We have become very good at staying alive.We are becoming increasingly efficient at death and poor at finding reasons to live.
That sounds like a strange thing to say in a world with medical shortages, chronic illness, inequality, and all the familiar complaints. But I don’t mean it in the simple biological sense. I mean something more administrative than that. We have built systems that can extend life, manage decline, stabilize bodies, and increasingly decide when life should end under conditions of legality, consent, and procedure.
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program is one of the more explicit examples of this. It began, as many things do, with a narrow moral intuition: terminal illness, unbearable pain, imminent death. Mercy, in other words. A controlled exit from what was already collapsing.
Then it widened.
Chronic illness. Disability. Non-terminal conditions. Suffering described as “intolerable,” one of those words that sounds precise until you spend more than a few moments with it and realize it contains an entire universe of subjectivity, interpretation, and institutional discretion.
And now there are debates about the edges of it—mental illness, psychological suffering, conditions that do not resolve neatly into a medical endpoint.
I don’t want to turn this into a policy essay.
The thing that interests me is more unsettling.
We seem to be becoming increasingly competent at administering the end of life while becoming noticeably less confident about how to sustain reasons for continuing it.
Those two developments may be unrelated. They may not be. What strikes me is that they are occurring together.
There is a familiar debate that appears whenever this subject comes up. On one side is the religious objection: life is sacred, suffering has meaning, and there are limits beyond which choice should not extend. On the other side is the autonomy argument: individuals should be free to choose the terms of their own exit when suffering becomes unbearable.
Both positions are intelligible.
Neither quite touches the question that keeps bothering me.
The question is not whether assisted dying should exist in a narrow set of circumstances. The question is what kind of society produces an expanding space in which more and more forms of life begin to appear as candidates for managed exit.
And more uncomfortable still:
What kind of society becomes better at organizing death than it is at organizing reasons to remain alive?
The obvious answer is that we have become too individualistic. Autonomy has expanded until it has begun dissolving the social and moral frameworks that once gave life its meaning.
That is an easy answer.
It explains something, just not enough. Many of the same societies that expanded personal autonomy also expanded freedom, opportunity, and forms of self-determination that few people would willingly surrender. The problem cannot simply be autonomy. Something else seems to be happening alongside it.
Part of me wants to say this is simply capital’s logic made visible. Everything becomes measurable, manageable, exchangeable, and eventually disposable.
Yet that answer feels a little too convenient, perhaps because I spent so many years reaching for it. The thinning I am trying to describe appears in places where markets dominate and places where they do not. It appears in bureaucracies, universities, social media platforms, political movements, and private life. Capital may intensify it.
What I keep returning to instead is something embarrassingly old-fashioned.
Erich Fromm used the language of biophilia and necrophilia. I spent years finding those terms vaguely cringe-inducing. They sounded too sweeping, too psychological, too much like they belonged to an earlier era of grand theory.
I am less sure of that now.
Not because I think Fromm discovered a scientific law, but because I am struggling to find a better vocabulary for what I am trying to describe.
What I am reaching for is not a policy disagreement or a technical failure. It is something more like an orientation.
A directional quality.
Some ways of living seem to increase attachment, curiosity, participation, and the sense that experience still contains possibilities that have not yet been exhausted. Other ways of living seem to flatten experience into management, optimization, repetition, and control.
I am not even sure “biophilia” and “necrophilia” are the right names for these tendencies.
But I increasingly suspect they point toward something real.
The expansion of MAID may be one expression of that tendency. Or perhaps it merely makes visible something that was already there.
Either way, I find myself thinking less about euthanasia policy than about the conditions under which life begins to feel optional.
There is another layer to this that I cannot honestly leave out.
I am writing this with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
That fact is not incidental.
I think through ideas. The machine helps organize them. I struggle for a phrase. The machine offers five. I follow one thread and discover three more waiting for me.
This is useful. It is also strange.
What complicates this picture is that the same technology that sometimes flattens experience has also helped me keep participating in it.
Sometimes it feels like an expansion of thought. Sometimes it feels like thought becoming frictionless.
I am certainly not outside the condition I am describing.
There are days when “interest” feels genuine and days when it feels like the performance of interest. The distance between those two states has become harder for me to locate than it once was.
Many things remain available.
Fewer things feel invitational.
Perhaps this entire essay is just a sophisticated description of my anhedonia.
But even that feels incomplete. Anhedonia may describe the texture of my experience. It does not explain why the experience seems increasingly familiar. Naming a condition is not the same thing as understanding the environment in which it flourishes.
Meaning enters the discussion at exactly this point.
Or perhaps it has been lurking there all along.
I no longer think meaning is something one finds, like a lost set of keys hidden beneath the couch cushions of existence.
Nor does it seem to arrive as a final answer.
If anything, meaning appears less like an object than a capacity.
The capacity to remain open to being affected.
By other people. By work. By beauty. By grief. By obligation. By curiosity. By whatever it is that occasionally interrupts the deadening sense that tomorrow will merely be a replay of today.
That is what I mean by openness.
Or permeability.
Not optimism.
Not certainty.
Certainly not resolution.
Just the maintenance of access.
Because the opposite of what worries me is not meaninglessness in the dramatic sense. It is closure.
The gradual reduction of contact between experience and the possibility of being moved by it.
A world that becomes navigable but not invitational.
And when I think about the debates surrounding MAID—not the difficult edge cases themselves, but the broader social atmosphere in which those debates occur—I find myself wondering whether we have become more fluent in the language of closure than in the language of attachment.
Not because anyone wishes for death.
Not because there is a conspiracy.
Not because a particular ideology has finally revealed its evil essence.
But because we seem increasingly able to explain why suffering is unbearable while becoming less able to explain why life remains worth bearing.
I do not have a solution to that.
I am not sure there is one.
What I have instead is a suspicion that some forms of action matter precisely because they resist closure.
Writing this essay may be one of them.
Not because writing saves anyone.
Not because publication is redemption.
Not because an essay can answer questions that civilizations struggle to answer.
But because the act itself sometimes re-establishes a relation that had begun to thin.
A small reopening.
A refusal to let everything become final.
Maybe nothing follows from that.
Maybe it is not even a position.
Maybe it is simply what remains when the more confident answers stop working, but the capacity to ask has not entirely disappeared.
Keeping the door open is not an answer.
It is just the refusal to close it.
