What If We Were Told We Are Living Forever?

I do not write because I believe I know better than you, nor because I imagine that there is a single philosophy capable of explaining how a human life should be lived. I write human to human, from the intersection of what I have encountered through medicine and universities, through art, love, motherhood, relationships, major life events, and through the stories of people who have trusted me with their inner worlds. Across these experiences, one question has returned repeatedly: what does it actually mean to be alive? And how might we live differently if we stopped seeing existence only through the visible boundaries of the body, age, time, and one human lifetime?

Science has given us extraordinary tools for understanding the body and the mind. It allows us to study cells, hormones, organs, neural pathways, memory, behaviour, development, ageing, and disease. It has transformed what we know about the human organism. Yet even as our knowledge expands, there remain aspects of experience that are more difficult to measure: consciousness, meaning, intuition, identity, spirit, and the felt sense that human existence may contain more than what anatomy alone can describe. Art often enters precisely where measurement becomes insufficient. It does not replace science, but it gives language to experiences that resist reduction. I sometimes think of this unexplained dimension as the gap in anatomy.

You may call it soul, consciousness, vital energy, inner life, spirit, or simply the human condition. The terminology matters less than the recognition that there may be something within us that is not fully captured by physiological description. To acknowledge this possibility is not to reject evidence, but to admit that evidence and experience do not always occupy identical territory. Human beings have always lived simultaneously in both worlds: the measurable and the meaningful.

This is not an invitation to follow me. I do not believe that personal transformation comes from adopting another person’s formula. What is useful to one person may be irrelevant to another, and what feels true in one period of life may later need to be revised. We are shaped by different bodies, histories, relationships, cultures, losses, responsibilities, and possibilities. I can offer questions, observations, and a way of looking, but each person must discover their own relationship to existence.

Do not follow my formula. Discover your own.

We are taught from an early age to prepare for almost everything except life itself. We prepare for school, examinations, careers, financial security, marriage, parenthood, retirement, and success. We learn how to organise, achieve, accumulate, perform, and protect ourselves against uncertainty. Yet how often are we taught to prepare ourselves psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually for existence itself? How often are we encouraged to ask what kind of person we want to become, how we want to experience our years, what we wish to transmit to the next generation, or how we would like to leave this chapter of life when the time eventually comes?

If existence is in some sense continuous, the question becomes larger still. How do we prepare ourselves for transitions into dimensions we do not yet understand? I do not present this as scientific fact. I present it as a philosophical possibility. The significance of such a possibility lies less in proving what comes after life than in asking what it changes about the way we live now. Far from diminishing the value of the present, the idea of continuity may intensify it. It returns us to responsibility. How am I caring for my body, my mind, and my inner life? What am I passing to my children, consciously or unconsciously? What am I creating through the way I speak, choose, love, withdraw, forgive, and endure? How would I wish eventually to leave this chapter—with fear and regret, or with gratitude, peace, and an open heart?

Modern medicine increasingly distinguishes between lifespan and healthspan. The question is no longer simply how long a human being can remain alive, but how long they can remain physically, cognitively, and emotionally well. This distinction matters. Longevity without vitality is not the same as living well. If we ask for more years, we should also ask: more years of what quality? While medicine continues to advance, perhaps there is also value in paying closer attention to what is already within our influence—our habits, relationships, emotional patterns, capacity for meaning, adaptability, and willingness to remain engaged with life.

At a certain point, society may begin telling us that we are old. A number becomes a category, and a category slowly becomes a psychological instruction. We are told, directly or indirectly, what should no longer interest us, what dreams are no longer realistic, and which forms of reinvention should have been left behind.

But ask your soul.

Does your deepest sense of self recognise itself through a number, or through curiosity, vitality, love, imagination, and the desire to continue discovering? This is not an argument against biological ageing. Nor is it an invitation to deny illness, limitation, or reality. Positive thinking is not magic, and the mind does not command the body without consequence. But thoughts influence choices, choices become habits, and habits influence the quality and direction of a life. The narratives we repeat about ourselves therefore matter, because they shape what we continue to believe is possible.

It is never too late to create a new inner habit. An unfamiliar way of thinking may initially feel artificial because the nervous system is accustomed to repetition. Human beings often confuse familiarity with truth. We continue thinking the same thoughts not necessarily because they are accurate, but because they have become well rehearsed. Transformation begins when we allow ourselves to interrupt that rehearsal and consider another possibility. Change is rarely one dramatic moment. More often, it is the accumulation of small acts of attention that gradually alter the way we respond.

What might happen if children were raised without being taught to experience age as a limitation on identity? Development, maturity, safety, and biological change would still matter. But a number would not become a psychological boundary around who they are allowed to become. We would not teach them that curiosity should disappear at a certain age, that playfulness becomes undignified, or that reinvention eventually becomes inappropriate.

Perhaps the familiar question, “How old are you?” could sometimes be followed by another:

How alive do you feel?

This question costs nothing, but it challenges a deeply ingrained assumption: that the passage of time and the diminishment of possibility are necessarily the same thing.

We understand very well that machines need energy. We recharge phones, refuel cars, maintain systems, and become concerned when batteries begin to fail. Yet many human beings continue operating for years without asking where their own energy comes from, where it is going, or why it no longer returns.

How do we recharge a human being?

The physiological answers are obvious: food, water, sleep, oxygen, movement, and recovery. But lived vitality appears to depend on more than physiology alone. A person may sleep adequately and eat well while still feeling emotionally depleted, disconnected, or internally absent. We may also need touch, love, nature, beauty, silence, play, meaningful work, intimacy, belonging, and a sense of purpose. The more important questions may therefore be personal: What depletes me? What restores me? What returns me to myself?

Perhaps such questions belong within a broader form of integrative human education. We teach children mathematics, history, language, and professional skills, yet many enter adulthood knowing very little about emotional regulation, boundaries, recovery, intimacy, or the difference between ambition and self-destruction. We teach people how to succeed before teaching them how to remain whole while succeeding.

This is also part of what we pass to our children. Human inheritance is not only genetic. We inherit fears, habits, tenderness, silence, courage, emotional reflexes, beliefs, ways of handling conflict, and ways of expressing love. Some inheritances deserve to be preserved. Others deserve to end with us. Looking towards previous generations with acceptance does not mean approving of everything they did or denying harm. It means recognising that we belong to a longer human story and becoming conscious of what we choose to continue.

Seen this way, inheritance is not passive. It is also ethical. We are not only recipients of what came before us; we are editors of what comes next.

The same principle can be applied to the feminine and masculine dimensions of human life. A feminine being. A masculine being. Two human expressions, each capable of carrying qualities traditionally described as feminine or masculine in different proportions. We can debate whether these qualities are biological, psychological, cultural, symbolic, or relational. But perhaps before defining them, we might allow human beings greater freedom to become who they are.

Equality does not require sameness. Difference does not justify hierarchy. Complementarity should not become confinement. The philosophical challenge is not to eliminate difference, but to prevent difference from becoming a prison.

Sexuality belongs within this discussion because it is inseparable from embodiment. If we understand life partly through movement, sensation, rhythm, attraction, and connection, then tenderness, erotic feeling, intimacy, and making love are also expressions of being alive. Yet sexuality is often discussed through extremes: pornography or prohibition, performance or shame, exposure or silence. There is another language available—beauty, consent, trust, responsibility, freedom, tenderness, and love.

The sexual body does not exist outside human wholeness. It belongs to anatomy, health, identity, vulnerability, pleasure, creativity, and reproductive capacity. Yet sexual connection cannot be reduced to reproduction. Skin-to-skin contact, arousal, and intercourse involve sensory, neurological, endocrine, cardiovascular, muscular, and biochemical processes. Orgasm is accompanied by measurable physiological changes. Scientific research can describe these mechanisms, but it cannot entirely describe what they mean to the person experiencing them.

Science tells us what happens.

Human experience asks what it means.

Perhaps intimate partners exchange something that could be described, poetically, as living information. Not genetic rewriting and not mystical certainty, but an encounter that leaves traces in memory, attachment, bodily experience, emotion, association, and sense of self. Human beings affect one another deeply. Touch can calm or alarm the nervous system. Intimacy can create security, vulnerability, longing, fear, attachment, or trust. Relationships alter the way we experience our own bodies and our own histories.

Orgasm should never be treated as performance, obligation, proof of love, or a measure of relational success. Yet when experienced freely, safely, and without coercion, it may represent a profound state of physiological and psychological release. Control softens. Breathing changes. Muscular tension reorganises. The thinking mind may briefly become quieter.

If art can be food for the soul, could pleasure—experienced safely, consensually, and without shame—also be nourishment for vitality?

This is a question, not a prescription.

Sexual freedom does not mean constant availability, rejection of commitment, or the absence of boundaries. Genuine sexual freedom includes consent, care, safety, dignity, self-knowledge, and the right to say both yes and no. Moral frameworks can protect us. Boundaries are necessary. But when rules become fear, rigidity, shame, and complete estrangement from the body, they may prevent us from understanding ourselves.

We do not need intimacy displayed everywhere, but neither should intimacy be treated as something dirty. It can be normal without being public, intimate without being shameful, and free without being careless.

When libido changes, intimacy becomes painful, desire disappears, or a person feels unable to give or receive affection, the experience deserves curiosity rather than judgment. The reasons may be physiological, hormonal, medical, psychological, relational, or all of these at once. Medication, illness, trauma, stress, exhaustion, menopause, insecurity, and relationship safety can all influence sexual wellbeing.

Sexual wellbeing therefore belongs within serious human education. Not because people need to become more sexual, but because fewer people should have to live divided from themselves.

My Transparent Happiness Formula begins with something deceptively simple: a pause.

Stop. Observe. Feel. Understand. Choose. Transform. Integrate.

The pause matters because much of human life is lived reactively. We respond before we understand. We repeat patterns before recognising them. We bring old wounds into new situations. We become absorbed in other people’s expectations and sometimes do not realise how far we have moved away from ourselves.

Hypnosis can create one form of such a pause. It can offer a state in which external noise becomes quieter and attention moves inward. Associations, memories, sensations, and perspectives may emerge that are less accessible during ordinary mental activity. But whatever arises should not automatically be treated as absolute truth. Inner experience still has to be integrated with reality, evidence, safety, responsibility, and conscious judgment.

Sometimes, however, the body and deeper layers of the mind appear to carry something before conscious language has found the words. Sometimes we feel the answer before we fully understand the question.

Begin with an intention. Notice what emerges. Then integrate it according to your own proportions: your body, your mind, your character, your history, your relationships, your present circumstances, your hopes, your responsibilities, your limitations, and your possibilities.

You are the centre of that integration.

Not your neighbours. Not society’s expectations. Not the mask created to look like a “good girl,” a “strong man,” a perfect parent, an ideal partner, or a permanently successful human being.

You.

Your answer. Your responsibility. Your next right choice.

Transparent happiness does not mean that pain, uncertainty, grief, disappointment, or difficulty disappear. Such experiences belong to being alive. Happiness becomes transparent when we can see through the masks we wear, recognise what is happening within us, understand where our reactions come from, and choose more consciously how we wish to meet life.

Perhaps awakening is not about becoming another person. Perhaps it is about recognising, accepting, and learning to live more fully as the person who has been there all along.

Work with your mind, but do not become imprisoned by it. Care for your body, but do not reduce yourself to your body. Listen to your senses. Protect your vitality. Allow tenderness. Love without unnecessary shame. Forgive without abandoning your boundaries. Accept without surrendering discernment. Choose without spending your entire life looking at yourself through the eyes of others.

We do not need to understand everything before allowing ourselves to belong to everything.

Perhaps we are preparing ourselves for some form of continuous existence. Perhaps consciousness extends beyond what we currently understand. Perhaps the mystery of being human is greater than our present scientific language can contain. Or perhaps none of these possibilities will ever be demonstrated in the way we would like them to be.

Even then, the question remains valuable.

What if imagining that life is larger than the visible frame encouraged us to live more consciously within that frame? What if thinking beyond age made us care for our health more seriously? What if reflecting on continuity made us more responsible for what we pass to our children? What if contemplating death made us more grateful for ordinary mornings, touch, laughter, movement, curiosity, and love?

Perhaps the greatest preparation for whatever comes next is simply learning to be present now.

Perhaps we are preparing ourselves for continuous existence.

Or perhaps we are simply learning, at last, to live this life while it is happening.

Either way, the invitation is the same: choose yourself, choose forward, remain curious, love deeply, protect your vitality, and live in such a way that regret has less and less to say.

You may be told that you are old.

But ask your soul.

Lina Sima