Longevity Finance: The Speculative Search of Life Extension

This lecture introduces what I define as longevity finance, which is an emerging field where financial institutions transform longevity risk—traditionally seen as an economic and social challenge—into a speculative market opportunity. By engaging with literature on the financialization of everyday life, the lecture examines how this paradigm shift redefines aging, merging financial accumulation with the quest for life extension.

Longevity finance operates across diverse contexts, illustrated by Silicon Valley elites’ quest to “hack” death and Singapore’s strategic efforts to reframe aging as a biopolitical project focused on longevity. These examples demonstrate how the pursuit of prolonged life is being translated into financial terms, intertwining capital accumulation with advancements in life extension technologies.

While this trend reflects broader patterns of techno-solutionism that deepens processes of financial extraction, it also opens speculative avenues that challenge conventional understandings of aging and its temporality. This fosters new future speculative imagination. Ultimately, the lecture interrogates the societal implications of commodifying life extension, raising critical questions about access, inequality, and the politics surrounding the future of aging.

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