So what's more important, society and everybody else or me living a long time?

Well, I mean, that's it, right? That was one of the interesting sort of philosophical or moral questions that comes up.

And I did talk to people whose ambition, frankly, is to have humanity live for, you know, one person spoke of it as like we treat our bodies like cars.

When our lungs go curfluey, we just get a new set of lungs.

And when our heart goes...

And we just do this endlessly.

And one of the questions I remember asking him was, well, I mean, what happens to the birth rate? And he's like, well, that's gone.

yeah yeah so so these characters like what kind of relationship do you have with them how's that do you hear them see them do you picture them are they taken after people you've run across in your life

And it was one of those thought experiments that I had about quality of life and extension of life and is it really a good idea when life is like that you know what i mean

right yeah well i mean and i think that's what um the real joy of the book in a weird way was that um and again we want to get out of spoiler territory and i don't think i'm going to go into it um but You know, they do come.

They come in broken to the point that they've all accepted made, which in Canada here has become legal.

And it's not like you can wake up at 25 on a sunny day and say, oh, I feel ennui.

I think I need to end things.

You know, there's a very big legal sort of process you need to go through.

But it is available.

Yeah,

So what's more important, society and everybody else or me living a long time?

Well, I mean, that's it, right? That was one of the interesting sort of philosophical or moral questions that comes up.

And I did talk to people whose ambition, frankly, is to have humanity live for, you know, one person spoke of it as like we treat our bodies like cars.

When our lungs go curfluey, we just get a new set of lungs.

And when our heart goes...

And we just do this endlessly.

And one of the questions I remember asking him was, well, I mean, what happens to the birth rate? And he's like, well, that's gone.

yeah yeah so so these characters like what kind of relationship do you have with them how's that do you hear them see them do you picture them are they taken after people you've run across in your life

So what's more important, society and everybody else or me living a long time?

Well, I mean, that's it, right? That was one of the interesting sort of philosophical or moral questions that comes up.

And I did talk to people whose ambition, frankly, is to have humanity live for, you know, one person spoke of it as like we treat our bodies like cars.

When our lungs go curfluey, we just get a new set of lungs.

And when our heart goes...

And we just do this endlessly.

And one of the questions I remember asking him was, well, I mean, what happens to the birth rate? And he's like, well, that's gone.

yeah yeah so so these characters like what kind of relationship do you have with them how's that do you hear them see them do you picture them are they taken after people you've run across in your life

Mm-hmm

... live with the repercussions of it, whereas in my book, the, um, the, the, the five main characters are quite old and, as you said in your introduction, they've accepted MAID, which is legal here in Canada, where the novel is set.

Um, so they are, they are accepting something that I th- they, they are told that it, um, has some dangers associated with it, uh, huge dangers.

It's, um, kind of technology that has not yet, you know, been approved by any [chuckles] kind of governing body.

Um, but you, they're at this point, obviously, where they have had, as you said, that, that decay of, of the body.

I think they're at a point where they are most vulnerable, that, um, they come to accept this thing.

So again, it's, it's, it's different.

Tell me a bit about that.