Writer, humanist, bioethicist
| Longevity + Progress
Hi, I’m Raiany.
I’m broadly interested in understanding why secular humans like to narrate death and aging as good things — as if they’d been designed for the good of our species. I’m also interested in quantifying the negative effects of this narrative on economies and people.
I’ll be equally happy if you reach out to geek over our shared interests or to critique my writing & thinking.
Raiany Romanni, for ABC Ethics & Religion:
"If in the Middle Ages the gods were thought to punish human sin with the Black Plague, today we think of poor health in old age as the set-in-scripture decay of the body — a testament to human frailty in the face of a vast and callous universe, the denial of which would result in the sin of arrogance.
We think of aging as the product of this orphic thing called “time,” ignoring that species far less resourceful than ours live on for centuries longer, and some (like the American lobster) do not decrease in strength, do not have their metabolism slowed down, and become more rather than less fertile with the passage of time."