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.
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.
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.
Repeated surgical corrections for your ever growing earlobes
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.
If it’s the realistic kind where you just don’t age, the statistical certainty that you’ll eventually die in an accident, or to war or murder. Your odds of getting to the heat death of the universe without making backups is pretty slim.
If it’s the kind where you’re indestructible, you’re highly likely to encounter someone who tries to bury you alive in a subduction zone eventually, because humans are like that, and then you get to spend eternity slowly moving into the scorching mantle.
At least I won’t be a snail in a metal ball full of salt.
EDOT: Typo, snail <-> small
Is this a quote from something? I’m OOTL.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/immortal-snail
One of the solutions was to put it in a giant metal ball and throw it into the sun or something. The salt was just out of spite.
Ah. And you typoed.
Oof, that was a hard one. Autocorrect strikes again.
I would hope to get realllly good in avoding people who’d put me in a subduction zone 😭
It would be an obsession of mine, if I was cursed with the inability to die under any level of duress.
I’m not saying it’s common, but punishment by live burial is a thing, and billions of years is an awful lot of human history.
The death of the sun will then eventually set you free into the gravity well of the sun where you’ll live burning hot untill heat death of the universe. What to do after that is anyone’s guess
Well, depends. The Earth is actually right near the edge of where the sun will expand to, so there’s a chance the scorched glob that used to be Earth will stay in orbit. Either way, it will still be hot for a while, and you’re ultimately stuck in something solid - be it a dead planet or a white dwarf.
There is such a thing as merciful death; it would not be good to be cut off from it.
Having to keep creating fake identities to prevent people and governments from finding out that you’re immortal. That would be a massive pain in the butt, especially in a world where mass surveillance of the population is common.
This would just be an occasional nuisance I reckon. You’d get pretty good at it. Just like all the other mundane things we have to do in our mortal lives.
What I meant is that it would get more and more difficult with more mass surveillance. Think about it, in 1950 it would take relatively little effort to fake an identity by inserting fake documents into a few physical cabinets. In 2000, cyber security was so weak that hacking to some government agency to modify their databases would be relatively simple. Now it would require advanced social engineering, and is extremely risky, and on top of that, they have a lot of mass surveillance.
If we assume everything will have a biometric database, you’ll have to find ways to change your fingerprints and face every few decades.
Over a long enough duration, you are guaranteed to be caught.
(Edit: grammar)
Unless you have a lot of money to rely on I don’t even know if it’s reliably possible right now. You’re basically in the same situation as an undocumented immigrant.
And the more times you do it, it’s like playing a Russian roulette over and over again, you’ll eventually be caught.
Having potentially thousands of years of embarassing moments of social awkwardness to think about. And, over the aeons, being relieved when the people you know and love die because they won’t remember the things you’re so ashamed of.
If you have epilepsy or Parkinson’s or MS, you’re just going to likely get worse forever.
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.
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.
How much more annoying the (much) younger generations would be.
Yeah, they always gloss over how you’d have a very noticeable accent within a couple hundred years, and would straight up be using a second language within a thousand.
As if peoples accents and vocabularies don’t grow and change over time?
Accents are at least somewhat fixed. Haven’t you noticed old people sound a certain way? Ditto for grammar - hedging with “like” isn’t something I’d ever hear an elder do where I live, and the “because noun” shortening sounds straight up incorrect to them, rather than just cute.
Vocabulary can grow, though. Sometimes it doesn’t, but that seems to be mostly down to old people not wanting to learn. Unfortunately new vocabulary is relatively minor in the evolution of most languages - a Russian word and an English word will often descend directly from the same 3000BC proto-Indo-European root, although they might now have drifted to mean different things.
Science fiction is going to age poorly. A lot of it is already hilariously dated. Look at most of Star Trek. They’re flying at FTL speeds through space with artificial gravity, teleportation, lifelike androids, and replicator technology, but their screens absolutely suck. More and more of those inconsistencies are going to add up over the centuries and make things ridiculous after a while.
The number of new things that people enjoy dwindles with age. Just about everyone agrees that the music that was being made when they were teenagers is the epitome of the art. Are you going to be able to enjoy anything when you’re 2563 years old?
The older you get, the faster time apparently moves. Having grown up in the 80s and 90s, on some days, even “The year 2000!!” still feels like it should be the future to me. I can’t imagine what even a few centuries would do to this phenomenon, let alone a millennium or megaannum (I had to look that word up.)
On the upside, presuming I’m the only immortal, I’ll be the only person currently alive to see if they actually finish that performance of Organ2/ASLSP in Halberstadt.
Scifi aging poorly is honestly a plus. I love sci-fi that contains incidental retro-futurism. Super high tech but everyone uses tape cassettes and coin operated everything? Sign me up. High tech but for some reason the style choices are all 20 years old?. Yes please.
Losing all of the skills you gain. No matter how good you get at something, after a few centuries you’ll have lost your edge. You can also only practice so many things concurrently without giving something up. At some point, years down the line, you might try to ride a bike again and completely fail to do it, or try to sing and fail to hit all the notes that came easily before, or do gymnastics but the muscles you need are underused. It doesn’t matter that you spent years mastering every skill, your abilities will degrade over time. You’ll never really be able to feel sure about your own abilities except for whatever you’ve done most recently.
You don’t know the expression, “it’s like riding a bike”?
If you haven’t ridden a bike in 20 years, go try it. But now 2000 years.
But the famous thing about learning to ride a bike is that you don’t forget, even after decades. I’ve just looked it up to double-check and all I got was articles about why you never forget. It’s like saying you’ll forget how to walk up stairs or something.
Famous sayings so not equal reality.
I mean, you could look it up yourself if you doubt it so.
Cross the wrong people and you end up not dead, but irrecoverable. Cement shoes, buried alive kind of stuff. Cross a different set of wrong people and you become a labrat. To avoid either scenario, you’ll be in a constant state of “undocumented” or false-documented which will keep you in a pretty consistent state of poverty.
There’s a book I heard about where the main character is immortal. Nevertheless at one point he pisses off some mafia dudes, and they nail him inside a barrel full of urine and throw him in the sea.
Just a random thought, but it would take a lot of work (or institutional access to some portable toilets) to be able to get enough piss to fill an entire barrel
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.
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(?))
