Humans have been scheming to live forever since we first realized we wouldn’t. This experiment is your chance to try every method—ancient and modern, sacred and absurd—in one glorious, globe-trotting adventure. You’re not looking for actual immortality (spoiler: you won’t find it). You’re celebrating the audacious creativity of a species that refuses to accept the obvious.

Week 1: Egyptian Preservation — Visit Egypt and the great pyramids of Giza. Study mummification. Work with a body preservation specialist to learn embalming techniques on a small bird. Design and sketch your ideal tomb. Read old spells from the Book of the Dead. Sleep one night in a sarcophagus. Feel what it’s like to prepare your body as a vessel for eternity.

Week 2: Greek Kleos (Eternal Fame) — Channel Achilles. Do something so bold it demands to be remembered. Climb a mountain and camp on its ridge calling out to Zeus for an eternal quest. Break a record. Perform a feat of endurance. Get your name in the news. Pursue glory shamelessly. Discover that fame is exhausting—and maybe that’s the point.

Week 3: Taoist Alchemy — Travel to China. Study with practitioners of internal alchemy. Drink herbal elixirs. Practice Qigong at dawn. Eat shou bao for good fortune. Meditate on circulating your life force. Spend a week convinced that breath control and the right herbs might actually extend your years. Feel younger, even if it’s placebo.

Week 4: Norse Heroism — Go to Iceland. Do something dangerous and worthy of a saga. Swim in glacial waters. Climb a volcano. Fight someone (in a boxing ring). Drink mead and boast about your deeds. Die metaphorically in battle—through extreme physical challenge—and be “reborn” the next morning.

Week 5: Hindu/Buddhist Reincarnation Practice — Spend a week in India or Nepal meditating on the cycle of rebirth. Study the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Perform good deeds to enrich your karmic life. Chant mantras to settle the mind and ward off negative thoughts. Practice dying consciously through visualization. Imagine your next life. Let go of this one. Discover that believing in reincarnation makes death feel like changing clothes.

Week 6: Japanese Artistic Legacy — Go to Kyoto. Study with a master craftsperson—pottery, calligraphy, tea ceremony. Create one perfect object designed to outlast you by centuries. Sign it. Date it. Imagine someone holding it in 2324. Feel the weight of making beauty that transcends your lifespan.

Week 7: Mesoamerican Sacrifice — Visit Mexico. Study Aztec cosmology. Then perform a symbolic sacrifice: give up something you love (a habit, a possession, a relationship) as an offering to the universe. Fast for a day. Bloodlet symbolically (a finger prick, donated blood). Feel what it means to trade pieces of yourself for transcendence.

Week 8: Christian Mystical Union — Spend a week in a monastery. Practice contemplative prayer. Seek union with the eternal through dissolving the self. Fast, pray, sit in silence. Visit St. Winefrid’s well and drink its life-giving water. Discover that some traditions achieve immortality by erasing the boundary between you and God.

Week 9: Cryogenic Preservation — Visit Alcor or another cryonics facility. Tour the tanks. Sign up (or at least seriously consider it). Lie in a practice pod. Imagine your body frozen, waiting for a future that may never come. Laugh at the absurdity. Feel the hope anyway.

Week 10: Legacy Through Lineage — Spend your final week with children—your own, or mentees, or young strangers. Teach them everything you know. Tell them your stories. Plant ideas in their minds that will outlive you. Realize that this—consciousness continuing in other bodies—might be the only immortality that actually works.

At the end, throw a party. Invite everyone who joined you on any leg of the journey. Toast to the fact that humans have tried everything—preservation, fame, alchemy, heroism, reincarnation, art, sacrifice, mysticism, science, and love—and we still die. But we tried. And the trying is what makes us magnificent.