Who Wants To Live Forever - Television Tropes & Idioms

What good is immortality if you look like this forever?

"You damned rascals, do you want to live forever?"

— Frederick the Great, addressing his retreating Prussian troops at the battle of Kolin, 1757.

Scully: You know, most people want to live forever.

Fellig: Most people are idiots.

— The X-Files

...Put your hand down. This is not a vote.

For a TV character, the worst Curse possible is immortality. Sure, you get to live forever and keep your good looks hundreds of years from now, but what's eternal life and youth compared to the anguish of seeing your loved ones die, one by one, as you stay fixed in time because of an ability you were apparently more "special" to get than them?

It doesn't stop there either: any friends you make will only become grave resters in time, and you'll never have a permanent home because you have to keep on moving from location to new location every few years before your neighbors get suspicious that there's something just not right about you. Even worse, you must steel your heart against love because, for you, love is fleeting. You got your eternal life, now give up your connections and life bonds with your community and everything you ever loved or could possibly love. (The fact that you have forever to get over it isn't mentioned, but sanity always has its limits.) Of course, soon you won't even care. Remember when you were a kid, and an hour seemed like eternity? As you grow up, your perception of time changes. Eventually, like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, you become a sociopathic recluse for whom a human lifetime seems like five minutes, so what's the point in making friends?

And even when you are no longer traumatized by the deaths of the people around you, you'll be bored out of your skull, as there are only so many movies you can watch and life-defying antics you can perform before life settles into a monotony. A rut you can't ever get out of. Scared straight yet? And that's with eternal youth added to the package. If you've got Age Without Youth, you'll be lucky if you become only a grasshopper after your wrinkles and bent back take over. And then there's the fact that the memories of things that the world will never see again, one of the few rewards of immortality, may also one day vanish from your mind by sheer dint of memory capacity. Then again, if you got "blessed" with unageing immortality before you fully grew up, you Can't Grow Up. Ever.

Eventually, say in a few trillion years from now, the Universe itself shows its mortality (lucky bugger) and dies. Earth will have been destroyed long before. As you hop from one dying planet to another, if you can, eventually they too will end. Soon, it'll just be the endless void of subatomic particles that can never reform into anything. And you, floating there. Forever. Unless, of course, you get lucky and it turns out all matter in the universe will contract into one small mass and then make a new Big Bang, in which case after a sufficient amount of time (say, a few billion years) you might be able to find life to talk to. Assuming you survive the Big Crunch, of course...

Any characters who initially jump for joy at the prospect of living forever will find within a few centuries' time that immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be. Their quest will become a search to find a way to return to a normal, mortal life. Sometimes they'll even allow themselves to be killed outright by supernatural means to be able to rejoin the natural life cycle at last. Sometimes the ones who can be killed but not age are rather picky; they won't commit direct suicide, they just want to be able to grow old and eventually die of organ failure. If this would happen in real life you would probably slowly forget everything (your brain can only hold so much information before it starts losing older bits) so maybe it wouldn't be so bad. (Real-life senile dementia sort of says otherwise, but this is fantasy we're talking about.) About the only advantage of living forever is having the time to read all of TV Tropes.

A special case of Blessed With Suck. When done Anviliciously, this can seem like sour grapes on the part of the very much mortal writers. May be used as a Fantastic Aesop. See also Cursed With Awesome, may be due to being Enemies With Death.

Oddly, elves or naturally immortal species seem to be immune to this (although in some cases they too may grow weary of immortality, given enough time.) Maybe they're good at finding hobbies? At the least, living among fellow immortals is a good way to ameliorate the strain. After all, they've had a lot of time to work out cultural mores and general psychological structures necessary to deal with the relatively unchanging social landscape.

It's not all hopeless, however. In some cases, you actually are better off with living forever. You may be bored, but at least something is going on.

Vampires are obviously subject to this trope, as are Flying Dutchmen of various types.

The title is from the song of the same name, written by Queen for the soundtrack of Highlander, which features some of the downsides of immortality. (Ironically, another Queen song from the same soundtrack, "Princes of the Universe", takes the exact opposite view, that being immortal is awesome. This Troper sees no reason that both views can't be spot-on.)

Its polar opposite is So You Want To Live Forever for those who seek it, and Living Forever Is Awesome for those who like it.

This one is Older Than Dirt.