The Immortal Jellyfish Capitalism’s Worst Nightmare, and the Horror of Never Dying

Wehumans, in our boundless wisdom, have been dreaming of immortality for centuries now — through religion, literature, and, naturally, Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that drinking the blood of interns will make them youthful. Yet nature, the ultimate prankster, has already addressed this issue with Turritopsis dohrnii- a jellyfish so completely unbothered by existential dread that it’s capable of biologically transforming into an earlier life phase whenever it becomes too old or too injured. It’s achieved, in a way, what philosophers, poets, and Jeff Bezos could only fantasize about: a continuous loop of self-renewal. But before we start fantasizing about our own immortal future, let us pause and reflect — what kind of horror would this actually be? Think, if you can stomach it, of the neoliberal nightmare that an immortal human species would create.

The Capitalist Nightmare of Eternal Life

You think the housing crisis is bad now? Just wait till no one ever dies, and we’re all competing for the same overpriced flats owned by landlords who’ve had centuries to build up property. Your great-great-great-granddad, now 23 again, won’t be retiring because he “just loves the grindset” and has 500 years’ worth of experience in the job market. The job market? Don’t even get me started. Good luck with getting your boss to promote you when the CEO has been around since the Renaissance. We already have a form of social immortality — just look at how old ruling elites refuse to exit. Henry Kissinger, the geopolitical *Turritopsis dohrnii*, only just departed the world stage at 100, and even in death, his legacy persists.

Freud, the Death Drive, and the Jellyfish’s Refusal to Die

If you threw biological immortality into the mix, the utter terror of dynasticism would be complete. The kings, dictators, and oligarchs would never die, so revolutions would need to occur not every century but every five million years, and even then, the ruling elite would merely reset their clocks and begin anew. Sigmund Freud, if he were alive today (which, in this dystopian jellyfish world, he well might be), would tell you that our unconscious is all about the awareness of death. The “Thanatos”, the so-called “death drive,” is what renders us reckless, creative, self-destructive, and, finally, human. Remove the awareness of death, and behold. We are no longer beings of desire — we are simply “there”, drifting like brainless jellyfish, without urgency or direction. We can see this principle at work in our culture’s obsession with youth. Today, we have billionaires infusing themselves with their sons’ blood, a gruesome “Oedipal” twist on the old vampire myth.

The Socialist Question of Immortality

The paradox is clear: the more we try to escape death, the more ridiculous we become, reducing human experience to a macabre travesty of itself. Picture Mick Jagger at the age of 400, still performing “Satisfaction*” his lined face now stretched tight like a balloon, his voice a fading echo of a song that has endured longer than history itself. Naturally, the actual question of immortality isn’t really so much “can” we do it as “who gets it”? Under capitalism, after all, immortality would be a commodity, available only to those who can pay for periodic biological redesign. Mark Zuckerberg, 1,032 years young, still playing the role of regular human being, attempting and failing to blink in a manner that doesn’t terrify the populace. While the working class — those who cannot afford the miracle jellyfish cure — would still lead short, brutish lives, rapidly aging in their 20-hour workdays as they’re taunted by their immortal masters from atop the fortified moon mansions.

The True Wisdom of the Jellyfish

This, then, is the supreme horror: not that death would disappear, but that it would be saved for the underclass. The wealthy would live forever, and the rest of us would be disposable, nothing but “organic waste” in a world ever more governed by immortal oligarchies. The irony is searing — immortality, which ought to be a utopian dream, would instead render class distinctions intolerable. But let us get back to “Turritopsis dohrnii”. This simple creature does not suffer from existential crisis, does not accumulate wealth, does not worship youth. It just exists, going through its life stages without anxiety. If we were to really learn from this creature, we would not try to obtain its immortality but its indifference. Maybe the true moral of the story is not that we must try to live forever, but that we must, like the jellyfish, try to embrace the absurdity of life without fear.

I come back to Kierkegaard’s statement: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The jellyfish, with its perpetual resets, does not live or understand — only “repeats”. And is not that the horror par excellence? To be forever, without meaning?