Death is Inevitable Drew Magary explores the subtle differences between youth, aging, death, and overpopulation the post-aging world of The Postmortal. These anti-aging, “postmortals”, believe that death can never overcome them due to their ability to not age. What these postmortals don’t realize is that death is inevitable. The novel follows postmortal John on his journey from being afraid of death and procuring the cure, to willing to die so that others can live on. John’s story forces readers to realize that even though death is a terrifying, complex concept, there is no way of avoiding it. Death isn’t as awful as everyone thinks, especially when no one is aging, causing the world to fall into overpopulated chaos. The postmortals believed
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Many years after the cure for aging became available to everyone, Earth became overpopulated to the point where countries started bombing themselves just to reduce the population: “Three massive, nuclear-scale explosions were detected in China . . . .The explosions appear to be centered on . . .A combined population of nearly sixty-five million people” (Magary 266). Bombing one’s own country because the population got too out of hand due to the death rates’ exponential decline is asking for chaos to ensue in the world. It did, people started looting and killing in order to get the most of the limited resources this planet has to offer so that they could survive as long as possible. Resource prices went through the roof and became scarce, “Tap water fees . . . now regularly hitting the five dollar mark . . . .A piece of halibut . . .cost a thousand bucks” (Magary 165, 206). The looting and killing for resources caused widespread panic, thus resulting in more people turning to this method of self-insured survival. The panic over resources and housing became so widespread that people were living out of their cars in large groups along the highway, stealing from one another whenever they left. The world is only meant to have a certain amount of people on it for a certain amount of time before it starts taking care of the problem on its own. Disease broke out killing millions of people around the world and increasing the amount of panic. Death is a natural part of life and without it the world become a mess of overpopulated chaos, leaving the planet to take control of the situation by whatever means
Many years after the cure for aging became available to everyone, Earth became overpopulated to the point where countries started bombing themselves just to reduce the population: “Three massive, nuclear-scale explosions were detected in China . . . .The explosions appear to be centered on . . .A combined population of nearly sixty-five million people” (Magary 266). Bombing one’s own country because the population got too out of hand due to the death rates’ exponential decline is asking for chaos to ensue in the world. It did, people started looting and killing in order to get the most of the limited resources this planet has to offer so that they could survive as long as possible. Resource prices went through the roof and became scarce, “Tap water fees . . . now regularly hitting the five dollar mark . . . .A piece of halibut . . .cost a thousand bucks” (Magary 165, 206). The looting and killing for resources caused widespread panic, thus resulting in more people turning to this method of self-insured survival. The panic over resources and housing became so widespread that people were living out of their cars in large groups along the highway, stealing from one another whenever they left. The world is only meant to have a certain amount of people on it for a certain amount of time before it starts taking care of the problem on its own. Disease broke out killing millions of people around the world and increasing the amount of panic. Death is a natural part of life and without it the world become a mess of overpopulated chaos, leaving the planet to take control of the situation by whatever means