Ceiling of Life: Between the Dream of Immortality and the Risk of Wasted Years

This book explores the gap between how many years of life biology has already made possible and how many of those years a person actually lives while preserving autonomy, relationships, and a sense of meaning. The central framework is a distinction between three temporal coordinates: lifespan (length of life), healthspan (years of health), and wellspan (the period during which the “I” persists as a recognizable subject of experience). The authors show how the biological mechanisms of aging, the evolutionary logic of limits, and individual disease trajectories shape a species’ “ceiling,” and why an increase in average life expectancy does not automatically mean an extension of wellspan. Separate chapters analyze scientific strategies for working with this limit (rapamycin, metformin, GLP‑1, senolytics, gene therapy) and offer a critical reading of the immortality market, where scientific results are blended with marketing promises for investors and consumers. In response, the book proposes the concept of wellspan as a more realistic and ethically rich goal: instead of chasing immortality, constructing a life in which losses of health and function do not automatically entail the loss of one’s “self.” It considers individual and societal strategies for narrowing the gap between the number of years lived and the number of years in which a subjective sense of self is preserved—from behavioral changes to aging policy and the support of collective wellspan.