Loneliness. I think being immortal would show someone what true Loneliness is
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If the ultra rich find you out, you can expect lab-rat life, at least until all modern systems collapse. Death is the only thing those suckers fear, because regardless of their net worth, it comes for all, even if late. They would do anything to find out your trick
i think that experiencing all the things & people i care about would be the worst of it.
either that or seeing us repeat history over and over again as a society complete with all of the indifferent cruelties it entails and studying it, but ignoring it anyways
If we're talking magical immortality, as in you can't die, at all. Then the fact that however much enjoyment and experiences you get while the universe still exist, it will be followed by an infinite stretch of nothing after the heat death of the universe.
Then again, you have billions of years to come up with a solution to this problem.
I think the estimates are much, much longer until that happens.
Everyone else in your life that isn't immoral (if you're the only one who is) dies eventually, so every time you make a friend or start a family, you do so knowing that you will have to watch them all die someday.
Wow you're a real smart one, nobody has ever thought about that. Read the Question in the title again.
Nobody is answering the prompt lol. Everyone says all of this shit all the time.
You live long enough to never feel at home. Sure the loneliness sucks or whatever, but who do you root for at the football game?
Having to buy new shoes for the rest of eternity. You know how much work I've literally just put into finding shoes that 1) don't suck and 2) aren't made with slave labor? It's impossible. Drives me insane. I'd found my own shoe company once I become immortal rich just to fix that problem alone. Maybe other stuff too we'll get there
I suppose on that note: it seems like a really bad idea to become a public figure after a while. Like you obviously don't want your immortality found out. You have to have like illuminati power before that point though, but it could happen at any time. Like if something happens and you become a news item (i.e. helping someone out and a video goes viral online). Not saying everyone is all that close to going viral, but over a sufficiently long lifespan you're effectively rolling that dice a lot.
Upsides: You can create a cult where they believe in you as a god, because you will live for eternity.
If you have epilepsy or Parkinson's or MS, you're just going to likely get worse forever.
A lot of ways to die are excruciatingly painful, but you die, so you don't live with the pain. If you end up in one of those situations and don't die (because you are immortal), I imagine the psychological impact of the pain without immediate release could be enough to completely break you, mentally.
Idk id be super depressed if I was able to experience my family, friends, family's children, and so on die.
At some point, our sun will go supernova and you will end up drifting through space.
And all your life before that point will be less than a blink of an eye compared to the time that follows:
Trillions and trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.
And even that time will be less than the blink of an eye compared to the eternity afterwards, when you drift through a black void without any stars.
But no people around. So overall a win.
LoL investing and compounding! I literally have all the time in the world.
If you're injured and you survive with the scarring from said injuries. Well, good luck because you're now going to wear those and wish you had died from them. If you're incapacitated or amputated? Gotta live with that for years and years.
Sounds like you have time to figure out alternatives. Like cyborgetics or using cloned parts.
And robocop was born
That was a horror cause he wasn't willing. If he was willing then it would be like cult mechanicus, ghost in the shell, or Adam smasher. Embrace the certainly of steel! Or course if your brain is damaged and you can't die that is a curse.
Agreed
All the comments assume everybody else isn't also immortal. I forget the title and author but there's an old sci fi story (or novel?) about a future where everybody lives for centuries, and they've found that the brain only retains a certain amount of experience. They have long careers, get tired of doing whatever, re-educate and do something else, or even have multiple families they eventually forget about. A couple of the characters are surprised to find out they used to be married like a century earlier. To me that seems vaguely like reincarnation, and I kind of don't hate the idea. I really don't see any downside to that scenario, or even just going on forever.
People are focused on having regrets and negatives that last forever. But buck up li'l camper, you can learn to move on from stuff. And I say this as a dad whose daughter had cancer at age 10 (she survived). It was hell and I wouldn't want to live through that whole period again, but I don't consider it a reason not to want to live forever. The trick is to learn how to cope with these things and not let them outweigh the good experiences you have.
Time gets shorter. I've already experienced this going from my teens to my twenties and into my thirties. I can remember entire weeks of my childhood. By the time I was in my mid twenties, days and weeks blurred together. Now it's like months go by and I don't even notice.
People talk about it more as they get older. Eventually when you enter your 80s and 90s, it's like entire decades can come and go. So imagine when you're immortal. If you've been alive for 100,000 years, that's longer than writing has been around. Entire civilizations will have come and went.
But from your perspective, it's all a blur. Entire genealogies were experienced, yet those people barely registered in your mind. If you had a favorite food, maybe the recipe disappears when you went four centuries without eating it. Jokes and fashions you're familiar with are completely alien to everyone else. Are you even capable of noticing when things change at that point?
There's also the question of how human are you? Everything and everyone would seem inconsequential. Would you even be able to socialize with others, or would you be completely sociopathic? That's if you don't hurt anyone and get tossed in a jail cell. What happens if you spend a few centuries in prison? Fight in multiple wars? Would you even feel the slightest discomfort when you kill someone?
Life will pound you into an uncaring jaded disinterested unloveable husk of a being after too many emotional scars from losing loved ones, too much of seeing humanity make the same mistakes, and too much watching the knowledge you gained turned irrelevant.
Or, life will beat into you an uncanny ability to converse and relate to others, even if fleetingly.
Watch The Man from Earth.
You don't need immortality for that. Only a bad decade in your 20'.
But do not watch the sequel. It ruins the whole beautiful thing.
Yes and No. You could argue that True Love was the factor between them
I donβt think youβd remember a break up from hundreds of years ago, let alone be upset about it.
Probably, but it depends on the person. I stopped caring about some relationships that ended after a year, but I'm still thinking about others decades later.
Vampires are always like this in stories. I feel like reality might be more like ergo proxy. Where what is a relationship that tastes 10 or 200 years compared to thousands?
Discovering the upper limits to what the human mind can retain and just constantly forgetting all the shit you used to find important.
On one hand, you have eternity to come to grips with everything you've done. On the other hand, it might take eternity to come to grips with everything you've done.
Seeing all of your friends and family die, knowing you'll never stop missing them.
Having the perspective of centuries. Seeing society make the same mistakes over and over again because they forget, but you never do. It would drive me mad. Already does, considering I have the ability to, and have, read history. I just imagine living it over and over to be tedious.