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Leslie Escobar
Professor, Topf
English 114B
18 March 2014
Postmortal Essay
For many centuries immortality has been craved by humanity, the thought of living
forever sparks up the idea of a pleasure-filled life. In the book The Postmortal by Drew Magary,
he illustrates how humanity reacts once a cure for mortality is created. That means that people
get to live for much longer without worrying about getting old. That is something impressive, but
in the book it explains how it really can be if the cure would happen in reality. Initially it brought
out happiness to some people but at the end it ended destroying everyone. The cure brought out
problem such as population, religion, and society. Drew demonstrates how some things are
somewhat applicable to what is happening as in today. With everyone getting the cure and
people not dying it only caused overpopulation, therefore only few people shouldve gotten the
cure.
Just imagine if we get to live for decades with the cure for ageing. In other words we will
get the change to explore things and travel around the world. Spend more time with family
member and see grandkids and great grandkids grow. We will even have more time to finish
college since we will not grow old and we will still be the same age. Many things we can do
with the cure and live a happy life after.
But by living longer the meaning of life will no longer exist since people would prefer to
live for decades. We came to this world for a short time not to live for decades. Everyone will
die when their time comes. Dont we think if we live forever we wont get tired of seeing the
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same things all over again? For example, people will not want to be married with the same
person for decades for the fact that they will not find a different thing to do for so many years.
According to Barbara Walters, Well, if we live much longer than a century, our relationships,
our spending habits, our retirement plans are bound to undergo sweeping changes (Live to 150
years, can you do it?). Well it means that the much time we spend with someone or doing the
same thing we are going to get bored pretty easily. We ultimately are going to get annoyed of
each other. Baines states in the Postmortal that without death, we dont learn a goddamn thing
about life (Magary 197). In other words, we need to have in mind that we will die someday;
therefore, we could live without regrets. And everything we do we take it as a lesson.
The book talks about how the cures caused overpopulation over time. That happens
because people took advantage of the cure. That actually is something relevant that is occurring
right now in The United States where we are dealing with overpopulation. In the United States
they are approximately 7 billionth people. People are having babies and knowing the fact that we
are short in sources for food, and water. People having more babies and less people are dying for
the circumstance that there is more treatment for medical problems. Peter Rogers and Susan Leal
book, Running out of Water they explain how we are short of sources. How we dispose of
water will have a direct impact on our future supplies of water, the food we eat and our
environment.(Running out of water). We do not actually think how much is going to affect us
later on since we are wasting water when we do not have too. For example, when we take a
shower, we take long showers when we could just take 15-20 minutes. The postmortal points out
how people suffered because they did not have enough food and water for the fact that they had
too much people. They were all suffering since they were not getting any rain and stores where
running out of water.
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In the novel discuss how many people got tired of living the same life but not only that
how the government takes over. The End Specialist became more popular because they were
killing people that does not want to die but also killing people that do not want to live anymore.
People that do not want to live anymore will do anything to die. Like Chuck that died because he
was bored of everything already. Everywhere he went, or the things he did were not fun as they
were at the beginning. John and Ernie had to kill Chuck from the cannon because thats what he
wanted. Many people choose to die the painful way or the way that it did not hurt which was the
shot.















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Work Cited
Andrew Nusca. Why we're running out of water. SmartPlanet. Web. 20 Mar. 2014
Babst, Gordon Albert, Emily R. Gill, and Jason Pierceson. Moral Argument, Religion, and Same-
sex Marriage: Advancing the Public Good. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009. Print. 18
Mar. 2014.
Magary, Drew. The Postmortal: A Novel. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Walters, Barbara. "Live to 150, Can You Do It?" ABC News. ABC News Network, 01 Apr.
2008. Web. 18 Mar. 2014.