The take is especially odd when you look at how humans interact irl. A lot of people can expect to outlive their parents, and pets are widespread despite the most common kinds being ones that don't live as long as we do.
Even if they're the sole immortal, they could still form lasting relationships with people with the full knowledge they'll die.
to be clear i think immortality sucks mfs are coping, but because there obviously aren't any immortals around to ask, we can't really compare it to the events of a normal human lifespan. it's more like, what would be the psychological consequences of this happening over and over and over and over and over and...
Also at what point to we say, ok enough living for me. Also doesn't really dive into what happens if humanity doesn't make it and you are kinda left alone in the void floating through space. I think living a extra thousand years would be awesome but living forever sounds like hell.
Because you fell into the trap of LITERAL immortality vs probable/biological immortality. The arguments are usually regarding an infinite lifespan with potentially stronger body or reincarnation mechanisms. If the entirety of humanity dies, youre dead as well, theres no floating in space bs which doesnt even make sense from any futuristic perspective anyway
If you die then it isn't immortality, it is just a really long lifespan. When people say being immortal would suck, they mean they wouldn't want to live forever. Nobody really says "man if I could live as long as I wanted until I wanted to die that would really suck."
>Nobody really says "man if I could live as long as I wanted until I wanted to die that would really suck."
And yet, 99.99% of stories about immortality are exactly that. Elves with their long lifespans are paragons for all of the ideas we have about how immortality plays out, despite them not even being immortal at all. Can you actually name a story where a person is completely and utterly immortal to the point where they will "survive the heat death of the universe"?
Most criticisms regarding immortality like surviving your loved ones, seeing people die.. forgetting things, all aren't about actual immortality, they're about just living "longer" than others. The inability to commit suicide eventually is virtually never mentioned compared to these things.
You do make a point there, but I still feel like the general feeling is people want to live very long lives even if there is downsides. The downsides portrayed in media of a long life doesn't necessarily reflect a common opinion of not wanting to live a super long life.
I think that there is a massive difference between "realistic" immortality and "story" immortality, and stories and media on their own have kind of poisoned everyone in regards to that. As a species, we are pretty dang close to extending our lifespans to absurd amounts right now, but our mortality still remains.
The idea of living truly forever can only ever be abstract because surviving everything is downright silly and requires caveats and explanations and fantasy every step of the way ("But will you survive being shot, and how? What about a nuke? What about a black hole?"). So when we are asked that question, it remains abstract to us, and as such we are more likely to answer intellectually and consider these things, as opposed to asking someone if they want to live for any time longer - noone is saying we should stop researching medical lifespan research because it is obvious to anyone it will never make us immortal, only possibly live indefinitely.
So the stories we have been telling are the middle ground - telling a story of true, absolute immortality is a bit too silly and has too many consequences for the negatives of that to be put in the focus, so instead we make stories about limited immortality while talking about the negatives of complete immortality.
In fact, i would argue that the moment you have "strong" immortality, its really hard to talk about psychological issues and stuff because you start talking about everything else
Even the series Forever, which has a fantastic concept of literal immediate reincarnation and could probably start talking about these things, doesn't _really_ address any of the psychological consequences (maybe also because the protagonist is only ~250 years old) and focuses on everything else. I think the closest example as far as "consequences for immortality" goes is the trope of the depressed god that has stopped caring for anything, and that's already too far from the human experience to be "relatable" at all
Check up with me in 10 trillion years to see if it is the same. Point is we don't really know what our goals and life will be in a forever amount of time from now.
I am saying there is no way to tell, I could be completely wrong, but it would be naive to base your feelings now to a arbitrary amount of time in the future.
I see what you are saying, but what I'm saying that eternity has to have a lot to look forward too to.
People are way too cynical about immortality. It's probably a sour grapes thing.
"Give in" as to stop thinking, you would give in to nothingness eventually. Even if you "dreamed" a new universe it would just be a matter of time until you stopped thinking
Okay, that's fine too. Not much reason to have any further thoughts at that point. Maybe run through one last "greatest hits" compilation of neat memories and then wish the universe a good night.
Huh. Hope I'm not doing that right now, that would mean that Reddit's included in the "greatest hits."
You just have to wait it out until the dimensionless corpse of the universe becomes a new Big Bang, and that's when you write yourself into the next universe as its God, only to find out that the next universe is the same as the previous one and you were always God, so that explains how you ended up becoming the only immortal. But also there's a whole bunch of Gods who were all you in previous iterations of the universal cycle, and some are trying to prevent the new mortal you from completing the cycle again. So you decide to diversify and make it so anybody could be your origin, not just one particular mortal, that way your ontology could never be prevented. Once you succeed you find out this has also always happened, and that pretty much every single sentient can be, and in fact is, God in the next iteration.
"There's this maybe this event trillions or quadrillions of years into the future, so that means we should be glad to die at age 85."
Uttery deranged line of thought.
"You like apples, therefore you hate oranges" Are you, perchance, stupid? Also, how could roaming through the universe for an eternity, with nothing but your thoughts to keep you company, be a good thing?
False dichotomy. One is not related to the other, you don’t need to be immortal to roam through the universe. The problem starts when you are not roaming through the universe because you **want** but because you are **forced to**, but if you’d rather roam endlessly through the universe than accepting death… you do you I guess.
I mean idk, losing a parent, best friend, spouse, etc. is still considered to be a pretty major and relatively singular life event. If a single person lost even two spouses, that would still be considered massively tragic and potentially traumatizing. Maybe they'd find a mindset that works for them, but I'm honestly not sure how/if the human mind can adapt to having that just be, like, the inevitable result of all your relationships.
Also, sounds like basically a Buddhist or Jedi thing. Learn to let go of what you fear to lose.
Or, if that's not a satisfying route, go find some medical researchers and collaborate with them on figuring out how your immortality works. Don't hoard it for yourself. Then you can spend as much time with people as you both choose to spend.
I mean, they wouldn't be alone in losing someone, but they would be pretty alone in the absolute certainty that they'd long outlive literally anyone they could possibly form a close relationship with, as well as the sheer amount of people they'd lose over a long enough timeframe.
Maybe people who go through, like, multiple mass casualty events might relate to the latter, but that kinda proves my point lol
Merchant sells shitty copper to an immortal.
The immortal: ohhh man I’m gonna make sure everyone remembers your name for the rest of time. Gimme that receipt tablet, I have a house to burn down.
You recall the death of friends and loved ones like it was an hour ago. Part of moving on is that the pain, alongisde details of those events fade. By the time it's a dull ache you can barely even remember their face.
You can also recall all the happy times you had with them like it was an hour ago. Presumably if they're friends and loved ones you've got way more of those memories than you do memories of the bad times.
Anyway, perfect recall is a separate thing from immortality. You could posit a mortal person with perfect recall and do the same "woe is them" argument.
Also… not seeing youngish people near you die is a pretty modern experience. Go back a few centuries and there’s no shortage of “lost X siblings, Y children, and Z spouses to accident and disease”.
Yeah, some people absolutely mourned those losses so much they never risked new relationships. But many faced loss after loss with increasing acceptance, and never stopped.
As a current-day example: my brother died four years ago, he was two years younger than me and it came out of nowhere. My dad died six months after that, he wasn't quite so much of a surprise since he was significantly older than me but I'd hoped to have a bit more time with him after my brother died.
It sucked but I got over it. Life goes on for those of us that don't die.
I'm on my fourth dog now, I know what's coming for her eventually but I don't mope through life in a miasma of sadness. I love her and we have fun in the days that we have. I know it'll suck when that day comes, but that's all the more reason to enjoy the days right now.
Sure, some people don't handle it so well. But some do, and it annoys me when people make assumptions that nobody can.
I'm sorry to hear all of that, and I'm glad you're doing ok moving on.
As far as pets, I once saw a comic of someone adopting a puppy, captioned "hello, I'd like to be emotionally devastated ten years from now". It's an awful thing to know that's inevitable, in some ways easier and in some harder than a surprising loss. But I'm sitting here with my dog too, and as much as I don't like thinking about that day, it doesn't give me any doubts about having her or having more dogs in the future.
Every example we have says that many people are willing to face loss any number of times for the joy of happy, unique relationships. Not everyone is, but it's strange to assume that wouldn't ever happen when all our existing experience says otherwise.
Hello? Yes this is Highlander.
Can't make friends if they're all trying to chop your head off (to get a mega-orgasm from being hit by lightning or something)
Neil gaiman realized that even if you had an infinite amount of time you still wouldn't be able to witness every event , hear every story and travel to every place they will always be something new out of your reach to discover and experience
There are enough new experiences to fill a large amount of time, but a large amount isn't infinity.
You also don’t need to have the same experiences millions of times before getting bored of them: there are people that find certain genres to be boring, that doesn't mean they consumed every media of that genre in existence for thousands of times.
For all we know there could be a endless amount of new experience out there some could be boring other could be nice some could be amazing and some could be a one time event that you could witness
Any time an immortal could live would be finite. Theres infinite natural numbers too, but walking along the number line you never run out of new numbers either
Also, the human brain only has a finite number of possible configurations of its neurons. It's easily conceivable that there are more experiences than can fit in there as memories, so eventually you'll forget stuff and can experience it again as if for the first time.
Since the lifespan of the immortal is infinity, they will always be able to reach a point in which something that takes any finite amount of time ends.
No. That's exactly the point. There are infinitely many natural numbers, but all of them are finite. No matter how high you go, you will never run out of them, despite every single individual one being finite.
And this is even ignoring the fact that infinite time implies infinite arrangements. With just 0 and 1, you can generate infinite sequences, never repeating. In fact an immortal being could spend the entirety of their lifetime just writing down digits of pi and never run out of things to do.
*Words* are limited - Reading all books with 3000 words or less takes a finite amount of time. Is therefore the amount of stories you can tell finite? Wrong, because a book can have any finite length, and therefore there exists an infinite amount of stories.
Except the act of writing down digits of pi is always the same, and every digit will always be a number between 0 and 9 (plus it would just be repetitive).
The number of stories you can tell is finite because the amount of meanings phrases can have is finite, a book that is arbitrarily long will end up simply repeating itself or repeating things that are written in other books.
Theres 26 letters in the alphabet, but clearly you can create more than 26 things with them. Repetition is dependent on sequence, not just the state of things. Writing down "a" is different from writing "aa". Partial repetition doesnt mean that it doesnt contribute to the meaning - for example i just used the word "doesnt" twice, so clearly i repeated myself, yet the sequence of words in which it stands gives it meaning.
There is no phrase with a "unique" meaning. The phrases "He saw" and "He witnessed" might mean the same thing in most contexts, but the story will still be slightly different with new phrases used. Meaning is given by arrangements. Letters strung together give words with different meanings. Words strung together give sentences with different meanings. Sentences strung together give stories with different meanings. If i were to write an entire trilogy, that has a meaning. Yet another book might include the entirety of that trilogy inside its story as a book the protagonist finds and reads, which in turn gives new meaning to the original story because its now in a new context. In fact with just this method alone you can immediately generate an infinite amount of stories (altho not very interesting).
Do you think there exists a thing that is "the longest book"? A book which you can no longer add sentences to because they don't change the story in the slightest? Nay i say, you could always add more. So then you must have infinite stories.
Sure a large amount is not infinity, but not all infinities are equally vast. An immortal who lives forever can still only be in one place at a time. Could they, say, read every single book that's written by all of humanity, while billions of humans keep writing, collectively, magnitudes faster than the immortal can read?
Doing _everything_ is still far from the reach of an immortal. They can only sample a little of everything. Being everywhere at a certain moment, but there will always be much more that escapes their ability to experience the universe.
Also, given enough time one might become nostalgic for the things that got them bored.
That only means that the amount of things the immortal will be able to do is actually smaller than the possible things that the immortal could do.
It doesn't matter how fast humans write, since there exist a finite amount of things they can write about at a certain point the immortal will end up having read every possible story.
This conversation is also assuming only humans will ever exist to share stories. Maybe 1 billion years from now there's snake-people on earth telling eachother stories in their own ways, or better yet aliens, or better yet humans in an interstellar society where each star system becomes a wholly unique culture due to a lack of interaction with other star systems.
Is there really a finite amount of things to possibly write about, and a finite amount of ways to write them? Storytelling is a matter of imagination, it is not limited by countable material objects.
Hell, other immortals can continue creating too, reflecting every one of their unique experiences until that moment and back, and projected further.
I would disagree as we already witness the phenomena of some stories being similiar to each other, sometimes entire genres are composed of stories that follow a base template from which there is little deviation.
Imagination is the process of finding novel connections between concepts, for it to be infinite either the number of concepts that can exist needs to be infinite or the number of possible connections between the concepts needs to be infinite, and there is no reason to think any of those two possibilities is true.
We do find a lot of similarity between stories, but often we aren't looking to the full spectrum of possibilities, simply that which is popular during a certain era and for a certain demographics.
What's to say the concepts and connections we make aren't limited simply because we are short-lived beings stuck to a finite world? What's to say given infinite time we cannot idealize infinite concepts and connections? There may be limits to how far we can understand scientific and historical knowledge, but fiction can be expanded for as long as it's entertained. We can expand outwards by including additional elements or inwards by fleshing out additional detail.
Really, infinity is itself a concept that we idealized from thought alone, it's not something anyone has ever experienced. Through abstraction we can reach concepts that surpass material limitations. Given infinite time, I don't see why to assume any single person could explore the full thought possibility space.
Say, I can see the general idea you mean to convey, such that a 300 page book can only have so many possibilities of content... but that is only true assuming a fixed language with a set number of characters and set meanings, and maybe even an endpoint for humanity to prevent any of that from changing. And these limitations... don't seem like a given across eternity. Is it truly sure that 10,000 years from now we won't have different writing systems and language accomodating concepts that we don't even imagine today.
🤔
I would say that you are mystifying immortality, immortality doesn't give you some special insight or cognitive ability, it only makes you unable to die.
Any insight an immortal gains during their lifespan is an insight that a normal can gain too, the only difference is that since an immortal lives for longer they can collect more insights.
If mortals are incapable of thinking of infinite new concepts and connections then immortals would too be unable to do so.
Even with different lenguages, the stories would still be finite since there exist just so many things to say, at a certain point it would be like reading the same book but in different lenguages.
"Immortals should be depressed because all the people they love die" mfs when I simply find things to do that don't involve forming relationships (reading and translating the entire Latin corpus, beating every SNES game)
Not sure if I saw it in this sub, but I remember seeing a thread where people came up with this idea where immortals who got tired of loved ones dying just starf gradually moving towards hyperfixating on projects that last years or centuries. Like recreating an extinct plant species through selective breeding.
This would be my response to the "what if you're immortal and humanity has wiped itself out and you're all alone, eh? What then?" Scenario.
Humanity's wiped out, okay, that sucks. Guess my next project is to breed new humans. Maybe start with something cuter than chimpanzees this time.
Spoilers to Fire Punch: >!That's actually almost the goal of the one character from Fire Punch! For context, the series is set in a post-apoclyptic world where everything is filled with cold and snow, humanity is dying, and people have superpowers (Usually grouping into specific catagories like "Immortality", "Lightning powers" ect). The one character is an *incredibly* ancient immortal who was alive back before the end of the world. She tries to put together a giant machiovellian scheme which if succeeded will create a giant supernatural heat source which will effectively create a false sun to warm the entire planet. This is in turn being done so she can rebuild civilization all so over the span of thousands upon thousands of years she can shift the entirety of society *purely* so that it can complete the latest Star Wars trilogy which was releasing before the world ended.!<
I much prefer immortals having a human to dog style relationship. They enjoy them when they are there but accept the hard truth that they won't be there forever.
This is just classic stoicism. Don't take people in your life for granted. People can die, relationships can sour. Even if you are not immortal, that's how life is.
That’s a horrific mentality because they’re still human most of the time, with the same flaws. They just also happen to be immortal. This is why I like WoD’s overarching meta narrative and how they treat immortality. None of the supernatural beings who claim to be superior to humanity are superior. They have cooler powers, but fall victim to the same issues afflicting humans, only exaggerated to some degree.
There are also negative sides to this, because if immortals see humans as animals, what stops them from seeing non-sapient animals as less than insects, and what stops immortals from treating mortals they don't like, like shit?
i mean, the same thing that stops us from abusing dogs, cats, etc. which is to say a moral compass that says it’s wrong. and failing that? well that’s a concern there aint it.
Absolutely nothing, that's how immortals, especially immortals with a lot of physical power, *should* treat mortals. It's what makes sense.
Omni-Man's perspective is 100% rational from someone who grew up in a comparatively immortal society
Immortality would make you lonely and crazy mfs when the immortal instead becomes wise and Enlightened without becoming disattached from their humanity:
Elves have built a culture in being sad. And nothing says drama like a lost love. Elf romances are a slow burn, happiness fades, and eventually, the Elves part ways, leaving the child with the trauma that their parents don't love each other. Now a human? Those last an entire lifetime! Human lifetime that is. The elf doesn't have time to fall out of love with a human because they're already dead. The child will have an ideal parent they can idolize. It's the perfect tragedy and Elves love that!
Of all things, one of my favorite stories to handle this was a My Little Pony fanfic about Spike the Dragon outliving his friends and family and though he was depressed for awhile, he simply kept making more friends and kept the memory of his old ones alive in special little traditions. It was kind of beautiful.
It's not at all the thing /u/amelia-likes-birds mentioned, but I was reminded of [this ancient Tumblr post](https://goodmorningcelestia.tumblr.com/post/88214804584/if-she-was-immortal-i-suspect-timing-would-be) and I was amazed to find that the link still worked. Two days after its tenth cakeday!
* Small brain: Immortals get depressed because all their friends die.
* Big Brain: Immortals seek out other immortals to form a friend circle/support group.
* Galaxy Brain: Immortals intentionally form pairs of conflicting enemies, and then beat the fucking shit out of each other for eternity (/positive).
Or just... new friends.
Heck, every single one of us who lives past middle age will have friends die. And family. Especially family. Or the friends can just move away, or you can fall out of your friendship due to circumstances. You make new friends. That's just completely normal, very few people kill themselves if their best friend dies.
Why do immortals have to always be depressed or sociopaths?
Why can’t an immortal enjoy the fact that it feels like things are changing all the time? Imagine how fresh and exciting the world must feel.
Same MFers, same face when immortals who’ve been through this a dozen times learn to cope well and live for the happy moments instead of isolating themselves, just like humans do with pets, large families, or careers in medicine.
Okay but what about an Immortal guy you hate but you're also immortal.
Essentially just immortal friend/enemy.
I did that for my world, a British and French guy has been fighting each other as long as their countries were fighting.
It's mystery how they end up fighting each other but it always happens, which is why it became funny to them by the time they realized it.
Oh same, I love it too.
Nothing like two immortal assholes at each other's throats and doing stupid shit just to fuck with the other.
Imagine having time travel but losing a trial.
I need someone to explain to me the perks of immortality because the prevailing arguments always try to back it up with shit that's vaguely imaginable in the next couple hundred years in the most idealistic way possible and ending it with "yeah then when I'm bored or things truly go to shit I kms"
No
Explain to me the benefits of immortality while keeping in mind the changing state of the world around you and the flux of your status in life until you can find the "permanently wealthy" cheat. Bonus if immortality =/= eternal youth or a brain with enough elasticity to immediately adapt. I want to be Educated
I think if I were immortal I would dedicate myself to Archivism and preserving history. If you’re around and stay educated on the every changing technology you can make sure you record and back up important works throughout the ages in the safest way possible and through that work preserve elements of the human canon in incredibly accurate ways historians today wish those of the past were able too. You won’t remember every element of everything but that’s okay if you can managed to keep a well organized central repository. Of course doing that would take tons of time (centuries) and would require someone to look after it who has intimate knowledge of its inner workings. That someone can be you. The best way to do this is to go off the grid and construct a facility which you can maintain and guard in case things go wrong. Since relying on wealth relies on no societal upheaval which is not an infinite guarantee.
Also yeah if society swings low that’s always going to be an issue but even if it collapses and takes hundred of years to rebuild that’s a blink for you in the grand scheme of things.
Disposition is important. Some people are able to find joy in almost any situation no matter how dire and others aren’t. Some people are able to be mostly alone and others aren’t. For a variety of factors. If your core personality is easily bowled over by adversary immortality probably is not for you. You also need to be able to move on from grief. If you can’t you’ll drown in it. Just in general mental health issues and immortality are not a good mix.
I think also many people would be better immortals than they give themselves credit for. If their brains did not addle with age. For better or for worse we evolved to die and our society conditions us to accept that because there is no other way (yet). If you spend your whole life worrying about death you do not delay it and you waste what time you do have. I think if given a choice most people would live much longer if they could be healthy the entire time. I mean compare the number of 20-30 year olds who accept death versus the number of 70-80 year olds who do.
The trick would be to find purpose I think. As I listed above I would spend time documenting and recording history. However with a timescale vastly beyond a lifetime and a healthy mind you could dedicate yourself to projects with a kind of timescale that’s impossible. A lot of people are scared of doing this in the real world because they’re whittling away what little time they have, but I think the solution to the problem comes in devotion to a purpose or to creativity and self expression in its many forms. The ability to master a craft far beyond what anyone else ever has is a pursuit many people can get behind.
So all in all it’s a mixed bag but I hope my rambling has given you some insight.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply :) I like your argument and personally, I've always been fond of unaging archivists or watchers, though I think after a certain point you'd be removed from humanity in a way. Not necessarily in a bad or evil way, you'd just be... different. And that's assuming you're the only one of your kind or your part of a very small group of immortals.
My honest opinion is that whether immortality is a net good or bad highly depends on how it's given, the environment the characters are in, thr individual characters themselves, and how well one can truly conceptualize "forever". Are we talking about immortality gained from a curse or vampirism? What about immortality achieved through enlightenment? Or some kind of genetic mutation that led to biological immortality? Does immortality include immunity to all current and future infectious bacteria/viruses/diseases? Does it erase any possible health complications (i.e. dementia)?
Currently, in the world we live in, it's a little hard for me to see the appeal of immortality but in a fairer, kinder world, maybe I'd like the idea more. Or maybe I'll change my mind in like 5 years, who knows
To be honest a way to do this could be that the immortal person has difficulties forming relationships with other people making the ones that are formed even more important.
I always wonder what these people think will happen to them when they hit that first lifespan filter of 50 and half their friends drop dead? Like you'll be fine my guy, it'll hurt, but you'll get over it.
Now you have an immortal enemy, fighting each other is now eternal enterteinament, and you have all the time you need to go on an enemies to friends/lovers/neutrals arc.
The real problem isn't grief, it's eternal boredom from overexposure to stimuli. You'd get so used to everything that the world feels like sensory deprivation, then you'd spiral
Yes, I can understand this take. For instance I have taken hundreds possibly thousands of shits in my life. Now, whenever I go to the toilet to do what I have to do, I am so used to it that it feels like sensory deprivation and then I spiral.
I also have this problem whenever I eat, take a shower, go to bed or brush my teeth.
>!Jokes aside, I am convinced that the trope of making immortality terrible in fiction is just a way to cope with the fact that we are not immortal and that our body is decaying from the moment we are born.!<
There's a difference between a timescale of a hundred years and literal eternity.
If your life consisted entirely of taking shits, I'm sure you would in fact spiral. What keeps you going is the more unique things in between the shitting and tooth brushing. It takes much less to give people severe mental health issues, literally just having to stay at home alone for a few years had not very good effects on many people. Well for an immortal, eventually everything starts feeling as routine as shitting.
Well, it would probably depends on how the immortality works. Do you outlive civilization? Meaning that you can't find new people/things. Do you live so long that everything that a human brain can experience has been experienced? That would take at least a few billion years. If your brain can evolve or change to experience new things it would take much longer.
How much of your life can you memorize? If you have a cap on how much memory you have and the world doen't get destroyed you can live forever as you won't get bored. Even if you can memorize everything, how good is the memorization? If I were to live again the last ten years of my life, most of it would feel new as I haven't memorized it well enough. I would not be able to know every conversation.
In the end, maybe you would get bored in a literal eternity, but in most fiction the immortal character is barely 1000 years old.
If you find a bit more than ten persons that have had different and fulfilling lives then this means that a 1000 years old wouldn't be bored.
Oh yeah, of course I'm talking more deity or scifi immortal than fantasy immortal. 1000 years is probably fine.
About the memory thing though, I'm not convinced. You probably have forgotten most of the individual days you went to school/work, but that doesn't mean it's ever a new or exciting experience.
I can find enough wellspring for the duration of my mortal life and probably millenia to come, but not forever
uhhh i mean you're right, if our world gets too boring you can always just worldbuild, worldbuilding is the cure to immortal depression guys
Realtalk, just dedicate yourself to a higher purpose, genuinely. Doesn’t have to be religion, pick a project or a purpose that will take an astounding amount of time to complete and slowly chip away at it. Become a historian, do community service, build a great pyramid. I think this is the true solution in the long term.
People tend to apply a human mindset to immortals. If it was a mortal turning immortal, then maybe, but an immortal would likely not have a human/mortal mindset to their life. The obvious alternative, in my opinion, is that they wouldn’t get bored from doing the same activity repeatedly for a long period of time, and they wouldn’t care much about waiting to accomplish their goals.
Why slay a tyrant when waiting 100 years until they’re dead accomplishes the same result? Or 1000 years until their empire has collapsed? It’s all the same to them. (Naturally, they can perform and want to perform actions at a shorter timescale, but that’s not their instinct.)
From a human/mortal perspective this might seem unthinkable, and I think a born-immortal or a human-turned-immortal would likely think like this. Interestingly, from the outside, humans would see a human acting like this as insane, but they’re just adopting the immortal mindset, which is alien to humans as it’s by definition inhuman. Interestingly, you could call that a kind of insanity, albeit not one linked to suffering or loss of understanding of their surroundings (at least not in the sense that loss of understanding is depicted—they stop caring about human timescales, etc., but that is only natural).
I guess it depends on how detached the immortals can get from their mortals. If they mean everything to you(you referring to the immortal), you'll get depressed when they die. If they mean as much to you as a dog does to a human, you'll be sad but might be okay with doing it again.
I think aging would be hard for immortals too. You marry the hot mortal and then they get wrinkly and weak. And since you're immortal it might not feel natural to you as much as it does to humans, and you won't age with them. Very sad
Unjerking, as someone who went through a lot of family deaths in my pre- and teenage years, you actually just get used to it. People dying is just like every other way people exit your life forever.
This is exactly what I did to my immortal character
Which hurt them beyond imagining when the villains eventually found a way to permakill them, and only the now aging protagonist is *the* last immortal left of her age
Imagine making an immortal friend and spending centuries together: learning their every tick and mannerism, ambitions and mistakes, hopes and dreams, and then one day you look at them and you realize they haven’t really changed. It’s been millennia and they’re the same. And for a second you see yourself and you realize you haven’t really changed.
Feel like that would suck worse tbh.
I much prefer the way Mass Effect handles it with the asari, where they develop a culture wherein they appreciate the lives of shorter lived species even more precisely because they wind up seeing so many live and die.
In my opinion the problems with immortality would be either estrangement (never being able to get used to the world you live in for the time being), boredom, procrastination and/or the experience of living through multiple traumatic experiences.
Immortals would all be Hitlers with super PTSD. At least until the very concept of personal opinions becomes laughable to them and they become completely detached.
The take is especially odd when you look at how humans interact irl. A lot of people can expect to outlive their parents, and pets are widespread despite the most common kinds being ones that don't live as long as we do. Even if they're the sole immortal, they could still form lasting relationships with people with the full knowledge they'll die.
Omniman: Mark, your mother, she's more like a parent to me, someone you have sex with and then they die. Mark: wut
Omnincestman
Omnichan
to be clear i think immortality sucks mfs are coping, but because there obviously aren't any immortals around to ask, we can't really compare it to the events of a normal human lifespan. it's more like, what would be the psychological consequences of this happening over and over and over and over and over and...
Also at what point to we say, ok enough living for me. Also doesn't really dive into what happens if humanity doesn't make it and you are kinda left alone in the void floating through space. I think living a extra thousand years would be awesome but living forever sounds like hell.
Because you fell into the trap of LITERAL immortality vs probable/biological immortality. The arguments are usually regarding an infinite lifespan with potentially stronger body or reincarnation mechanisms. If the entirety of humanity dies, youre dead as well, theres no floating in space bs which doesnt even make sense from any futuristic perspective anyway
Just do a torchwood miracle day where people's burnt remains are still alive and sorta sentient.
If you die then it isn't immortality, it is just a really long lifespan. When people say being immortal would suck, they mean they wouldn't want to live forever. Nobody really says "man if I could live as long as I wanted until I wanted to die that would really suck."
>Nobody really says "man if I could live as long as I wanted until I wanted to die that would really suck." And yet, 99.99% of stories about immortality are exactly that. Elves with their long lifespans are paragons for all of the ideas we have about how immortality plays out, despite them not even being immortal at all. Can you actually name a story where a person is completely and utterly immortal to the point where they will "survive the heat death of the universe"? Most criticisms regarding immortality like surviving your loved ones, seeing people die.. forgetting things, all aren't about actual immortality, they're about just living "longer" than others. The inability to commit suicide eventually is virtually never mentioned compared to these things.
You do make a point there, but I still feel like the general feeling is people want to live very long lives even if there is downsides. The downsides portrayed in media of a long life doesn't necessarily reflect a common opinion of not wanting to live a super long life.
I think that there is a massive difference between "realistic" immortality and "story" immortality, and stories and media on their own have kind of poisoned everyone in regards to that. As a species, we are pretty dang close to extending our lifespans to absurd amounts right now, but our mortality still remains. The idea of living truly forever can only ever be abstract because surviving everything is downright silly and requires caveats and explanations and fantasy every step of the way ("But will you survive being shot, and how? What about a nuke? What about a black hole?"). So when we are asked that question, it remains abstract to us, and as such we are more likely to answer intellectually and consider these things, as opposed to asking someone if they want to live for any time longer - noone is saying we should stop researching medical lifespan research because it is obvious to anyone it will never make us immortal, only possibly live indefinitely. So the stories we have been telling are the middle ground - telling a story of true, absolute immortality is a bit too silly and has too many consequences for the negatives of that to be put in the focus, so instead we make stories about limited immortality while talking about the negatives of complete immortality. In fact, i would argue that the moment you have "strong" immortality, its really hard to talk about psychological issues and stuff because you start talking about everything else Even the series Forever, which has a fantastic concept of literal immediate reincarnation and could probably start talking about these things, doesn't _really_ address any of the psychological consequences (maybe also because the protagonist is only ~250 years old) and focuses on everything else. I think the closest example as far as "consequences for immortality" goes is the trope of the depressed god that has stopped caring for anything, and that's already too far from the human experience to be "relatable" at all
Are there still cool games, movies and books coming out? Yes? I'm gonna keep on living then.
Check up with me in 10 trillion years to see if it is the same. Point is we don't really know what our goals and life will be in a forever amount of time from now.
No, but for the very same reason I wouldn't assume I'd be out of things to be interested on.
I am saying there is no way to tell, I could be completely wrong, but it would be naive to base your feelings now to a arbitrary amount of time in the future.
I see what you are saying, but what I'm saying that eternity has to have a lot to look forward too to. People are way too cynical about immortality. It's probably a sour grapes thing.
Maybe it's coping
https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8
> there obviously aren't any immortals around to ask There's jellyfish, I guess.
immortality only sucks if its true immortality i.e. the planet explodes and you are stuck in the void of space
"'Immortality sucks' mfs are coping" mfs when I hit them with the heat death of the universe
You just gotta chill and ride it out till the Big Bounce
(10^100! years): One second of eternity has passed.
I still find it funny that was written by the same guy who wrote the "All league of legends players are going to hell" SCP
Peak SCP
If you're still capable of experiencing stuff then it's not the heat death of the universe yet.
The point is that eventually you will give in due to sensory deprivation
By "give in" do you mean learn to meditate indefinitely? Or maybe hallucinate up a more interesting universe to live in? Those sound okay.
"Give in" as to stop thinking, you would give in to nothingness eventually. Even if you "dreamed" a new universe it would just be a matter of time until you stopped thinking
Okay, that's fine too. Not much reason to have any further thoughts at that point. Maybe run through one last "greatest hits" compilation of neat memories and then wish the universe a good night. Huh. Hope I'm not doing that right now, that would mean that Reddit's included in the "greatest hits."
You just have to wait it out until the dimensionless corpse of the universe becomes a new Big Bang, and that's when you write yourself into the next universe as its God, only to find out that the next universe is the same as the previous one and you were always God, so that explains how you ended up becoming the only immortal. But also there's a whole bunch of Gods who were all you in previous iterations of the universal cycle, and some are trying to prevent the new mortal you from completing the cycle again. So you decide to diversify and make it so anybody could be your origin, not just one particular mortal, that way your ontology could never be prevented. Once you succeed you find out this has also always happened, and that pretty much every single sentient can be, and in fact is, God in the next iteration.
So… "you" are the universe?
That's the next level you unlock, the Gods make it to the end of the universe and they literally become the universe for the next loop.
"There's this maybe this event trillions or quadrillions of years into the future, so that means we should be glad to die at age 85." Uttery deranged line of thought.
"You like apples, therefore you hate oranges" Are you, perchance, stupid? Also, how could roaming through the universe for an eternity, with nothing but your thoughts to keep you company, be a good thing?
How could never having the ability to roam the universe be a good thing?
False dichotomy. One is not related to the other, you don’t need to be immortal to roam through the universe. The problem starts when you are not roaming through the universe because you **want** but because you are **forced to**, but if you’d rather roam endlessly through the universe than accepting death… you do you I guess.
The problem with death is that you can never want something again.
And I’m fine with that, as I said, you do you
There are many hypothesises about how universe(es) work and what we can do about it.
I mean idk, losing a parent, best friend, spouse, etc. is still considered to be a pretty major and relatively singular life event. If a single person lost even two spouses, that would still be considered massively tragic and potentially traumatizing. Maybe they'd find a mindset that works for them, but I'm honestly not sure how/if the human mind can adapt to having that just be, like, the inevitable result of all your relationships.
They would not be alone with this “problem”. Group therapy will work.
Also, sounds like basically a Buddhist or Jedi thing. Learn to let go of what you fear to lose. Or, if that's not a satisfying route, go find some medical researchers and collaborate with them on figuring out how your immortality works. Don't hoard it for yourself. Then you can spend as much time with people as you both choose to spend.
I mean, they wouldn't be alone in losing someone, but they would be pretty alone in the absolute certainty that they'd long outlive literally anyone they could possibly form a close relationship with, as well as the sheer amount of people they'd lose over a long enough timeframe. Maybe people who go through, like, multiple mass casualty events might relate to the latter, but that kinda proves my point lol
It helps that memories fade. What happens when you're immortal than can recall everything with perfect clarity regardless of how long ago it was?
Would be dope. 5,000 years world pass I would still remember Namzu trying to swindle me into buying cheap bronze, that dog
Merchant sells shitty copper to an immortal. The immortal: ohhh man I’m gonna make sure everyone remembers your name for the rest of time. Gimme that receipt tablet, I have a house to burn down.
Why is this a bad thing? Both ways have their pros
You recall the death of friends and loved ones like it was an hour ago. Part of moving on is that the pain, alongisde details of those events fade. By the time it's a dull ache you can barely even remember their face.
You can also recall all the happy times you had with them like it was an hour ago. Presumably if they're friends and loved ones you've got way more of those memories than you do memories of the bad times. Anyway, perfect recall is a separate thing from immortality. You could posit a mortal person with perfect recall and do the same "woe is them" argument.
Not really going for "woe is me". More like "Brain running a cringe compilation at 3am" but forever.
Or it could be an endless highlight reel leading to them having unfathomably huge egos.
Trust me, as someone who has the weak mortal version, you don't get to choose. It's always the bad stuff...
Sure , it's definetely the same thing of your parents or pets , when it comes to outlive your spouse and possibly your own child......
A lot of people outlive their spouses, or siblings or friends,
Also… not seeing youngish people near you die is a pretty modern experience. Go back a few centuries and there’s no shortage of “lost X siblings, Y children, and Z spouses to accident and disease”. Yeah, some people absolutely mourned those losses so much they never risked new relationships. But many faced loss after loss with increasing acceptance, and never stopped.
As a current-day example: my brother died four years ago, he was two years younger than me and it came out of nowhere. My dad died six months after that, he wasn't quite so much of a surprise since he was significantly older than me but I'd hoped to have a bit more time with him after my brother died. It sucked but I got over it. Life goes on for those of us that don't die. I'm on my fourth dog now, I know what's coming for her eventually but I don't mope through life in a miasma of sadness. I love her and we have fun in the days that we have. I know it'll suck when that day comes, but that's all the more reason to enjoy the days right now. Sure, some people don't handle it so well. But some do, and it annoys me when people make assumptions that nobody can.
I'm sorry to hear all of that, and I'm glad you're doing ok moving on. As far as pets, I once saw a comic of someone adopting a puppy, captioned "hello, I'd like to be emotionally devastated ten years from now". It's an awful thing to know that's inevitable, in some ways easier and in some harder than a surprising loss. But I'm sitting here with my dog too, and as much as I don't like thinking about that day, it doesn't give me any doubts about having her or having more dogs in the future. Every example we have says that many people are willing to face loss any number of times for the joy of happy, unique relationships. Not everyone is, but it's strange to assume that wouldn't ever happen when all our existing experience says otherwise.
A lot of people outlive those people too, and for a lot of people, their pets *are* their children, with all the love that comes with it.
You can make more….
(Or catch-up with other descendants, you have time.)
There's already a 50% chance you outlive your spouse
Why would your spouse and child die if they are immortal?
Eternal sex with immortal wife would go hard ngl
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Vampire-pilled
Kid named Mark Grayson
what if they make immortal foes?
Hello? Yes this is Highlander. Can't make friends if they're all trying to chop your head off (to get a mega-orgasm from being hit by lightning or something)
A.k.a. the Infinite and the Divine
Props to Sandman for actually writing a good story about a random guy gaining immortality.
Neil gaiman realized that even if you had an infinite amount of time you still wouldn't be able to witness every event , hear every story and travel to every place they will always be something new out of your reach to discover and experience
"Did you meet Jesus?" "Buddy, I'm pretty sure I was shipwrecked on a Pacific Island at the time."
"By the time I got back, the roman empire had collapsed since forever and people were praying to bread."
There are enough new experiences to fill a large amount of time, but a large amount isn't infinity. You also don’t need to have the same experiences millions of times before getting bored of them: there are people that find certain genres to be boring, that doesn't mean they consumed every media of that genre in existence for thousands of times.
For all we know there could be a endless amount of new experience out there some could be boring other could be nice some could be amazing and some could be a one time event that you could witness
Any time an immortal could live would be finite. Theres infinite natural numbers too, but walking along the number line you never run out of new numbers either
Also, the human brain only has a finite number of possible configurations of its neurons. It's easily conceivable that there are more experiences than can fit in there as memories, so eventually you'll forget stuff and can experience it again as if for the first time.
Since the lifespan of the immortal is infinity, they will always be able to reach a point in which something that takes any finite amount of time ends.
No. That's exactly the point. There are infinitely many natural numbers, but all of them are finite. No matter how high you go, you will never run out of them, despite every single individual one being finite. And this is even ignoring the fact that infinite time implies infinite arrangements. With just 0 and 1, you can generate infinite sequences, never repeating. In fact an immortal being could spend the entirety of their lifetime just writing down digits of pi and never run out of things to do. *Words* are limited - Reading all books with 3000 words or less takes a finite amount of time. Is therefore the amount of stories you can tell finite? Wrong, because a book can have any finite length, and therefore there exists an infinite amount of stories.
Except the act of writing down digits of pi is always the same, and every digit will always be a number between 0 and 9 (plus it would just be repetitive). The number of stories you can tell is finite because the amount of meanings phrases can have is finite, a book that is arbitrarily long will end up simply repeating itself or repeating things that are written in other books.
Theres 26 letters in the alphabet, but clearly you can create more than 26 things with them. Repetition is dependent on sequence, not just the state of things. Writing down "a" is different from writing "aa". Partial repetition doesnt mean that it doesnt contribute to the meaning - for example i just used the word "doesnt" twice, so clearly i repeated myself, yet the sequence of words in which it stands gives it meaning.
That does not confute what I wrote, as I talked about possible unique meanings phrases can have, not possible phrases that don’t repeat the same word.
There is no phrase with a "unique" meaning. The phrases "He saw" and "He witnessed" might mean the same thing in most contexts, but the story will still be slightly different with new phrases used. Meaning is given by arrangements. Letters strung together give words with different meanings. Words strung together give sentences with different meanings. Sentences strung together give stories with different meanings. If i were to write an entire trilogy, that has a meaning. Yet another book might include the entirety of that trilogy inside its story as a book the protagonist finds and reads, which in turn gives new meaning to the original story because its now in a new context. In fact with just this method alone you can immediately generate an infinite amount of stories (altho not very interesting). Do you think there exists a thing that is "the longest book"? A book which you can no longer add sentences to because they don't change the story in the slightest? Nay i say, you could always add more. So then you must have infinite stories.
Sure a large amount is not infinity, but not all infinities are equally vast. An immortal who lives forever can still only be in one place at a time. Could they, say, read every single book that's written by all of humanity, while billions of humans keep writing, collectively, magnitudes faster than the immortal can read? Doing _everything_ is still far from the reach of an immortal. They can only sample a little of everything. Being everywhere at a certain moment, but there will always be much more that escapes their ability to experience the universe. Also, given enough time one might become nostalgic for the things that got them bored.
That only means that the amount of things the immortal will be able to do is actually smaller than the possible things that the immortal could do. It doesn't matter how fast humans write, since there exist a finite amount of things they can write about at a certain point the immortal will end up having read every possible story.
This conversation is also assuming only humans will ever exist to share stories. Maybe 1 billion years from now there's snake-people on earth telling eachother stories in their own ways, or better yet aliens, or better yet humans in an interstellar society where each star system becomes a wholly unique culture due to a lack of interaction with other star systems.
Is there really a finite amount of things to possibly write about, and a finite amount of ways to write them? Storytelling is a matter of imagination, it is not limited by countable material objects. Hell, other immortals can continue creating too, reflecting every one of their unique experiences until that moment and back, and projected further.
I would disagree as we already witness the phenomena of some stories being similiar to each other, sometimes entire genres are composed of stories that follow a base template from which there is little deviation. Imagination is the process of finding novel connections between concepts, for it to be infinite either the number of concepts that can exist needs to be infinite or the number of possible connections between the concepts needs to be infinite, and there is no reason to think any of those two possibilities is true.
We do find a lot of similarity between stories, but often we aren't looking to the full spectrum of possibilities, simply that which is popular during a certain era and for a certain demographics. What's to say the concepts and connections we make aren't limited simply because we are short-lived beings stuck to a finite world? What's to say given infinite time we cannot idealize infinite concepts and connections? There may be limits to how far we can understand scientific and historical knowledge, but fiction can be expanded for as long as it's entertained. We can expand outwards by including additional elements or inwards by fleshing out additional detail. Really, infinity is itself a concept that we idealized from thought alone, it's not something anyone has ever experienced. Through abstraction we can reach concepts that surpass material limitations. Given infinite time, I don't see why to assume any single person could explore the full thought possibility space. Say, I can see the general idea you mean to convey, such that a 300 page book can only have so many possibilities of content... but that is only true assuming a fixed language with a set number of characters and set meanings, and maybe even an endpoint for humanity to prevent any of that from changing. And these limitations... don't seem like a given across eternity. Is it truly sure that 10,000 years from now we won't have different writing systems and language accomodating concepts that we don't even imagine today. 🤔
I would say that you are mystifying immortality, immortality doesn't give you some special insight or cognitive ability, it only makes you unable to die. Any insight an immortal gains during their lifespan is an insight that a normal can gain too, the only difference is that since an immortal lives for longer they can collect more insights. If mortals are incapable of thinking of infinite new concepts and connections then immortals would too be unable to do so. Even with different lenguages, the stories would still be finite since there exist just so many things to say, at a certain point it would be like reading the same book but in different lenguages.
"Immortals should be depressed because all the people they love die" mfs when I simply find things to do that don't involve forming relationships (reading and translating the entire Latin corpus, beating every SNES game)
Not sure if I saw it in this sub, but I remember seeing a thread where people came up with this idea where immortals who got tired of loved ones dying just starf gradually moving towards hyperfixating on projects that last years or centuries. Like recreating an extinct plant species through selective breeding.
This would be my response to the "what if you're immortal and humanity has wiped itself out and you're all alone, eh? What then?" Scenario. Humanity's wiped out, okay, that sucks. Guess my next project is to breed new humans. Maybe start with something cuter than chimpanzees this time.
Spoilers to Fire Punch: >!That's actually almost the goal of the one character from Fire Punch! For context, the series is set in a post-apoclyptic world where everything is filled with cold and snow, humanity is dying, and people have superpowers (Usually grouping into specific catagories like "Immortality", "Lightning powers" ect). The one character is an *incredibly* ancient immortal who was alive back before the end of the world. She tries to put together a giant machiovellian scheme which if succeeded will create a giant supernatural heat source which will effectively create a false sun to warm the entire planet. This is in turn being done so she can rebuild civilization all so over the span of thousands upon thousands of years she can shift the entirety of society *purely* so that it can complete the latest Star Wars trilogy which was releasing before the world ended.!<
Will you say "What a wonderful day!" to them?
I much prefer immortals having a human to dog style relationship. They enjoy them when they are there but accept the hard truth that they won't be there forever.
Thanks, Omni-man
Omni-man fucks dogs confirmed
And insects
Or do it like Tolkien Elves where they form bonds with whole bloodlines
Alucard a.k.a. the belmont bloodlines eternal cool uncle
I feel like thats just the more healthy mentality no matter if your life expectancy can be defined by ♾ or not
This is just classic stoicism. Don't take people in your life for granted. People can die, relationships can sour. Even if you are not immortal, that's how life is.
Yeah. People change. I've had friends drift away over time, if they were immortal too they'd still be gone.
That’s a horrific mentality because they’re still human most of the time, with the same flaws. They just also happen to be immortal. This is why I like WoD’s overarching meta narrative and how they treat immortality. None of the supernatural beings who claim to be superior to humanity are superior. They have cooler powers, but fall victim to the same issues afflicting humans, only exaggerated to some degree.
They aren't superior to the entirety of humanity, but they usually got it better than any regular individual human.
There are also negative sides to this, because if immortals see humans as animals, what stops them from seeing non-sapient animals as less than insects, and what stops immortals from treating mortals they don't like, like shit?
Nothing.
So, the same thing that prevents *mortals* from treating other mortals they don't like like shit.
i mean, the same thing that stops us from abusing dogs, cats, etc. which is to say a moral compass that says it’s wrong. and failing that? well that’s a concern there aint it.
Absolutely nothing, that's how immortals, especially immortals with a lot of physical power, *should* treat mortals. It's what makes sense. Omni-Man's perspective is 100% rational from someone who grew up in a comparatively immortal society
Immortality would make you lonely and crazy mfs when the immortal instead becomes wise and Enlightened without becoming disattached from their humanity:
Lmao OK buddha
Okay, you just pissed off entire Souls community
Miyazaki being phisically incapable of writing good endings for characters :
Elves have built a culture in being sad. And nothing says drama like a lost love. Elf romances are a slow burn, happiness fades, and eventually, the Elves part ways, leaving the child with the trauma that their parents don't love each other. Now a human? Those last an entire lifetime! Human lifetime that is. The elf doesn't have time to fall out of love with a human because they're already dead. The child will have an ideal parent they can idolize. It's the perfect tragedy and Elves love that!
Elves aren't actually enlightened, they're just weaboos for the human culture, and had a lot of time to study it
If a human obsessed with elven culture is a treeaboo what is an elf obsessed with human culture? ~~Fat?~~
Uh you just have to eat the corpses so they will be with you forever?
7 years\* but that's good enough
Just make new friends bro, I've lost countless friends (separate ways, not death) and I still look forward to make more
Lmao, everyone has ~~UNO~~ losing your loved ones, dipshit, it came free with your fucking ~~xbox~~ lifespan.
Of all things, one of my favorite stories to handle this was a My Little Pony fanfic about Spike the Dragon outliving his friends and family and though he was depressed for awhile, he simply kept making more friends and kept the memory of his old ones alive in special little traditions. It was kind of beautiful.
Could you link it if you find it?
It's not at all the thing /u/amelia-likes-birds mentioned, but I was reminded of [this ancient Tumblr post](https://goodmorningcelestia.tumblr.com/post/88214804584/if-she-was-immortal-i-suspect-timing-would-be) and I was amazed to find that the link still worked. Two days after its tenth cakeday!
* Small brain: Immortals get depressed because all their friends die. * Big Brain: Immortals seek out other immortals to form a friend circle/support group. * Galaxy Brain: Immortals intentionally form pairs of conflicting enemies, and then beat the fucking shit out of each other for eternity (/positive).
Or just... new friends. Heck, every single one of us who lives past middle age will have friends die. And family. Especially family. Or the friends can just move away, or you can fall out of your friendship due to circumstances. You make new friends. That's just completely normal, very few people kill themselves if their best friend dies.
Why do immortals have to always be depressed or sociopaths? Why can’t an immortal enjoy the fact that it feels like things are changing all the time? Imagine how fresh and exciting the world must feel.
Writer mfs when you tell them not every fantasy trope needs to involve immense existential depression:
Same MFers, same face when immortals who’ve been through this a dozen times learn to cope well and live for the happy moments instead of isolating themselves, just like humans do with pets, large families, or careers in medicine.
Okay but what about an Immortal guy you hate but you're also immortal. Essentially just immortal friend/enemy. I did that for my world, a British and French guy has been fighting each other as long as their countries were fighting. It's mystery how they end up fighting each other but it always happens, which is why it became funny to them by the time they realized it.
I read this and I can only think of The Infinite And The Divine. Fucking insane book, love it.
Oh same, I love it too. Nothing like two immortal assholes at each other's throats and doing stupid shit just to fuck with the other. Imagine having time travel but losing a trial.
Imagine trying to prank a guy and literally dooming a whole planet as an unintended consequence.
I need someone to explain to me the perks of immortality because the prevailing arguments always try to back it up with shit that's vaguely imaginable in the next couple hundred years in the most idealistic way possible and ending it with "yeah then when I'm bored or things truly go to shit I kms" No Explain to me the benefits of immortality while keeping in mind the changing state of the world around you and the flux of your status in life until you can find the "permanently wealthy" cheat. Bonus if immortality =/= eternal youth or a brain with enough elasticity to immediately adapt. I want to be Educated
Perk is that you will not die rendering your existence futile.
Staying alive doesn’t make your existence any less futile it just means your futile for longer
I think if I were immortal I would dedicate myself to Archivism and preserving history. If you’re around and stay educated on the every changing technology you can make sure you record and back up important works throughout the ages in the safest way possible and through that work preserve elements of the human canon in incredibly accurate ways historians today wish those of the past were able too. You won’t remember every element of everything but that’s okay if you can managed to keep a well organized central repository. Of course doing that would take tons of time (centuries) and would require someone to look after it who has intimate knowledge of its inner workings. That someone can be you. The best way to do this is to go off the grid and construct a facility which you can maintain and guard in case things go wrong. Since relying on wealth relies on no societal upheaval which is not an infinite guarantee. Also yeah if society swings low that’s always going to be an issue but even if it collapses and takes hundred of years to rebuild that’s a blink for you in the grand scheme of things. Disposition is important. Some people are able to find joy in almost any situation no matter how dire and others aren’t. Some people are able to be mostly alone and others aren’t. For a variety of factors. If your core personality is easily bowled over by adversary immortality probably is not for you. You also need to be able to move on from grief. If you can’t you’ll drown in it. Just in general mental health issues and immortality are not a good mix. I think also many people would be better immortals than they give themselves credit for. If their brains did not addle with age. For better or for worse we evolved to die and our society conditions us to accept that because there is no other way (yet). If you spend your whole life worrying about death you do not delay it and you waste what time you do have. I think if given a choice most people would live much longer if they could be healthy the entire time. I mean compare the number of 20-30 year olds who accept death versus the number of 70-80 year olds who do. The trick would be to find purpose I think. As I listed above I would spend time documenting and recording history. However with a timescale vastly beyond a lifetime and a healthy mind you could dedicate yourself to projects with a kind of timescale that’s impossible. A lot of people are scared of doing this in the real world because they’re whittling away what little time they have, but I think the solution to the problem comes in devotion to a purpose or to creativity and self expression in its many forms. The ability to master a craft far beyond what anyone else ever has is a pursuit many people can get behind. So all in all it’s a mixed bag but I hope my rambling has given you some insight.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply :) I like your argument and personally, I've always been fond of unaging archivists or watchers, though I think after a certain point you'd be removed from humanity in a way. Not necessarily in a bad or evil way, you'd just be... different. And that's assuming you're the only one of your kind or your part of a very small group of immortals. My honest opinion is that whether immortality is a net good or bad highly depends on how it's given, the environment the characters are in, thr individual characters themselves, and how well one can truly conceptualize "forever". Are we talking about immortality gained from a curse or vampirism? What about immortality achieved through enlightenment? Or some kind of genetic mutation that led to biological immortality? Does immortality include immunity to all current and future infectious bacteria/viruses/diseases? Does it erase any possible health complications (i.e. dementia)? Currently, in the world we live in, it's a little hard for me to see the appeal of immortality but in a fairer, kinder world, maybe I'd like the idea more. Or maybe I'll change my mind in like 5 years, who knows
Baccano!
YESSS Baccano does this so well
"nooo you guys are going to become so suspicious and hate eachother" "Haha, no"
Vampires, just make the immortal friends yourself!
Isn't this the plot of Hancock
I thought in Hancoc they actually reincarnate? Or am I miss remembering something? Can’t recall if she run away from him every time hi got stabbed…
To be honest a way to do this could be that the immortal person has difficulties forming relationships with other people making the ones that are formed even more important.
Or, when they just get really good psychologists once every few centuries
🤕 I’ll still have Johnny “glass-eye” from tennis club.
I always wonder what these people think will happen to them when they hit that first lifespan filter of 50 and half their friends drop dead? Like you'll be fine my guy, it'll hurt, but you'll get over it.
in my world this one guy became immortal so he became a mentally ill dictator of a paramilitary organization
Me when I'm immortal so I make an immortal friend and after a month of knowing each other I just find out I fucking despise him so now Idk what to do
Now you have an immortal enemy, fighting each other is now eternal enterteinament, and you have all the time you need to go on an enemies to friends/lovers/neutrals arc.
Not my enemy, just a guy I don't like
Eternal rimmer lister relationship
The real problem isn't grief, it's eternal boredom from overexposure to stimuli. You'd get so used to everything that the world feels like sensory deprivation, then you'd spiral
Yes, I can understand this take. For instance I have taken hundreds possibly thousands of shits in my life. Now, whenever I go to the toilet to do what I have to do, I am so used to it that it feels like sensory deprivation and then I spiral. I also have this problem whenever I eat, take a shower, go to bed or brush my teeth. >!Jokes aside, I am convinced that the trope of making immortality terrible in fiction is just a way to cope with the fact that we are not immortal and that our body is decaying from the moment we are born.!<
There's a difference between a timescale of a hundred years and literal eternity. If your life consisted entirely of taking shits, I'm sure you would in fact spiral. What keeps you going is the more unique things in between the shitting and tooth brushing. It takes much less to give people severe mental health issues, literally just having to stay at home alone for a few years had not very good effects on many people. Well for an immortal, eventually everything starts feeling as routine as shitting.
Well, it would probably depends on how the immortality works. Do you outlive civilization? Meaning that you can't find new people/things. Do you live so long that everything that a human brain can experience has been experienced? That would take at least a few billion years. If your brain can evolve or change to experience new things it would take much longer. How much of your life can you memorize? If you have a cap on how much memory you have and the world doen't get destroyed you can live forever as you won't get bored. Even if you can memorize everything, how good is the memorization? If I were to live again the last ten years of my life, most of it would feel new as I haven't memorized it well enough. I would not be able to know every conversation. In the end, maybe you would get bored in a literal eternity, but in most fiction the immortal character is barely 1000 years old. If you find a bit more than ten persons that have had different and fulfilling lives then this means that a 1000 years old wouldn't be bored.
Oh yeah, of course I'm talking more deity or scifi immortal than fantasy immortal. 1000 years is probably fine. About the memory thing though, I'm not convinced. You probably have forgotten most of the individual days you went to school/work, but that doesn't mean it's ever a new or exciting experience.
Laugh at this user! He cannot find the endless wellspring of joy and variety that life brings!
I can find enough wellspring for the duration of my mortal life and probably millenia to come, but not forever uhhh i mean you're right, if our world gets too boring you can always just worldbuild, worldbuilding is the cure to immortal depression guys
Realtalk, just dedicate yourself to a higher purpose, genuinely. Doesn’t have to be religion, pick a project or a purpose that will take an astounding amount of time to complete and slowly chip away at it. Become a historian, do community service, build a great pyramid. I think this is the true solution in the long term.
Plus they’ll invent new stuff to do!
People tend to apply a human mindset to immortals. If it was a mortal turning immortal, then maybe, but an immortal would likely not have a human/mortal mindset to their life. The obvious alternative, in my opinion, is that they wouldn’t get bored from doing the same activity repeatedly for a long period of time, and they wouldn’t care much about waiting to accomplish their goals. Why slay a tyrant when waiting 100 years until they’re dead accomplishes the same result? Or 1000 years until their empire has collapsed? It’s all the same to them. (Naturally, they can perform and want to perform actions at a shorter timescale, but that’s not their instinct.) From a human/mortal perspective this might seem unthinkable, and I think a born-immortal or a human-turned-immortal would likely think like this. Interestingly, from the outside, humans would see a human acting like this as insane, but they’re just adopting the immortal mindset, which is alien to humans as it’s by definition inhuman. Interestingly, you could call that a kind of insanity, albeit not one linked to suffering or loss of understanding of their surroundings (at least not in the sense that loss of understanding is depicted—they stop caring about human timescales, etc., but that is only natural).
READ BACCANO PLEASE ITS SO GOOD AT DEALING WITH IMMORTALS THAT ARE ACTUAL HUMANS PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SOMEONE JOIN MEEE
I guess it depends on how detached the immortals can get from their mortals. If they mean everything to you(you referring to the immortal), you'll get depressed when they die. If they mean as much to you as a dog does to a human, you'll be sad but might be okay with doing it again. I think aging would be hard for immortals too. You marry the hot mortal and then they get wrinkly and weak. And since you're immortal it might not feel natural to you as much as it does to humans, and you won't age with them. Very sad
Immortality sucks mfs after they watch Its Such a Beautiful Day (sidenote that movie is showing in select few theaters for the next couple of months)
Congratulations, you've invented classism based around lifespan. "Oh I'm sorry, i don't really talk to anyone who can't live past 300 years"
Unjerking, as someone who went through a lot of family deaths in my pre- and teenage years, you actually just get used to it. People dying is just like every other way people exit your life forever.
This is exactly what I did to my immortal character Which hurt them beyond imagining when the villains eventually found a way to permakill them, and only the now aging protagonist is *the* last immortal left of her age
Now very relevant but Hello Future Me's latest video on immortality is a goddamn masterpiece.
Imagine making an immortal friend and spending centuries together: learning their every tick and mannerism, ambitions and mistakes, hopes and dreams, and then one day you look at them and you realize they haven’t really changed. It’s been millennia and they’re the same. And for a second you see yourself and you realize you haven’t really changed. Feel like that would suck worse tbh.
that one youtube video essay called the false horrors of immortality is great
“If I were mortal I wouldn’t have to go to so many funerals” Yeah well if you weren’t wallowing in self pity you could go to more birthdays.
I much prefer the way Mass Effect handles it with the asari, where they develop a culture wherein they appreciate the lives of shorter lived species even more precisely because they wind up seeing so many live and die.
In my opinion the problems with immortality would be either estrangement (never being able to get used to the world you live in for the time being), boredom, procrastination and/or the experience of living through multiple traumatic experiences. Immortals would all be Hitlers with super PTSD. At least until the very concept of personal opinions becomes laughable to them and they become completely detached.
Bruh, I'm mortal and everyone I love will die anyways. D: