I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.
Edit 1:
- Heath death of the universe, Death of the sun, etc, does not count. I feel like focusing on this is an overused point.
Edit 2:
- Loneliness does not count. I feel like we all know immortality means you’ll miss people and lose them.
Repeated surgical corrections for your ever growing earlobes
Either “Boredom: After some time you have seen basically everything.” or “Can’t keep up: The world changes so fast, and I’m, stuck in a mindset I acquired in 1543”.
And: Bureaucratic nightmare. “We have you on file as being born in 1924, but you don’t really look like a centennial. Can I see your passport instead of that of your great-grandfather, please?”
I cannot connect to the boredom one at all. Are there books, video games, stone tablets, cool rocks to look at? Outta here with that boredom nonsense.
I think you’re undervaluing loneliness. Loneliness isn’t just missing some one. Loneliness means there’s no point in connecting with people because they will just die. Loneliness means that no one knows the depth of your condition because it isn’t available to them. It means that as they change and face new obstacles, you’ll be oblivious to all of that. You’ll not only see them die, you’ll see the vitality deep out of their pores as they age. All the while you’ll never know what that means personally or feel that slow slipping.
Also, super weird that your example is a breakup and people dying is something not worth registering.
I kinda disagree with you. Why would it be different from now? We know that people will die.
I’ve had good friends pass away at different times, and it hurts but eventually, I move on.
My only exception, with the knowledge I have today, is that I wouldn’t have any kids. That attachment is straight up reptilian brain and that would be way too hard. Otherwise, it would be okay.
It’s the difference between knowing you’ll grow and graduate together with your classmates vs knowing you’re only going to see them for that one month before you move away.
outlasting humanity and all its trappings
If everyone gets to be immortal, imagine never being able to get rid of dictators. Putin’s 600th won election.
People in the future wouldn’t be allowed to have children, Earth will be filled to the brim with very old people and very few new ideas.
Being asked your birthdate in order to view a game on Steam, and the year dropdown not going back far enough.
Date pickers that assume you have a 5 digit birth year.
I once entered an extremely far back yet technically plausible birthday there and steam just wouldn’t accept it. I remember thinking “what if Kane Tanaka wanted to check out this steam game, you just wouldn’t let her?” (RIP by the way, she was the last oldest person whose name I learned. They change too often)
Or not being able to play a board game, because it says “ages 9 - 99” on the box.
Worse still, no manual entry of the birth date, so it takes ages to scroll down and select the year.
Depends on the type of immorality. Do you continue to age? If no, what age do you stop? Eventually the universe will die. So what happens to you then?
It might be fun for a while. Maybe even a long while. But that fun will be gone in an instant compared to the trillions and trillions of years you will float in a dark dying universe of nothing.
Presumably you will advance along with humanity though, or failing that, just figure out the transcendence thing yourself with so much time?
I don’t think anyone would choose to stay ‘meatbag human’ for trillions of years.
Nothing forever will feel oh so fast when you lose any frame of reference.
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.
Is it: “the age of pussyfoot” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_the_Pussyfoot
That could be it - many elements are familiar, although the title isn’t at all, but I have read a lot of Fredrik Pohl. The plot synopsis also doesn’t mention the characters finding out they had been married before. Maybe that’s a small detail that just stands out more in my mind.
Swear I’ve read that. Anyone?
Isn’t the movie Hancock a bit in this direction?
A scifi short story I read was set in a somewhat idyllic future.
Robots did everything. Everyone was given housing, food etc. Health was covered and people lived virtually forever. Nobody worked, and you could travel and do anything you wanted.
The most prized thing, that everyone was desperate for, was having an original thought.
Reminds me another story about an idyllic world where almost nobody worked and everything was provided. At one point a crew showed up to repair a house, and everybody gathered around to watch, marveling at their work clothes and tools. One guy yearned to use tools so he started making little craft items at home, and trading them to people for worthless little tiddly wink tokens they used for friendly bets on sports. Then his neighbors started doing the same thing and they got a little economy going, using the tokens as currency, until the government got wind of it and squashed the whole thing because commerce was illegal.
immortality doesn’t guarantee perpetual health, you’re alive, but so broken and sick you wish you could die, but you can’t
Yeah this answer.
Imagine being immortal and you get stuck somewhere.
Like in a giant land slide.
Alive, but stuck in nutty putty cave for eternity
Not eternity, just a few billion years until earth is vaporized by the sun going supernova.
Then you’re free - to drift through empty space forever.
My knees hurt already. I can’t imagine living with constant aging forever until you’re just a crumpled pile on the ground and then it still goes on.
“I have no mouth and I must scream” could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.
Just listened to that recently. I could see this being a thing.
I also couldn’t believe how graphic it was for how old it is.
This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus
In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten
Brandon Sanderson wrote a novel about this.
Basically all of the time you’re alive will be after the heat death of the universe, where you will be floating in space, with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience. Complete darkness, complete silence, in a complete vacuum, for eternity. Every other particle in the universe is forever out of your reach. You know that you will have nothing forever. You will never see, hear, or touch anything again, for all of time, which will never end. The trillions of years that preceded your float through the void fade into a distant memory as you outlive twice as much time, four times as much, a trillion-trillion times as much, and infinitely more.
I wrote a story that features such an entity and what was interesting about it to me was how even the slightest glimmer of life beyond their void would lead to an all-consuming desire to experience “living” again.
So just my normal day?
Or you get to experience another big bang. That would be worth the wait.
Then you could call yourself Galactus
That old person feeling of no longer being with “it”, and what’s “it” now being strange and scary probably compounds over the centuries.
And this is why elder vampires are so vengeful.
I absolutely love the scene in “Interview with the Vampire” where Lestat is found hiding away in a room, distraught by all the creations of modern civilization.
yes, but old people can get over that and just stop giving a fuck and accept that they’re weird now. it must be liberating.
I’m not sure about this. Ever heard the phrase “the past is a foreign country”? Living through time would be like immersing yourself into a new country every couple of decades. You could even lessen the blow (and would probably have to in order to remain anonymous) by frequently moving around the world. People tend to give newcomers a certain amount of slack and with the enormous amount of knowledge and experience you would gain over time, you can easily and quickly immerse yourself in any new environment and adapt to whatever is “it” now.
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
Also, it is already frustrating seeing kids being dismissive or denying events that you yourself have lived. Imagine being thousands of years old and seeing so much shit, but those events are rarely retold, forgotten, or straight up denied by conspiracies or future governments that won’t admit their fault on it.
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
IDK, I feel like researching for supporting evidence of a theory you already know is correct would be much easier than researching to try to piece together a theory from no information. I think you could put the truth out there as credible and well-regarded theories, even if there are incorrect alternative theories that people also have to consider.
Knowing my memory I’d forget it all very soon after it happened and need a history book to help me recall any of it and the stuff left out or distorted would end up warping that recollection enough that it’d be so unreliable I may as well believe the historians. I can scarcely remember the previous day as it is.
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.
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
You don’t need immortality for that. Only a bad decade in your 20’.
I’ve watched the Man From Earth a couple times. Can only recommend.
However it doesn’t fit your description. Oldman says that his memory is basically limited. Just like any mortal’s. Only the brightest, most impactful memories are retained and the rest is a blur. If you are forty plus, you barely have memories of your childhood today, unless you have recorded them as soon as you could and rehashed them frequently. Same for him. As such, he is constantly evolving with the world mentally (and physically apparently).
The first paragraph is how I imagine he was during the first few centuries of his life, when all the scars were fresh and he had no idea how to deal with it. From the sounds of it he has been in ruling positions, and may have even enjoyed it briefly, before he adopted the humble mindset that he has now and tries to inspire humanity with small acts of compassion.
(I write “adopted” but I like to think that his actions actually reflect the hazy consciousness of humanity at the time, and so maybe he was molded into this persona over the years, as humanity grew somewhat kinder? Or he learned that the highest value one can have is not through wealth or power, but through compassion, i.e. something that all humans would eventually learn, a.k.a humanity does have value if given a chance).
I do wonder how his skills have decayed. Can he juggle? Can he do a backflip, or it’s been too long and he no longer remembers how? How elastic is his brain exactly, and what precisely is there left of him in there that just isn’t a hazy imprint of his circumstances over the last few centuries.
Imagine a neural net with limited nodes that has been subject to more training data than it can handle. Eventually it just learns to approximate all the data it has seen (overtrained) and isn’t elastic enough to predict or react to new stimulus, and becomes set in its ways. Is this the case with John? Or does he summarize old historical data and leaves himself with enough elasticity to learn new things from the last X decades?
Juggling might be in the same vein as bicycling, or swimming. Learn it and it’s really hard to unlearn it. Or maybe like tying your necktie or shoe laces. You learn it once with more focus and then periodically if recalled you retain it.
Anecdotal, but I’ve learned how to flip the balisong over a couple days in my late teens at the cost of lots of cuts on my hand and fingers (more dramatic than it sounds really) without a guide. I haven’t had one in three decades, but I got my hands on one a year or two back and I was able to recall the motion and technique in only a couple tries without any cuts. Even today when I think about it, I can do the flick motion and my hand and wrist instinctively yearns for the weight of the cool steel.
Yeah I figure that he has some skills that he can just “snap” back into, and clearly he still has some good reflexes when it comes to aggressive situations. In that sense, I guess he can choose to retain the skills that he still finds valuable (e.g. hunting, teaching, kindness, child-rearing(?))
The rest of humanity will eventually evolve into something you don’t recognize and can never be part of.
My thought. In 500M years, you would be like the slime that crawled out of the oceans to the dominant life.
Neanderthals wanted to live forever and now we have bigfoot.
Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.
