If you have epilepsy or Parkinson's or MS, you're just going to likely get worse forever.
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Nobody is answering the prompt lol. Everyone says all of this shit all the time.
You live long enough to never feel at home. Sure the loneliness sucks or whatever, but who do you root for at the football game?
Having to buy new shoes for the rest of eternity. You know how much work I've literally just put into finding shoes that 1) don't suck and 2) aren't made with slave labor? It's impossible. Drives me insane. I'd found my own shoe company once I become immortal rich just to fix that problem alone. Maybe other stuff too we'll get there
I suppose on that note: it seems like a really bad idea to become a public figure after a while. Like you obviously don't want your immortality found out. You have to have like illuminati power before that point though, but it could happen at any time. Like if something happens and you become a news item (i.e. helping someone out and a video goes viral online). Not saying everyone is all that close to going viral, but over a sufficiently long lifespan you're effectively rolling that dice a lot.
A lot of ways to die are excruciatingly painful, but you die, so you don't live with the pain. If you end up in one of those situations and don't die (because you are immortal), I imagine the psychological impact of the pain without immediate release could be enough to completely break you, mentally.
At some point, our sun will go supernova and you will end up drifting through space.
And all your life before that point will be less than a blink of an eye compared to the time that follows:
Trillions and trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.
And even that time will be less than the blink of an eye compared to the eternity afterwards, when you drift through a black void without any stars.
But no people around. So overall a win.
Idk id be super depressed if I was able to experience my family, friends, family's children, and so on die.
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.
If you're injured and you survive with the scarring from said injuries. Well, good luck because you're now going to wear those and wish you had died from them. If you're incapacitated or amputated? Gotta live with that for years and years.
Sounds like you have time to figure out alternatives. Like cyborgetics or using cloned parts.
And robocop was born
That was a horror cause he wasn't willing. If he was willing then it would be like cult mechanicus, ghost in the shell, or Adam smasher. Embrace the certainly of steel! Or course if your brain is damaged and you can't die that is a curse.
Agreed
LoL investing and compounding! I literally have all the time in the world.
Life will pound you into an uncaring jaded disinterested unloveable husk of a being after too many emotional scars from losing loved ones, too much of seeing humanity make the same mistakes, and too much watching the knowledge you gained turned irrelevant.
Or, life will beat into you an uncanny ability to converse and relate to others, even if fleetingly.
Watch The Man from Earth.
But do not watch the sequel. It ruins the whole beautiful thing.
Yes and No. You could argue that True Love was the factor between them
Discovering the upper limits to what the human mind can retain and just constantly forgetting all the shit you used to find important.
Basically all of the time youβre alive will be after the heat death of the universe, where you will be floating in space, with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience. Complete darkness, complete silence, in a complete vacuum, for eternity. Every other particle in the universe is forever out of your reach. You know that you will have nothing forever. You will never see, hear, or touch anything again, for all of time, which will never end. The trillions of years that preceded your float through the void fade into a distant memory as you outlive twice as much time, four times as much, a trillion-trillion times as much, and infinitely more.
I wrote a story that features such an entity and what was interesting about it to me was how even the slightest glimmer of life beyond their void would lead to an all-consuming desire to experience "living" again.
So just my normal day?
On one hand, you have eternity to come to grips with everything you've done. On the other hand, it might take eternity to come to grips with everything you've done.
Seeing all of your friends and family die, knowing you'll never stop missing them.
Having the perspective of centuries. Seeing society make the same mistakes over and over again because they forget, but you never do. It would drive me mad. Already does, considering I have the ability to, and have, read history. I just imagine living it over and over to be tedious.
I donβt think youβd remember a break up from hundreds of years ago, let alone be upset about it.
Vampires are always like this in stories. I feel like reality might be more like ergo proxy. Where what is a relationship that tastes 10 or 200 years compared to thousands?
I'll say no one can truly know. Unless you are yourself immortal
You know how the curse of pet ownership is that you will almost certainly outlive them?
That, but with everyone you love
That, but with everyone you love
Agreed. You will have to move state to state after three decades. New identity, new job, basically new "life" so as not to raise any suspicions.
You do not wanna spend the rest of the eternity being a state government "lab rat"
I believe there's a movie about this.
That old person feeling of no longer being with "it", and what's "it" now being strange and scary probably compounds over the centuries.
And this is why elder vampires are so vengeful.
I absolutely love the scene in "Interview with the Vampire" where Lestat is found hiding away in a room, distraught by all the creations of modern civilization.
Having to keep track of that evil snail.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5ipinn/you_and_a_super_intelligent_snail_both_get_1/
If other people are also immortal, the awkwardness of all of them eventually becoming your exes
"Hey, we talked about this. You stick with the 52 states while I herd my broken heart down south"
One of my books features an immortal protagonist and I've as such thought about this quite a bit. More than the answers already provided here, what I found interesting as a writer was the balance I needed to find between making an immortal detached from mortal values while still being engaging to mortal readers.
Said as a pithy question, if you can outlive everyone's decisions and mistakes, what would it take to make you do anything at all?
Being eaten by sea anemones, tuna, sharks, swordfish, sea turtles, penguins, and other jellyfish.
Given a long enough time frame, the vast majority of an immortal life would be spent buried beneath something or floating in the void of space. Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don't die...nothing to do but float in space.
You might counter that with, "well yeah, but eventually I'd find other sentient life forms and/or people again.β And sure, maybe, but that wouldn't last as long as you...and then you're just alone floating in space again, for the vast majority of your life. The only thing to look forward to, since you will outlast everything, is the end of time itself.
I think there is a clear difference between being immortal and being indestructible. I would think if your planet breaks apart you'd probably die with it being crushed or whatever. Also always unclear if being immortal means you don't need to breathe air.
I think a good author makes it explicit.
Here's a sci-fi web novel I read years ago, where a couple of the characters end up being immortal in different ways, and in one case they show exactly how far that can go (in the context of the story) even without invoking heat death.
Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don't die...nothing to do but float in space.
LOL, that's just the beginning -- only on the order of 10^12^ - 10^14^ years. After that, you're going to be waiting around for proton decay (10^36^ - 10^43^ years), all the way up to 10^10^120 years* for the final heat death of the universe.
(* Anybody know how to get Lemmy markdown to do nested superscripts?)
Depends on the type of immorality. Do you continue to age? If no, what age do you stop? Eventually the universe will die. So what happens to you then?
It might be fun for a while. Maybe even a long while. But that fun will be gone in an instant compared to the trillions and trillions of years you will float in a dark dying universe of nothing.
Nothing forever will feel oh so fast when you lose any frame of reference.
Without getting into the heat death of the universe and all that, I can think of something that happens much, much sooner. I'm only middle aged and I already don't like where the world is going. Can you imagine being centuries, or eons past the era you identified with? Can you imagine how insufferable young people and old people alike would seem when you have centuries worth of life experience and wisdom? Can you imagine a horde of little edge lords on the internet confidently yet incorrectly telling you about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when you were there when it was signed?
Being asked your birthdate in order to view a game on Steam, and the year dropdown not going back far enough.
Knowing the answer to some of history's biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
Also, it is already frustrating seeing kids being dismissive or denying events that you yourself have lived. Imagine being thousands of years old and seeing so much shit, but those events are rarely retold, forgotten, or straight up denied by conspiracies or future governments that won't admit their fault on it.
immortality doesn't guarantee perpetual health, you're alive, but so broken and sick you wish you could die, but you can't
Having to constantly find new hiding places for the blood chalice, and keeping up with all the latest scanning methods so you can develop countermeasures. Your secret is never truly safe.