life,

in the world of abolished senescence, becomes a countable noun (compare forever): rather than a birth-to-death affair, the new life is a subspan of one’s consciousness between deep sleeps or, for Minds, profound explays. Emphatic time can be used almost interchangeably, e.g. “Last time I dabbled in faraway…” ■    And death: with our newfound “freedom to rewind,” the vast mythologies of afterlife, reincarnation, death as a focal point of life have all been dusted, actualized (whatever happens to the bodies, minds and ideas grow by evolutionary buildup), loreified — e.g. genomic “fairy gifts” or “a new name for a new life”; attitudes to one’s past lives evoke the archetype of “forefathers” but with a new literality of “I am one with my ancestors.”  ■    Frequent occupation changes accompanied the rising social mobility right until the deep sleep — “a new kind of existential boundary” — calmed the occupational jitters; knowing that your productivity is replenishable unmasks and concentrates priorities, so life in its new meaning is commonly a unit of work: “one life, one book” is natural and respected, as is a lifetime of selfless collaborative impersonation — a relife. When, after a life of learning and teaching, “shallowing overtakes widening” it is, acceptedly, “time to go back.”  ■    Capitalized Life or metalife is a chain of one’s lives “interpreted as a story arc”; most, “instinctively,” build their metalives as iterative approximations — you rewind to iron out minor wrongs, to convince yourself a missed forkpath wasn’t worth it, to self-copyedit across lives. Metalives tend to regularize, replay the same crystallization program ever more rigidly, making the ideal of “progressively longer and wider-grasping lives” elusive; late-metalife art deuniversalizes, desocializes: you lose traction of whatever you didn’t yourself do in your past lives. Such a stagnant metalife may yet diverge — sometimes explosively, with a “short and crazy” “farewell life” followed by a “deep deep sleep” (resetting as far back as possible) before launching in an entirely new direction or Leaving.

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