In time, society figured out how to prevent death, and everyone became immortal. As a matter of fact, we can stop all unwanted forms of aging, with bodies perpetually feeling like they were in their twenties.
Amazing isn’t it? Well yes, but there were some unexpected results in how it became implemented.
First, the rich received treatment before everyone else. For a while, this was an experimental (which means expensive) treatment that only the truly wealthy could afford. As it became more established and the costs decreased, the middle classes started using it, but it was labelled as an optional medical expense by most healthcare agencies and still out of reach of many of the poor of the earth. The wealthier got to reexperience their better bodies, forever, while many poor still aged and some died before they could get this death-defying treatment.
Ok, governments and charities may have solved that one. Legislating coverage and subsidizing it so that everyone in the world can get it. But another problem persisted:
Debt has become eternal. One’s debt will never go away. Not even the slow deterioration of one’s body towards retirement absolves people from their obligation to pay their debts. Those indebted must work and work until they pay back every cent (with interest), forcing them into awful, low-paid jobs.
The wealthy, however, are able to make money at an exponential rate; whereas, the waged poor and middle class only make money through salaries, which follow a much slower, linear model. Thus, in addition to their initial lead being far too great, they continue to expand their wealth leaps and bounds beyond what everyone else can.
Where does this money ultimately come from? Those with less. They are fleeced as the cost of standard expenses rises and rises filling the coffers of the wealthy widening the chasm for the indebted.
Death was once the great equalizer, the cut-off that nerfed everyone how much further ahead or behind they happen to be at in the race, but now, that check no longer exists. The wealthy shoot at lightning speed ahead, and nothing exists to keep that lead in check.
And they use that to control the type of afterlife they would like to have. The poor are increasingly forced to harvest more and more for the rich. The middle class, too, although they have more flexibility to establish their own comforts and hobbies when they are off from working. The rich can choose whether to expand it on luxuries, or for whatever reason, spend their afterlife wasting away at work. And no individual has a real chance of catching up with them.
This is how society chugs along. We continue to build our output forever, locked into this system of inequality. Expending more and more resources and engulfing more and more planets in the universe until one day, maybe, just maybe, we will expend all the resources that keep us going in this hell of immortality, allowing the cleansing fire of death to finally renew us once again.