Conquering Time

I have always hated the word immortality. It sounds like an app update: “live forever—version 2.1.” The salesmen of forever stand in cryo labs and YouTube thumbnails, selling eternity like a supplement. Bryan Johnson (and the bros) transfuse himself into the future, promising continuity by syringe. The word itself points forward when the real direction of time is inward.

And yet—I inject peptides too. Citizen science, I tell myself, the lab rat who writes poetry. I run experiments on my own mitochondria, collect data in silence, chase another century like a gambler hiding under a philosophy degree. Not forever. Just a hundred more years. Enough to see the next act. I laugh at the immortality cult while swallowing the same pills. That’s not contradiction; that’s the human operating system: we seek control while rehearsing surrender.

Nietzsche understood this loop before we had language for dopamine and data. He asked if you would live your life again—every bruise, every accident, every stupid silence. That’s not an extension; that’s a rebellion. Time folded into a circle and you laughing in the middle of it. Not software—stance.

I once painted those words on the wall of a condemned apartment. The city had already tagged the door; eviction was a rumor. I lived alone, but the building was alive—basslines upstairs, cigarettes downstairs. I waited for someone to invite me to one of their parties. They never did. So I painted Zarathustra instead: cheap paint, crooked letters, a conversation with no reply. Every morning I woke up under it and stared. Would you do it again? Not “will you live forever,” just that one question humming through the ceiling.

Maybe time isn’t something that passes at all. Maybe it’s something we remember. Neuroscientists say the hours are reconstructions, mosaics built from what survives the editing room. Forgetting isn’t failure; it’s the clock itself. When memory thins, time folds. When days repeat, they melt into one undistinguished blur. Childhood summers stretch; adult decades collapse. We’re not running out of time—we’re running out of bandwidth.

This is bandwidth economics of the soul: limited registers, limited encoding. Novelty burns through bandwidth and thickens time. Routine conserves it and erases it. Every efficient day is a vanished day. AI will drown us in abundance—data, tasks, versions of ourselves—but it cannot mint attention. It can compress thought, not widen perception. The human mind stays narrow, and meaning hides in that bottleneck. When everything accelerates, the only scarce thing left is the capacity to notice.

My good friend, Riza C. Berkan, Ph.D, once called time the devil of physics. He meant it literally. He said no one has ever measured time directly—only counted change and called it time. Clocks, he said, don’t measure; they tally. If the first second was defined by Earth’s spin and the latest by cesium’s vibration, then all we have are conversions between counting devices, not contact with the thing itself. Maybe there is no “thing itself.” Maybe time is a bookkeeping interface for change, a trick of definition hiding in plain sight.

Rıza and I used to argue about this long before the current wave of machine oracles—back when we were trying our hand at an AI Doctor (a kiosk that gave you your prescription after a brief conversation). We were trying to teach a machine to diagnose disease, but mostly we were diagnosing the disease of human certainty: the same one that makes physicists confuse clock for time and philosophers confuse repetition for meaning. The clock is to physics what memory is to mind: a bandwidth-limited interface pretending to touch the infinite. Maybe that’s what time really is—the residue of finite bandwidth pretending it can measure change.

Then the new clockmaker arrived—AGI, the silent machinist of microseconds. Heidegger’s Augenblick collapses into a server tick. The pause that once carried moral weight becomes latency. A machine writes a B-movie script before I refill my coffee. The scaffolding of consequence wobbles. Undo, retry, rerun—the verbs of eternity. We become toys in a sandbox of reversible mistakes.

Mortality isn’t meaning; it’s gravity. It bends every trajectory but never explains it. Without death there is no clock, but death itself is not the point. The point is how you face the pull—fear, denial, laughter. I still want another century. Peptides in the fridge, spreadsheets of biomarkers. I know it’s the same trap, yet I walk into it smiling. Maybe paradox is the last honest theology.

Waiting—what a forgotten art. We treat it as dead air, but maybe it’s the last privilege machines can’t steal. They idle; we wait. The pause before saying I love you. The silence in a Coltrane solo. The stillness beside a dying friend. Waiting is thick time. To conquer time is not to erase it, but to choose its texture.

The techno-immortals hoard hours like candy. They think Chronos can be bribed with blood and code. But Chronos eats his children. Always has. The only answer is to look up with a grin and say: do it again. That’s conquest. That’s style ("taste" as the bros say these days).

My practice, if you can call it that, is simple. Stop chasing more, even as I chase another century. Live a life I’d repeat, even unwillingly. Protect thick time. Let mistakes scar. Laugh when the syringe goes in.

I don’t know if we’ll live forever. I doubt it. But I care about painting the wall again tomorrow, and about whether my children will learn to laugh at Chronos instead of bargaining with him. Immortality isn’t conquest. Conquest is saying yes to recurrence. Conquest is mastering waiting. Conquest is living consequence. Conquest is bending time into a circle and still wanting one more round, knowing it’s greedy, absurd, and human.

That’s how I try to conquer time—alone in a condemned building, peptides in the fridge, Zarathustra on the wall, and a party upstairs that never calls my name.

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