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.
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.
All the comments assume everybody else isn’t also immortal. I forget the title and author but there’s an old sci fi story (or novel?) about a future where everybody lives for centuries, and they’ve found that the brain only retains a certain amount of experience. They have long careers, get tired of doing whatever, re-educate and do something else, or even have multiple families they eventually forget about. A couple of the characters are surprised to find out they used to be married like a century earlier. To me that seems vaguely like reincarnation, and I kind of don’t hate the idea. I really don’t see any downside to that scenario, or even just going on forever.
People are focused on having regrets and negatives that last forever. But buck up li’l camper, you can learn to move on from stuff. And I say this as a dad whose daughter had cancer at age 10 (she survived). It was hell and I wouldn’t want to live through that whole period again, but I don’t consider it a reason not to want to live forever. The trick is to learn how to cope with these things and not let them outweigh the good experiences you have.
Is it: “the age of pussyfoot” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_the_Pussyfoot
That could be it - many elements are familiar, although the title isn’t at all, but I have read a lot of Fredrik Pohl. The plot synopsis also doesn’t mention the characters finding out they had been married before. Maybe that’s a small detail that just stands out more in my mind.
Swear I’ve read that. Anyone?
Isn’t the movie Hancock a bit in this direction?
A scifi short story I read was set in a somewhat idyllic future.
Robots did everything. Everyone was given housing, food etc. Health was covered and people lived virtually forever. Nobody worked, and you could travel and do anything you wanted.
The most prized thing, that everyone was desperate for, was having an original thought.
Reminds me another story about an idyllic world where almost nobody worked and everything was provided. At one point a crew showed up to repair a house, and everybody gathered around to watch, marveling at their work clothes and tools. One guy yearned to use tools so he started making little craft items at home, and trading them to people for worthless little tiddly wink tokens they used for friendly bets on sports. Then his neighbors started doing the same thing and they got a little economy going, using the tokens as currency, until the government got wind of it and squashed the whole thing because commerce was illegal.
immortality doesn’t guarantee perpetual health, you’re alive, but so broken and sick you wish you could die, but you can’t
Yeah this answer.
Imagine being immortal and you get stuck somewhere.
Like in a giant land slide.
Alive, but stuck in nutty putty cave for eternity
Not eternity, just a few billion years until earth is vaporized by the sun going supernova.
Then you’re free - to drift through empty space forever.
“I have no mouth and I must scream” could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.
Just listened to that recently. I could see this being a thing.
I also couldn’t believe how graphic it was for how old it is.
My knees hurt already. I can’t imagine living with constant aging forever until you’re just a crumpled pile on the ground and then it still goes on.
This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus
In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten
Basically all of the time you’re alive will be after the heat death of the universe, where you will be floating in space, with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience. Complete darkness, complete silence, in a complete vacuum, for eternity. Every other particle in the universe is forever out of your reach. You know that you will have nothing forever. You will never see, hear, or touch anything again, for all of time, which will never end. The trillions of years that preceded your float through the void fade into a distant memory as you outlive twice as much time, four times as much, a trillion-trillion times as much, and infinitely more.
I wrote a story that features such an entity and what was interesting about it to me was how even the slightest glimmer of life beyond their void would lead to an all-consuming desire to experience “living” again.
So just my normal day?
Or you get to experience another big bang. That would be worth the wait.
Then you could call yourself Galactus
That old person feeling of no longer being with “it”, and what’s “it” now being strange and scary probably compounds over the centuries.
And this is why elder vampires are so vengeful.
I absolutely love the scene in “Interview with the Vampire” where Lestat is found hiding away in a room, distraught by all the creations of modern civilization.
yes, but old people can get over that and just stop giving a fuck and accept that they’re weird now. it must be liberating.
I’m not sure about this. Ever heard the phrase “the past is a foreign country”? Living through time would be like immersing yourself into a new country every couple of decades. You could even lessen the blow (and would probably have to in order to remain anonymous) by frequently moving around the world. People tend to give newcomers a certain amount of slack and with the enormous amount of knowledge and experience you would gain over time, you can easily and quickly immerse yourself in any new environment and adapt to whatever is “it” now.
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
Also, it is already frustrating seeing kids being dismissive or denying events that you yourself have lived. Imagine being thousands of years old and seeing so much shit, but those events are rarely retold, forgotten, or straight up denied by conspiracies or future governments that won’t admit their fault on it.
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
IDK, I feel like researching for supporting evidence of a theory you already know is correct would be much easier than researching to try to piece together a theory from no information. I think you could put the truth out there as credible and well-regarded theories, even if there are incorrect alternative theories that people also have to consider.
Knowing my memory I’d forget it all very soon after it happened and need a history book to help me recall any of it and the stuff left out or distorted would end up warping that recollection enough that it’d be so unreliable I may as well believe the historians. I can scarcely remember the previous day as it is.
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.
But can I take my Steam Deck with me?
Yes but you don’t have anything to make power to charge it :/
The rest of humanity will eventually evolve into something you don’t recognize and can never be part of.
My thought. In 500M years, you would be like the slime that crawled out of the oceans to the dominant life.
Neanderthals wanted to live forever and now we have bigfoot.
Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.
People are commenting ‘fates worse than death’ and ‘being made into a labrat by the 1%’, but really, if you have infinite time to just do stuff and you can’t be killed – And you don’t somehow squirrel your way into a position of power then what are you even doing with your time and immortality, oomfie?
The loneliness part is also questionable. I know OP said it’s overly done, but I also think it’s just wrong. If you’re an adult you’ve had people in your life die before. It sucks. You miss them. But then you move on. And you meet other people. You’ll still go “:(” when you think about the person and such… But life goes on.
And that’s just life. It doesn’t get any worse if you extend it longer – If anything it gets better. You might have lost your beloved today, but you have another dozen lifetimes to heal your wounds and meet someone else and fall in love again and (…)
So here’s some lower-stakes, frustrating inconveniences of being immortal:
- Your favourite fashion? It’s not just out of fashion. It’s so out of fashion it is now considered ‘historical costuming’. You can no longer find any articles like it at all. Because the only people even trying to recreate the techniques are costuming nerds and theater people who always exaggerate stuff
- You got a song stuck in your head. It is either from before recording was invented, or any recordings of it that existed are too old to be reliably listenable. You have a song stuck in your head.
- You used to really enjoy a job you did. That entire career path is now obsolete. As per the first paragraph of my post, if you’re immortal you have probably snuck your way into the upper echelons of society at some point during your infinite time… But like. You’re bored. You loved being a Court Jester, now there are no Court Jesters.
- Actually tedium just in general. Sooner or later you’ll run out of new things to try, because you’ll have done everything that even remotely caught your eye already. So what the fuck will you do with your time? You’ll eventually just get depressed and not do anything.
Feeling bad for the immortals who were professional garden hermits.
The Sun will eventually fry all life on Earth and boil off the water & atmosphere. Eventually the Sun will die out completely, leaving you on a cold, dark rock.
Once with no atmosphere and the sun going nova, there’s a chance of the rock getting obliterated. With a nice boost you might fly off to another planet eventually. Might not be inhabited or even inhabitable, but hey.
I think I’d have enough time to build a rocket…
You’d have Musk-levels of wealth before long, so maybe.
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.” 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 1012 - 1014 years. After that, you’re going to be waiting around for proton decay (1036 - 1043 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?)
10^10^10
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.
Boredom after some period of time, you will have some everything there is to do.
You get to pursue all of the really niche crafts. Things like clock making and random complicated stuff like that.
I don’t think one could ever be bored with enough curiosity, and the means to pursue it.
That’s really a valid point.
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.
