finitude of the flower is precisely what makes the flower beautiful.

Diego would like to know who is repairing the flower.

The first thing to understand about his immortalism is how early it occupies the building. It is downstairs from his politics, older than his involvement in Effective Altruism, and underneath much of his philosophy of mind. In August 2026, looking back at his childhood, he described a decision that had crystallized by eight:

Basically I saw death at age 4, understood it by 6, and established a resolute unwyelding intention "ABSOLUTELY NOT" by 8. This intention has guided the entirety of my life.¹

The child has subsequently acquired a PhD, several intellectual movements, an extensive acquaintance with the relevant Englishmen, and more elaborate vocabulary. The decision remains recognizably the same.

The complaint

His most systematic statement, the March 2023 post My Opinions About Death, begins by declining much of the usual philosophical ceremony:

To me death is a bad thing, an obvious bad thing, and a mostly technical problem.²

He regards the cessation of a person as a disaster that humans should investigate and prevent. Its ancientness gives it no moral authority. Its naturalness supplies no permission slip. The fact that it happens to everyone makes the scale of the disaster larger.

Nor does he accept the familiar claim that mortality supplies the meaning that life would otherwise lack. In his account, the pleasures, relationships, discoveries, and projects are doing almost all that work themselves. His estimate is characteristically unwilling to remain a tasteful generality:

Death doesn't give nearly any meaning to life, I would say the sum total of meaning that is conferred by death itself is less than 2% for sure.²

Even the flower has received a numerical assessment.

This does not mean that he finds every response to mortality empty. He is moved by people's capacity to remain kind when they know they are approaching their end. To him, their generosity under that pressure says something beautiful about humanity. But the beauty belongs to the people. It does not retrospectively turn what threatens them into a benefactor.

He also takes the absence of an afterlife literally. The dead are not sitting in a quiet waiting room, bored but available for an eventual reunion. For Diego, death ends experience. The loss is therefore not primarily a disagreeable experience one has while dead. It is the loss of the person who could have kept experiencing anything at all.

That distinction reaches into his ethics. He resists an accounting in which one person living a long, happy life and a succession of people living shorter lives become interchangeable whenever the happiness totals match. The interrupted life has lost something that cannot be repaired merely by printing another entry in the happiness column:

For me, dying itself removes moral goodness from a life, as it is extremely tragic that we are bound to die.²

The people who remain also suffer losses, and he counts those too. Death's damage spreads through relationships; it does not stop at the border of the dying person's body. But the individual's own destruction already matters before the bereaved have entered the calculation.

Please retain the people

There is a familiar defense of generational turnover: people become rigid, old ideas ossify, and funerals allow progress to resume. Diego knows this argument. He simply refuses its proposed maintenance schedule.

If the problem is that human brains stop revising their beliefs, then making brains more revisable becomes another engineering and cultural project. Killing their owners is an extraordinarily expensive workaround:

Once we end aging and disease, we have litarally all the time in the world to figure out how to make people change their minds over the long run. Just make sure there is a long run to begin with.²

This is a recurring movement in his thought: isolate what is actually undesirable, then ask whether it can be changed without destroying everything valuable attached to it. Aging bundles together frailty, limitations, changing appearances, social displacement, and eventually death. Diego wants the package opened. He does not accept that acquiring another birthday must involve surrendering another piece of the capacity to enjoy it.

The same sensibility appears outside manifestos. Watching the Friends reunion in 2021, he found aging newly personal: these familiar people had accompanied his own life, and suddenly the passage of decades was visible on them. He could appreciate their reunion and the lives that continued after the show's peak while still grieving the disappearance of a particular era. His question became whether friendship, liveliness, and a durable social world could continue together. Growing older had presented a set of doors; he wanted an additional one built.³

When Daniel Dennett died in 2024, Diego wrote about the philosopher's range, the pleasure of meeting him, and the years spent studying his work. Then the tribute became a request for urgent repairs:

Aging and death sucks and we need to fix that stuff immediately.⁴

There is affection in the impatience. He wants the minds he admires to encounter the future they helped make imaginable. Books are wonderful. A world that still contains the author can contain the next conversation too.

Nor does the feeling begin and end with celebrated human intellects. In 2017, he wrote about a dog dying in his hands after being hit by a car. His attention moved from the particular animal to the vanished possibilities of its life:

There is so much world to see out there, and so many cool things to do, it is really a calamity when someone is run over by a car, by aging, by some disease or in most cases even by suicide.⁵

Aging belongs in that sentence beside the car. Both interrupt a creature that could have gone on doing things.

An enthusiast with a changing forecast

His certainty about wanting to live should not be confused with an unchanging expectation that he will manage it. The desire has been unusually stable. The forecast has wandered through some dreadful neighborhoods.

As a teenager, he found the early anti-aging community and began helping Aubrey de Grey's work remotely. The discovery mattered because someone was treating his childhood objection as a project. Here were people asking how death might be postponed, rather than explaining why a well-adjusted boy ought to stop objecting.⁶

By 2012, he was investigating whether ordinary biomedical progress, even without cryonics or a technological singularity, might reverse aging within his lifetime. This was not a question for a decorative reading list. Its answer could determine whether he devoted substantial working time to acquiring the resources needed to obtain future treatments, or spent those hours elsewhere.⁷

Then came the pessimistic years. In his 2015 essay The Growth of My Pessimism, getting closer to research and researchers had made the task look harder to him. More funding had not canceled the complexity of biology. He doubted that incremental work would arrive in time for him before an intelligence explosion. His conclusion distinguished what he still wanted from what he could see a way to accomplish:

Ideally, I am still a transhumanist and an immortalist. But in practice, I have abandoned those noble ideals, and pragmatically only continue to be an EA.⁶

As late as December 2022, he described expecting his own permanent death while continuing to maintain precautions, including cryonics. His position had become an unhappy combination: do not surrender the available chances, but do not organize the emotional weather around expecting rescue.⁸

The weather changed again. In March 2023, listening to Ray Kurzweil discuss technological progress and the prospect of simulated biology brought him an unusually strong return of hope. He was imagining AI-driven improvements reaching biology with the startling speed he had begun seeing in other fields. He did not need the earliest proposed dates to come true for the possibility to matter. Several further decades could still leave him time to benefit.

His ordinary retirement target also reappeared:

The idea that I could live the minimum basic acceptable time, namely eighty thousand years, had been always a far fetched idea for me depending on cryonics and AI stuff.⁹

Eighty thousand years is a useful orientation aid for the visitor. Someone suggesting a satisfying life until ninety is discussing a very different accommodation package.

In his 2024 retrospective on two decades as a singularitarian, he described becoming emotionally attuned to technological progress again. The hope had regained immediacy:

That's something worth living for, inspiring, exciting. We could live thousands of years. That's what the Pharaohs wanted.¹⁰

The Pharaohs, in this room, are less a cautionary tale about vanity than extremely early customers whose suppliers underperformed.

Loving life is allowed to be the motor

One might expect a lifelong objection to death to require a lifelong atmosphere of panic. Diego explicitly separates those things. His account allows fear, but it also offers another engine:

Further, I believe you can have a positive motivation to live that drives you to work on ending death, it is not necessary to be driven by anxiety or fear.²

This matters for understanding the rest of the Castle. His pleasures are connected to his immortalism. The world has proved capable of producing experiences he wants more of. Love, travel, play, learning, and beauty help constitute the thing he is trying to preserve. A longer life is attractive because being alive has content.

The possibility of a substantially better future expands that content further. He thinks people can underestimate the value of continuing because they extrapolate too much from the limitations of their present circumstances. In his posthuman imagination, the quality of experience itself can improve. Staying alive preserves access to possibilities that a tired present-day brain may find difficult even to picture.²

His preferred rallying cause is therefore the end of involuntary death. That adjective matters. He does not believe people owe a deity their continued existence, or that every person must remain alive regardless of what living is like. His 2023 discussion recognizes a right to choose death, alongside a wish for safeguards against irreversible mistakes and strong concern for dependents. The ambition is to make continued life possible and worth choosing. It is not to trap everyone in an endless compulsory shift.²

Two gates, one continuing person

By August 2026, Diego's survival picture had two dominant threats: aging and AI catastrophe. They interact. The technology he sees as capable of radically extending life may also end it. Health can buy time, but even excellent health cannot settle the future of civilization.

When he examined AI-generated survival graphs, the feature that most interested him was the long tail: the branch in which a person lives well beyond conventional human ages. He distinguished his own more pessimistic forecast from the model's. Yet the continuing possibility was sufficient to keep the entire project emotionally alive:

I would move mountains for a chance at bio-quasi-immortality. It's been my central task since I was about 6, surely crystallized by age 8.¹

That is how philosophy, coalitions, biological intervention, AI, and preservation end up connected. He wants to understand what he is so that he can determine how it can continue. He wants a civilization capable of helping rather than extinguishing him. He wants to remain alive long enough for the relevant possibilities to become available.

And he keeps making future plans with a small conditional attached. An August 2026 comment supplies an unusually efficient miniature of the whole attitude:

I look forward to the next 1000 years assuming we don't die¹¹

He would appreciate an answer from customer service before then.

Further doors

Begin with 29 — My Opinions About Death (March 2023) for the moral position; The Growth of My Pessimism (November 2015) for the difficult middle years; The Singularity Is 20 Years Nearer And I'm 20 Years Older (June 2024) for the return of technological hope; and AI Doom, Aging, and My Survival Curve (August 2026) for the connection between survival and the rest of his intellectual life.

Continue: The Emergency Exit from Mortality