Following is the text from the recent Psychology Today article titled “The Boy Who Wants to Live Forever… and Other Champions of the Lost Cause” that profiled me and the immortalist movement.

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The Immortalist: When the Challenge is Eternity

For a strapping 22-year-old, Michael Anissimov spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about death. At an age when most young men are convinced that dying is something that happens only to other people, Anissimov is obsessed with halting aging and death altogether.

At the age of 18, he helped found the Immortality Institute, a nonprofit that promotes life-extension research in order to “conquer the blight of involuntary death.” He’s begun the paperwork necessary for having himself cryonically suspended—frozen for the future, should he die before the technologies that he believes will lead to greatly extended lifespans become available. “Death is just a technical problem,” he says. “People react strongly to the idea of living hundreds of years, but the body doesn’t care if we think it’s radical to preserve it.”

Life extentionists, cryogenics enthusiasts, and longevity buffs have an image problem, thanks in large part to guys like the inventor Ray Kurzweil, who sucks down hundreds of supplements and drinks 10 cups of green tea every day with the conviction that it will prolong his life. Also not helping: geneticist Aubrey de Grey, the wild-looking, raggedy-bearded Oxford professor who proclaims that at least one person alive today may live to be 1,000 years old.

It’s easy to poke fun at them. What’s less avoidable than death? But just as natural as death is the urge to rise above it. And that desperate need for existential permanence is ultimately what motivates us to sacrifice ourselves for everything from art to religion to politics.

When reminded of death by something as simple as a photo of a grave, people react by adhering more tightly to their social values and their self-image. Liberals become more tolerant, religious people more spiritual, racists more consumed with hate. “By being a good American, a caring parent, a committed sports fan, a creative musician, or a brilliant scientist, and by believing in the ultimate importance and value of such pursuits, one is able to feel part of something that extends into eternity,” writes University of Maryland psychologist Mark Dechesne in a recent paper on the subject of terror management theory, the branch of psychology that tries to explain this behavior.

In the end, banking on immortality through cryonics could be more plausible than believing in a second, eternal life. “It might be the most rational form of striving for immortality,” says Dechesne. “The only irrational thing is that you’re hoping to get it while science has not yet given any indication that it is feasible.”

But life-extension research is moving into the mainstream. Perhaps as many as 10,000 people worldwide, including scientists and investors, are actively involved in these communities. “Deviating from the mainstream by yourself is quite different than deviating from it with others who are successful, intelligent, insightful, and willing to discuss unpopular beliefs together,” says Anissimov. He may not live forever, but he’ll benefit from a thriving community of other dreamers as long as he does.

And he’ll reap more than the benefit of friendship: Embracing his goal, he exercises, and eats vegetarian. And just like everyone else, he hangs on to the idea that something—in this case science—will eventually be able to conquer death. It’s a long shot, but at least the cause is built on that most triumphant of human capacities: hope.

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The middle of the article engages in slightly tautological reasoning when it says that the immortalist movement’s image is damaged by Ray and Aubrey because they do things in pursuit of immortality, like taking supplements or marketing life extension research. They are doing things characteristic of immortalists. If they didn’t do them, they wouldn’t be pursuing immortality. Thus the author is essentially saying “immortalists are damaging the immortalist movement by acting like immortalists”. It’s a roundabout way of saying, “I’m pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing but don’t want to say so outright in this article”.