The nature of the Soul
While I was driving, I got to pondering, again, what I would have said to Tom Riddle, if he had approached me as he approached Horace Slughorn. Previously I've focused on the how to answer the Horcrux question, but I got to pondering the "What about seven? Isn't seven the most powerfully magical number."
Yes, seven is extremely powerful magically, and I can understanding thinking that your body is a suitcase of sorts, and the way to protect it to use seven different locks, each with a different key, and scatter the keys, and thus no one is ever able to open (destroy) the box. Sounds perfectly reasonable on its face, but it's misunderstanding the nature of the human. The box is never the point of a lock. The contents of the box are the important part. So if you think of the soul, the complex, multifaceted soul of a person in its complexity, a different picture emerges. Imagine the soul as a parchment, folded over. Each experience adds to the folding making the soul thicker, richer, more complex. The act of making a Horcrux tears a layer off; thinning the soul, making it more vulnerable, not less. Less of a treasure, not more; paradoxically less worth guarding and less able to defend itself. So instead of building a treasure of a soul, you're systematically destroying and weakening the soul, one layer at a time. Now you can make the claim, what value is the soul, when the body is what holds and sustains life, but we already know that's not the true source of value for life. Just look at what happens when someone suffers the Dementor's kiss; their body is undamaged, but without the soul to drive it, it's really is just a box, no matter how many locks it has. So, since you ask me, I would say that creating seven horcruxes from your soul would not make you better or stronger, it's actually more likely to make you weaker. Instead of one lock for a diamond, you'd have seven locks for a broken piece of glass. What are you guarding then? Not to mention, as I said before, that you'll likely have made moral enemies seeking revenge for the deaths of their loved ones along the way. And, of course, not to belabor the point, it's clearly not a solution to death because as previously mentioned, no known wizard who has ever created a horcrux is still alive. (https://www.facebook.com/mdyesowitch/posts/10152551373227843)