Who Wants To Live Forever - Television Tropes & Idioms

In Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid Saga, eating mermaid flesh almost always makes the eater insane or turns him/her into a monster, but there is a very small chance that the eater will gain immortality instead. The travels of the main character, one of the "lucky" ones, reinforce this property as only a step above insanity or deformity.
Rulers in the world of The Twelve Kingdoms automatically gain immortality upon gaining the throne. (Rulers can also grant immortality to their servants and officials.) Very few people who've been granted immortality ever come to regret it (even those who were very old when they became immortal.) About the only one who saw it as something of a curse was Suzu, but that's only because she spent 100 years of her life being abused by a cruel master. Once free of her employer, she pretty much picked up her former life where it had left off, (and despite the large amount of time that had passed, she still considered herself a teenager.) In one of the short stories, however, it is mentioned that some rulers cannot cope with what would have been the end of their natural life.
Hohenheim in Fullmetal Alchemist. In both the anime and the manga, this was why he abandoned his wife and sons: in the anime because he didn't want his wife to see his body deteriorating due to too many soul transfers, and in the manga because he didn't want the neighbors to notice he wasn't aging. In the manga, though, his wife knew all about it, and one of the reasons he left was to find a way to lose his immortality, because he wanted to grow old together, and even die, with his family. Also, his ex-girlfriend (wife?) Dante, who used the same method and ended up insane- or just really, really cold hearted. She was willing to sacrifice millions of lives just so she could look young and beautiful for a little bit longer, and nearly succeeded. And of course the anime homunculi, who just want to be human and thus are willing to swallow Dante's fairly obvious lies because she's the only chance they have to make themselves mortal.
- The exception among the homunculi being Greed, who wants to achieve true immortality.
C.C. in Code Geass, whose disconnected, sarcastic attitude and disdain for humans are shown to be the result of several centuries of life while being persecuted as a witch; at one point she even remarks "I've been alive so long that I can't even remember who loves me and who hates me."
- It's revealed in the second season that this is the goal of practically every "Geass Witch", since they were tricked into gaining their powers and immortality by their predecessors; the "practically" comes from the strong implication that C.C.'s real wish is to be loved honestly and truthfully.
  - And then, after the Grand Finale where Lelouch sacrifices himself to bring peace to the world, it's said that C.C. no longer feels this way, because Lelouch never hated or blamed her for the tragedy that his life became, and through everything he honestly cared about her, allowing her to live out her immortal lifespan with the happy memories he gave her.
In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the Wolkenritter lost their Rejuvenation program when Reinforce separated them from her. They considered this to be a gift from Reinforce. No longer bound by the prison of immortality, they can now spend their first and last lives with their beloved master, Hayate, and follow her in death, if they wish.
Count Magnus Lee's speech in Vampire Hunter D perfectly sums up this trope:
"I have lived for 10,000 years. Believe me, you have no idea what that means for me: boredom. Everlasting, hideous boredom. A neverending search for ways to pass the time, and mating with a human woman is one of the few I enjoy."
One of the main themes of Tsukihime is the inevitability of death, despite the fact that every supernatural character has (at least) immortality. The protagonist understands this well, as his eyes can see the fated destruction of everything. In fact, in Melty Blood a character explicitly says, "You can't avoid your destined end."
Although it may not appear one of the central themes in Kiddy Grade, it apparently was intended as such. Since all ES members are technically immortal, they have to face all the problems (the least of which are old enemies and their descendants) that pile up during their lives. One consequence of their immortality seems to be their tendency to band together with each other, in other words, with the likes of themselves - hence the obvious affection between the two main girls and the unexpected readiness to forget past conflicts and foil for each other when crap hits the fan.
Played straight and subverted in Baccano:
"The harshness of having to live for eternity... of all people, I gave it to you..."
"What are you saying?! We don't mind it one bit! On the contrary, we're glad we won't die! I feel like going 'Yahoo!'"
- The last episode in the series is subtitled "Both those who are immortal and those who are not enjoy life equally."
Played straight in Flame Of Recca in form of Kagerou/Kagehoshi. After literally turning immortal in order to save her son, Recca, she felt like real hell, wandering in eternity to have her son kill her. On the other hand, the two Big Bad of the series, Mori Kouran and Kaima, just simply have limitless lust for humanity's evils, greed and desire (Kouran wants to continue to gain money and possession forever, while Kaima wants to kill forever), so they avert this trope by actually WISHING to live forever, so they can satiate those lusts.
In Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, most characters that seek to drink the eponymous bird's blood fail to do so or change their mind because of this trope. However, in the second volume we get to see a character go on to live forever, to the point of becoming a godlike figure. He isn't truly happy until he is allowed to become a part of the Phoenix so he could be with his long-deceased lover. In other words, he died happily.
Fruits Basket, One of the Zodiac animals in the true Zodiac legend, chapter 131:
I don't want eternity. I don't want 'unchanging'. Even though you're afraid, let's accept that things end. Even though it's lonely, let's accept that lives come to an end. Even though it was only for a short while, I was so happy to be by your side. If we both die and are reborn, and we are able to meet once again, next time, rather than only during the moonlit nights, I want to meet you as you smile in the light of the sun. Next time, rather than only by ourselves, I want to meet you as you smile among people.
In Alive: The Final Evolution, it is revealed that the Happening-meets-X-Men events of the series was caused by an alien race that escaped the destruction of their planet by turning into living energy. The boredom of traveling through space and their inability to die left them completely insane, eventually concluding that the ultimate form of evolution is death. When they reached Earth, in their desperation to "evolve", they bodyjumped into several people, and had their hosts gleefully commit suicide just so they could die. Those watching the suicides and are able to resist the command themselves aren't sure if they should be terrified or jealous.
In Photon, it turns out the Emperor of the galaxy, having achieved immortality and near-omnipotence, has orchestrated most of the events of the OVA, causing a mutiny to rise up against himself simply because he was bored of being uncontested for thousands of years. This plot eventually leads to his destruction. He doesn't mind (or, possibly, notice, as he's quite mad).
What is revealed about Evangeline McDowell's backstory in Mahou Sensei Negima contains hints of this, especially the eternal wanderer aspects. Mainly because she is stuck at age 10, considered an undead abomination by those aware of the masquerade, and apparently cannot maintain illusions indefinitely.
In The Tower Of Druaga, King Gilgamesh's immortality was a curse by Druaga. He had to live through all of Uruk's hard times while a shadow eats away at his soul.
In Rebirth - which is really a manhwa series - Rett Butler, the best friend of the main character, was cursed with immortality by the the villain 300 years ago. Why? So he can watch the world be destroyed by said villain.
Hiroaki Samura's Blade Of The Immortal (think Highlander meets Samurai Champloo), in which the title character - thanks to an infusion of 'kessen chu' or 'sacred blood worms' which instantly repair virtually any injury which he sustains - is, to all intents and purposes, incapable of dying (and quickly comes to the realization that effective immortality sucks). When it's suggested that he simply decapitate himself, he protests that he wants to die a *normal* death and suggests that he slay 1000 evil men in return for the "cure" for his immortality (and partially to redeem himself for killing 100 men when he was an outlaw).
- Not relly he's more annoyed by the fact that since he knows he can't die his sword skills are starting to dull
Taken to an extreme in Waita Uziga's Mai-chan's Daily Life, an ero-guro manga that revolves around a slave maid named Mai who regenerates even the worst of injuries. Ero-guro + Immortal slave maid = you do the math.
Cowboy Bebop has Sympathy for the Devil where the bounty leads them to a child who at the time is actually over 80 and apparently can neither age nor sustain permanent damage until Spike shoots him with a MacGuffin that causes him to age rapidly and die in seconds. He was pretty crazy by the time we met him, likely from watching his family die and being experimented upon for decades by scientists hoping to figure out how to replicate the freak accident that made him the way he was.
Yuko from xxxHoLic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. A Reality Warper accidentally turned her into a zombie-ish thing when she was dying centuries ago. The entire plot, encompassing the death and suffering of millions, revolves around her wanting to finally RIP, and someone else disagreeing.
This trope is a major factor in Alucard's Alternate Character Interpretation, where he is basically jealous of a human's ability to die.
Baku in Nightmare Inspector are immortal, and, well... The original Hiruko let Azusa become his vessel because it was the closest he could get to dying. Then Azusa got sick of immortality and looked for a dream frightening enough to swallow him up and destroy him. The current Hiruko seems to avert this, though.
Magic Knight Rayearth: Emeraude. 'Nuff said.
Brook of One Piece can't die after eating the Yomi-Yomi Fruit, by the point that his soul tries to return to his body each time he experiences physical death. After being unable to find his body for many years after his first death, he's become a 'living' skeleton. And constantly jokes about what this makes him unable to do. Including grow hair, which makes him overprotective of his afro.
- Nami points out that he still has the limit of being unable to swim, so falling into the ocean without someone to save him would just lead to eternal drowning.

Lazarus Churchyard, a comic book character, was unable to kill himself because his brain was trapped in an indestructible body.
The Sandman issue "Facade" depicts Elemental Girl as a washed-up superhero who takes no joy from life, but finds it impossible to commit suicide due to her powers.
- There was also a subversion done on this trope: A man is granted immortality by Death and Dream; and Dream visits him once every hundred years. During each visit he asks whether or not he wants to continue to live forever. Even after seven hundred years - including the visit after being unable to eat for years on end due to extreme poverty - he continues to want to live forever. When asked by Dream whether he will choose to die because of the pain, he responds simply with "Why? I've got so much to live for!" It's suggested that Dream subconsciously desired this, as he suffered from immortal loneliness.
  - Besides Hob Gadling, another example shows up later in Brief Lives who is an even bigger contrast to most immortals in fiction - he's a dull, unassuming lawyer. People always need lawyers. He still screams "NOT YET!" when he's killed in a freak accident.
  - Gadling is a double subversion, because by the end of the series, he realizes that he's done all there is to do and seen all there is to see, and life is getting kind of boring.
- The demons of Hell in the Sandman series while away their endless time in Hell by coming up with wordplay and slang to use when speaking to each other and the damned. (e.g. speaking only in iambic pentameter.)
- And besides Hob Gadling is Mad Hettie, who's quite determined to keep on going no matter what it takes, even though she's, well, mad. It's unclear whether she was mad to begin with, or whether immortality made her so.
On the other hand, in Neil Gaiman's Eternals, Sprite, the only child Eternal goes to enormous lengths to make the Eternals into normal people who age (and can die) because he's sick of being stuck at the same age. (In the end, he only makes himself mortal, the others are restored by the Dreaming Celestial).
In Phil Foglio's comic book adaptation of Robert Asprin's Another Fine Myth (but not the original novel), the villain's motivation is to get enough power to cancel the immortality enchantment on him. He never specifies exactly why he wants to die, but apparently he's been trying for a long time.
Zzed, a supervillain from the Golden Age Airboy series and its 1980s revival, has been immortal for tens of thousands of years. Although originally, he enjoyed the possibilities eternal life afforded him, he eventually grew sick of seeing people around him died and set out to find a way to end his life. As technology progressed, he took increasingly drastic measures, until, in the Total Eclipse crossover, he set out to destroy the multiverse.
The protagonist of Drew Hayes' Poison Elves mentions in one episode that elves find it difficult to care deeply for anything or anyone, because of their long lifespans. Of course he's something of a Heroic Sociopath so his outlook may not really reflect the psychology of the elvin race in general.
Marvel Comics' Mister Immortal has tried suicide numerous times using increasingly drastic means. It's not until he finds out his true destiny that he finally accepts his "condition".
Averted for the most part in Fables, with the notable exception of Pinocchio, but only because he's stuck as a permanent pre-adolescent and wants to age so he can grow up.
Somewhat subverted by Mike LeRoi from Shadow Man, who is the slave of a beautiful voodoo priestess who has "cursed" him with practical immortality, in the sense that he can return from the afterlife whenever he pleases, to do her bidding. He must also periodically have relations with his mistress in order to preserve her youth. Seriously, what do you think is his opinion on the matter?
A minor character from an issue with Lucifer was cursed with immortality by her gods several thousand years ago. Every day, her body is reverted to the way it was the moment of the curse, which means she has had the same miscarriage every day for thousands of years.
Averted in Atomic Robo: the titular character is a Ridiculously Human Robot that has been around since the 1920's and one chapter shows that he's dealt with the issue of his friends dying from old age pretty well.
- However, he does say that the hardest part of his job is that he's over 80 years old and he does a great Jack Benny impression, but no one gets it anymore.
The Cyborg Superman seeks to end his life after the loss of his human body and suicide of his wife. An immortal Energy Being, he is able to survive any injury, including disintegration or being thrown into a black hole, without being destroyed. As such, he purposely antagonizes Superman, Green Lantern and other powerful beings in the hope that one of them will find a way to kill him.
- Good luck with that. Becoming a foe of Superman because only he could finally kill you, when Superman will not kill under any circumstances.
In Scott McCloud's Zot!, deranged cyborg Dekko turns 13 people into robots without their knowledge or consent specifically to make them effectively immortal. As they come to realize what had happened to them, not a one of them accepts or likes the change, a fact that broke what used to be Dekko's heart. Dekko himself, however, does want to live forever, one of the many indicators of how far removed from his humanity he is.
The Phantom once dealt with a gladiator from Ancient Rome who was cursed with immortality and Nigh Invulnerability (though like an ant, his back is vulnerable). Said gladiator even tried suicide throughout the centuries (and got really happy at his defeat and consequent death by the hands of the Ghost Who Walks).
Vögelein the Clockwork Faerie is, well, a clockwork fairy who must be wound every thirty-six hours to stay alive. So she's passed from caregiver to caregiver like an heirloom. She's basically tied to each guardian and has to stay a secret, so when one dies without passing her on...
Occurs frequently enough in Transformers comics that writer Simon Furman has made a Furmanism out of "Never did want to live forever!".
The Elders of the Universe in the Marvel Universe are immortal due to their fanatical devotion to a specific aspect of life (gardening, playing games, running, fighting). While none of them seem depressed they're pretty much irretrievably insane.
Dr. Doom achieved immortality at one point with the intention of trading it away - as he put it,
My years already feel like eons. I fear the eons themselves cannot be endured.
- He may have done it again, if indeed it's not the same case. Became Immortal just to use it up so he could vanquish his only real opponent. His own conscience.
DC Comics' Multi-Man is "sort of" immortal. Any time he is killed, he comes back to life with a new super power. It's never explicitly stated whether or not this can happen throughout eternity, or if he will otherwise have an ordinary lifespan. Other super villains frequently take advantage of this, most notably The Joker during the Last Laugh storyline, who kills him repeatedly until he resurrects with the super power that The Joker needs to escape prison. Shortly thereafter duplicated by Shilo Norman repeatedly killing him until he resurrects with the power needed to bring the prison back into normal reality after being pulled into a singularity as part of Joker's escape plan. Needless to say, Multi-Man is pretty traumatized by his power.
Elf Quest. Rayek eventually perfected the art of angsting about it.
In Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? Mxyzptlk says that one problem with immortality is that one becomes bored. The first two thousand years he tried doing nothing, being carried on inertia, the next two he was good and after that another two thousand years of being mischievous (as usually portayed). Things go very bad when he gets bored again and tries to be plain evil.
Invincible once visited a future, where, after some serious cataclysm, Immortal saved remains of humanity and become their leader. However, years later he get tired of his life, and immortality right to the point he decided to turn into a merciless dictator, hoping that the oppressed people will form a resistance and find a way to kill him.
In Common Grounds, a prehistoric man touched the flame of Prometheus, gaining the power over fire and never aging. He becomes a superhero. Subverted, as he is still able to enjoy his life after all that time, still falling in love over and over again.
In the Hellboy story "Darkness Calls" HB's main enemy is Koshchei the Deathless, a Russian warlord who's soul was hidden in an egg (that's inside a rabbit, that's inside a duck, that's inside a goat) by the Baba Yaga. When we meet him, he is sitting on his throne covered in cobwebs just because he no longer gives a damn. The only way that Koshchei agrees to go after Hellboy is the Baba Yaga promises to let him die if he does.

The Trope Namer is a montage in the first Highlander film set to Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever." Connor MacLeod and his wife Heather pass a long and happy marriage together, but Connor must watch his beloved age and die while he lives on, ever youthful. Thus Connor first learns the loneliness of immortality.
In The Fountain, Tom Creo seeks to discover a medical means to immortality through experiments with the bark of a rare tree, but he ultimately learns to accept death as a necessary aspect of life. Though our bodies die, the material is recycled into new organisms, and so we live on through new life. Even planets and stars that die become new stars and bring new life to other worlds. Two parallel stories feature different versions of Tom achieving immortality and finding it fruitless. Tomas the Conquistador seeks and finds the Tree of Life, but utlimately the sap turns his body into flowers, in something of a Literal Genie ending. Spaceman Tom has apparently succeeded in becoming immortal by consuming bark from the rare tree that was grown from the body of his dead wife, but the tree dies before he can ressurect her in a supernova. A vision of his wife convinces him to accept death with joy, and he dies in the supernova, becoming part of a new star. Interestingly, the story also makes room for a very unsympathetic priest to prattle on about immortal souls, which the film seems to dismiss outright.
The cult film Zardoz features a future Earth which has degenerated into two classes — a race of mortal slaves, and the immortal "Eternals". who live lives of purposeless luxury. Occasionally, an Eternal will develop a mental illness which makes them fall into a state of catatonia. (These people are called "The Apathetics".) If an Eternal commits a crime, they can be punished by being artificially aged (although they don't die — they just become permanently decrepit). The end of the movie has most of the Eternals joyously welcoming their own destruction at the hands of the "Exterminators", a primitive warrior class to whom the main character belongs.
In the 1940s German adaptation of The Adventures of Baron Von Munchhausen, the storyteller of the framing narrative is revealed to be the baron, whom loves his present wife of fifty years so deeply that he decides to relinquish his immortality to die with her, aging to her exact age before his guests' eyes.
The angelic protagonist of Wings of Desire (and its American remake, City of Angels) gives up immortality for love as well.
In Death Becomes Her, the two female leads drink a potion that grants eternal youth, but it does not protect them from damage to their bodies. Accidents and attempted murders leave their bodies dead and permanently mutilated. On the other hand, Bruce Willis's character is offered the potion several times, but he refuses it, giving a speech about how eternal life would be a nightmare even if he didn't fall victim to accidents and mutilation. He ultimately lives his life happily with a large family and dies peacefully, while the two women bitterly linger on, imprisoned in bodies that literally fall apart at the very end.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2007) has Winters, who, in a subversion, was so happy to have his mortality back that he laughed and told the heroes how happy he was before the result of losing his immortality took place.
In Bicentennial Man, the robot Andrew, (played by Robin Williams,) accepts aging and death rather than let the love of his... er, life die of old age herself.
- The Isaac Asimov short story is similar, though less about the Power Of Love.
Andrew Martin (on being told that he had violated the Third Law): "No. I have chosen between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires. To have let my body live at the cost of the greater death is what would have violated the Third Law."
The premise of Hook is that Peter Pan realized the disadvantages of his eternal youth when he discovered Wendy had grown up and aged into an old woman. Which made him decide to give up his immortality, return to earth, and live a normal life.
In The Man From Earth, this is brought up and subverted: John really doesn't mind his seeming immortality.
Not an example of this trope, but we've got to mention the Flash Gordon movie, with BRIAN BLESSED proclaiming "Oh well, who wants to live forever? DIIIIIIIIVVVVEEEEEEE!!!!!!"
- That's right, he even Large Hamed the silent e.
In Return of the King Theoden's battle cry "DEAAATH!" seems a less ironic version of the above-mentionend "Do you want to live forever?" because it pretty much points out that death what is what they are all heading for. Points in favor: (1) Instead of being disheartened, the Rohirrim join in and throw themselves into battle. (2) Tolkien's idea of death as a gift (see below in literature)
Three words. X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Subverted in Revenge of the Sith because Anakin wants to make Padme immortal; he would just be happy being mortal. Immortality Immorality reigns supreme as Anakin proceeds to slaughter children to become strong enough in The Dark Side to make his wife immortal. Luke similarly comments in the Expanded Universe on what it means if his powers make him immortal. Of course, the secret is that Jedi are immortal; it just takes compassion to make them so. And ultimately their descendant Cade does have the power to raise the dead.
Becomes a catch phrase for the questionable film version of Starship Troopers by both the mentor and hero, as a battle cry for the Federation soldiers.
This is the premise of Ryuuhei Kitamura's film Aragami, with the titular immortal war god having grown tired of his eternal life and seeking to meet the one who will kill him in battle. It wouldn't be that difficult if he wasn't Miyamoto Musashi
Alien3.
Dillon: Oh, I forgot - you're the guy who made the deal with God to live forever?
Tom Hanks's character in The Green Mile ends up outliving all his family because he recieves part of the lifeforce of the deathrow inmate John's healing power. He believes this is punishment from God for executing John.
In Pirates Of The Caribbean, it seems ("Why are these things never clear?") that whoever stabs Davy Jones's heart will have to live forever, ferrying souls to the afterlife and being allowed to step on land only once in 10 years, or, if you don't ferry souls and skip out on your job, turn into a fishman. Davy Jones is depressed/angry, Will wants to do it despite leaving his fiance, and Jack Sparrow thinks its freaking awesome, complete with an internal debate over whether one lifetime with unlimited rum access or an unlimited lifetime with rum every 10 years is more rum.

Douglas Adams examples:
- Life, the Universe, and Everything: Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, having seen and done everything there is to see and do, decides to dedicate the rest of his existence to insulting every single living being in the universe - in alphabetical order. It is interesting to note that the Guide points out that those who are naturally immortal are born with the psychological capacity to cope with immortality and would not suffer from this trope; Wowbagger's immortality was thrust upon him by accident, which is why he has such a hard time of it.
  - Marvin has also lived several times longer than the lifetime of the universe through various Time Travel mishaps. He still hates it.
  - Yeah, but he gets to die eventually. Thistroper doesn't understand why he never tried to kill himself.
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: The character Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology, or "Reg", is, for no reason the book makes clear, an apparent immortal who is so old that he's forgotten most of his origins. He fears that his eventual fate will be to "sit alone in a darkened room, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything but a little grey old head..." (Knowing the back story clears this up significantly: the story was originally going to be a Doctor Who story, and Reg, a fugitive Time Lord.)
Lloyd Alexander's short story, The Stone, was about a man who found a stone that made him live forever - by making everything on his farm exactly the same, day after day after day. He couldn't get rid of it easily, either - the stone was a Clingy Macguffin.
Piers Anthony's titular Incarnations Of Immortality are indeed immortal, but most of them can voluntarily resign their positions and become mortal again. The only exceptions are War, who can die when there is no war on Earth; Time, who lives his life backwards until the moment of his birth, and Death, who must be killed by his successor, only possible if he goes without part of his "regalia".
The protagonist from Isaac Asimov's Bicentennial Man is a robot, who can quite literally live forever by repairing himself whenever necessary. However, his wish is to be human. In an age of cybernetic prosthetics and replacement body parts, the boundary between man and machine blurs - and eventually, he gets himself legally declared human, but only after he introduces inevitable decay into his robotic brain, ensuring that he will eventually die like a human, rather than live forever as a robot.
Also from Isaac Asimov, The Last Answer has God harnessing dead beings' inevitable desire to snuff it, in an effort to figure out how he himself can do the same.
Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. The main character sacrifices the chance to live forever with an immortal who loves her for a normal life. Note usually this kind of character has to choose between eternal life and a mortal love; here, she can get immortality and love...but gives up both.
- Granted, the one who she was going to live forever with's brother told her about his love life as an immortal... he was married, with two children, but when his wife saw that he didn't age, she left him, thinking he had made a deal with the devil... and then she went insane. He also had to watch his two children die... one of whom was older than him.
In the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, citizens of the Culture have the option of dying of old age (after several centuries of life), or having their age stabilized to become effectively immortal (assuming accidents don't happen). However, there's a cultural bias towards dying when your time is up, and choosing immortality is thought of as immature - although the Culture is all about IDIC and this bias is probably not a constant. Multiple other options are also present; you can Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence or store yourself to be revived at a later date (either physically or electronically). These options can be combined; not uncommonly, those who elect to die also upload a version of themselves (presumably with tweaks so it won't get tired of living) so that their memories and experiences are not lost. The machine citizens, and especially the Minds, are immortal by default (again, barring no accidents), but emotional trauma can very rarely lead to a machine mind commiting suicide.
In Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Space, a scientist by the name of Nemoto keeps herself alive with advanced medical treatments for well over a thousand years, so she can deal with the problem of the alien Gaijin (and whoever the Gaijin are fighting). She doesn't seem to enjoy it much, and becomes extremely crochety—but she's too much of a control freak to leave things in anyone else's hands.
- In Baxter's Xeelee Sequence of novels, a group of people known as Jasofts gain immortality. However they suffer in that ultimately, they can only hold one thousand years' worth of experiences, and live many times that, sometimes able to vividly remember events, before seeing something which brings back other memories and pushes those away.
A significant subplot in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn involves Schmendrick, whose mentor made him immortal until he could come into his real power. When his power transforms the unicorn into a human woman, he tries to tell her about the beauty of things that can die, a lesson she learns all too well before she regains her immortality (and he loses his).
- From halfway through the book, when the unicorn is first transformed (and freaks out about being in a mortal body):
  Schmendrick: I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than the unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful thing in the world.
  - Later, Amalthea wishes to choose death rather than become immortal and fall out of love with Lir.
Heavily subverted in the Tarzan novels, where Tarzan and a few of his friends attain eternal life and youth by stealing some immortality pills from one novel's Big Bad (he cannot share immortality with the world, due to the pill's morally dubious manufacturing method). Tarzan has a very upbeat, "seize the day" mindset is completely unbothered by the consequences of his immortality. When asked by someone if the thought of all his friends growing old and dying bothers him, he replies that the promise of making new friends makes up for it. When asked if he is worried about boredom Tarzan replies that he lives such an exciting life he doesn't worry about it.
In CJ Cherryh 's Morgaine Cycle the gates can be programmed to provide a kind of immortality for their users. The user's physical condition can be scanned upon entering a gate for the first time, and subsequently each time they enter a gate they will emerge on the other side in that original condition, thus resetting their biological clock to its earlier state.
Indigo, in Louise Cooper's Indigo series, is cursed with immortality until such time as she can banish the seven demons whose can she foolishly unsealed. (Her traveling companion the talking wolf is also immortal...but in the wolf's case, it was a reward for being such a good friend to Indigo.)
- And in the last book, she discovers the immortality actually isn't a curse after all. Or something like that, the book doesn't go into what actually caused her immortality in the first place, only pointing out that the original exposition she received was wrong.
All Men Are Mortal, by Simone de Beauvoir. Besides the usual miseries of the immortal, Fosca is tormented by unreliability of people. He chose to become immortal so that he could make a political difference, only to find out that it's not time you need, it's people.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story The Ring Of Thoth is about an Egyptian who discovers, and injects himself with, an elixir which grants near-immortality, only to have the one he loves die of the plague before he can give her the elixir. The story is about his four-thousand-year search for the only poison strong enough to overpower the elixir.
Rather chillingly adapted in Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna. "Shall a man curse a god?"
Averted quite nicely in David Eddings' Belgariad and Malloreon series. Anyone who learns to use the Will and the Word becomes immortal as a side effect. Of all the sorcerers seen in the books, none of them ever register any complaints about their endless lives. This may be because most are caught up in the machinations of Light and Dark that make up the balance of the plot, but even those that aren't simply find something to do with their lives (one, for example, takes advantage of his infinite lifespan to work out how to turn lead into gold; when we see him 2,000 years into the project, he's succeeded but needs to bring the cost down before it's profitable). Some readers are a little confused by how two of Aldur's wizards will themselves out of existence; this isn't due to ennui, but to catastrophic depression (one annihilates himself after the theft of the Orb of Aldur, and the other discovery of the identity of The Mole).
- And Belgarath had to be physically and mentally restrained to prevent him from following them after Poledra's "death". Prior to that he was quite content with his state, though he does mention that outliving most of his friends and family is a drawback.
In I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, the God-like Master Computer AM has made the five human characters practically immortal. Since AM is a completely insane artificial intelligence consumed with a limitless, bottomless loathing for humanity and a psychopathic glee in sadistically torturing the characters, who are the last humans left on Earth, this is not a good thing.
Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics series. In Riddle of the Seven Realms, it is revealed that demons adopt various hobbies to avoid succumbing to this trope. Palodad the Reckoner, under its influence, turns into a Chessmaster Omnicidal Maniac.
In Time Enough for Love, by Robert A Heinlein, the main character, after living about 2,000 years, decides it is time to die because he's done it all. He's convinced to stick around in a sort of reverse-Scheherezade Gambit, where he'll tell his life story if they can, by the end, manage to come up with something genuinely new for him to do. Eventually they find two things: Time Travel and Opposite Sex Clones.
In Brian Jacques' Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series, the main characters are an immortal boy and dog. Leaving aside the fact that the boy is stuck at age 14 forever, they have to leave everyone they ever get close to before someone notices that they don't age.
Mercedes Lackey's auto-racing elves who get involved with humans are in fact traumatized by the deaths of the people around them, especially lovers and spouses, but they live with it.
One of the stories in Ursula K. Le Guin's Changing Planes discusses a plane where, it is rumored, immortals live. As it happens, there are a handful of them, the result of bites by a certain fly. They don't get eternal youth, and are condemned to endless agony. One of the plane's natives, who watches over one immortal in particular, notes that eventually the people bury their immortals, and over centuries their suffering apparently condenses them into a diamond. The narrator asks if the native is afraid of the flies because of this, and is told "There's only one"; as there are many flies on the plane, the narrator theorizes that there is one immortal fly that curses the bitten with immortality.
In C. S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, a tree's fruit comes with the warning that it brings eternal life and despair. The White Witch eats it, and from her expression, the title nephew understands the warning. Narnia is then protected from her by a tree grown from one of the apples; she cannot stand to come near it afterward.
Subverted in Larry Niven's Ringworld novels, in which the protagonist, Louis Wu, vows to live forever to see the wonders the universe has to offer (and his society's technology makes that feasible; Louis is already several hundred years old when he makes the pledge).
- The technology for eternal life is further enhanced in stories that take place later in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, specifically nanotech medicine developed by Carlos Wu which are shown to be able to rebuild a key character from just his head and raw materials in the short story Procrustes. As well as reverse the effects of the Protector virus on Louis Wu in the novel Ringworld's Children.
In the Discworld book Lords and Ladies, the not-nice kind of The Fair Folk invade Lancre. Granny, who seems to be going senile (turns out she's not), is mocked by the ever-young elf Queen for growing old ... and Granny turns the insult right around:
"What don't die can't live. What can't live don't change. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you ... you've lived longer'n me but I'm older'n you, and I'm better'n you."
- Also, in ~~Faust~~ Eric, Eric's third wish is to live forever. The demon granting his wishes sends Eric back in time to the beginning of the universe. He's not too thrilled with the prospect of having to spend several billion years as the only living thing in it.
In the non-Discworld Terry Pratchett book Strata, people working for "The Company" can get treatments to which make them effectively immortal. Despite this, most people don't live more than a few hundred years, because they grow tired of life where they have already done everything they can do. Not that they commit suicide as such; they just keep doing more and more dangerous things to get the same excitement, and eventually one of them goes wrong.
- There are similar themes in many Larry Niven short stories and novellas. (And subverted by Louis Wu in the Ringworld novels.)
A particularly disturbing twist on this trope is Claudia from Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, a young girl who is made into a (theoretically immortal) vampire and matures mentally and emotionally, but not physically. This leaves her perpetually dependent on others, embittered and perhaps not entirely sane. It is later revealed that vampire law prohibits the making of child vampires for precisely this reason.
- Indeed, several characters appearing throughout the entire series decide to commit suicide because they are bored with eternal life or just tired of living in "The Savage Garden". The usual means is walking into a fire but later on, we learn that many senior, i.e. "powerful", vampires use their power of flight to ascend to high altitude to greet the morning sun.
- A similar variation cam be found in the Anita Blake novels. One of the more disturbing vampires, called Valentina, was turned at the age of eight by a vampire pedophile who was bringing over children to be his permanent companions. The few vampires turned as children who survive a few centuries and described as twisted things. In Valentina's case, "(She) was taken before her body grew large enough for much physical pleasure. She has turned such energies into other avenues of interest", which in this case means torturing others.
There are at least three sources of immortality in Harry Potter.
- The Elixir of Life, created with a Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone, will keep you alive with repeated doses, and has eternal youth (or at least eternal middle age) added in. However, the books only speak of two people who availed themselves of this, and they eventually decided to stop making it out of fear it could be used to revive Voldemort.
  - The book also states that the two makers do not mind getting rid of the Elixir, because at their advanced ages (both 650+), they are bored with life, and death will be the next great adventure.
- Unicorn blood will keep you alive and rescue you even from the brink of death, but with "a half-life, a cursed life." The implication in the text is that the consumer will be wracked by guilt.
- More like despair, probably — the character we see drinking unicorn blood is Voldemort, who is almost certainly incapable of feeling guilt.
  - And when has dear Voldy exhibited that? I think that its karma, a curse that marks you as irreclaimable, but doesn't let you notice. It can manifest either as guilt, despair, or (in Voldemort's case) an Idiot Ball twice the size of normal. And the curse never goes away (as Book 7 bore out).
- You can create a Horcrux, a piece of your soul hidden in an inanimate object. It doesn't prevent you from being killed, it just allows you to be brought back. However, doing so will make you progressively less human.
  - The last two are subverted, in that the person using them (Lord Voldemort) is a violent sociopath and simply doesn't care about the negative consequences.
  - Each Horcrux requires a murder, because killing literally rips the soul apart — that's how you get the bit you put in the Horcrux. And in the seventh book, we learn from Hermione that there's only one way to reverse it — by feeling remorse. "Extremely painful," as she points out.
In Jeffrey Sackett's Mark of the Werewolf, the main character is cursed with immortality. This results in him forgetting anything beyond two hundred years past (including his own name), transforming into an Ax Crazy werewolf every night of the full moon (unless outfitted with a Restraining Bolt beforehand), and being invulnerable to damage in any form. The book revolves around his attempts to figure out how to die.
In Barry Sadler's Casca: the Eternal Mercenary, the titular character is a Roman legionnaire cursed by Jesus Christ to walk the world forever as a soldier. Amongst his challenges are his fear of being buried alive (briefly realized during one of his journeys in the Orient, and notably predating the Heroes episode with Adam being buried), and the problem with never being able to truly find love since he stays young forever while his various wives/girlfriends/lovers age and eventually die.
In The Bible, after they sin by eating from the Tree of Knowledge and are cursed, Adam and Eve are banished from Eden by God so that they won't eat fruit the Tree of Life, which would have made them live forever in their state of toil and sin.
- This isn't in The Bible. The reason God gives is that if Adam and Eve would know the difference between Good and Evil and live forever, they would be like God themselves. The sin and toil weren't results of the first fruit itself, but a separate punishment laid down by God - the only negative effect of the fruit was the loss of innocence.
Unusual use of an elf with this trope: Drizzt Do'Urden from R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms books. He spends a number of books angsting over eventually losing his friends and loved ones and even debating whether or not to get into a relationship because of it. He gets over it by adopting a carpe diem mentality.
In Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer, one of the main characters is approached by a man offering to increase his lifespan through new medical techniques. In the second "Flash", he sees that if he accepts the offer he has the chance to live forever. He sees the future of mankind, with humans eventually dismantling the Earth and using the materials to build a Dyson Sphere, and then spreading throughout the galaxy. He sees himself on another world, in a new, mechanical body. When he wakes up from the Flash, he decides to decline the offer of eternal life and instead grow old and die with his wife and family.
Very, very averted in Back to Methuselah by G. B. Shaw. Not only do the characters enjoy their eternal life, it is implied that normal life span is not long enough for a man to become mature, experienced and sufficiently intelligent.
Subverted in Cordwainer Smith and his Instrumentality of Mankind stories. The planet of Norstrilla produces sick sheep that create at least part of a mixture for immortality, which almost everyone takes. There are problems in the society, but immortality doesn't seem to be one of them.
The character Tithonus from Greek mythology and the Struldbrugs from Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels both suffer the torment of eternal life without the benefit of eternal youth. Although they never die, they age at the normal rate, and so are condemned to an eternity in decrepit ancient bodies.
In the third part of Gullivers Travels, there are people in Laputa who do live forever. However, they still age normally and suffer greatly from senility. The Laputans thus do not particularly desire immortality.
Lord of the Rings. Death isn't called 'Eru's gift' for nothing, you know.
- In fact, it is heavily suggested that fear of death is actually created by Morgoth to mess with humans.
- In LOTR, at one point Sam, when pondering Smeagol/Gollum, who is a Hobbit made, if not immortal, extended centuries beyond his proper span, gets a little hint of what Gollum's existence has been like. Preserved out of his time by the Ring, far beyond kin, friends, and everything he knew, a stranger in a different world. Utterly alone, living endless days in the dark, entrapped by a Ring he can't escape and can't give up and loathes.

When Bilbo does surrender the One Ring, unique in all its history, with the help of Gandalf, he feels an instant sense of relief as his natural state of being returns.

This is the entire premise behind the Tide Lords series.
In Gaunt's Ghosts, the Tanith First and Only have a battlecry: "Men of Tanith! Do you want to live forever?"
- In the Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) novels, this is made fun of, when Cain, upon hearing one of his sergeants yell this line to his men, remarks that nobody talks like that outside badly written combat novels.
  - It was probably aimed directly at the above Gaunt's Ghosts example (Gaunt himself was mentioned in passing in one of Amberly's footnotes).
In the story Child of All Ages, the protagonist, having lived several hundred years as a permanent child, is quite happy to continue life. Even if she is stuck as a child. She does bemoan the fact that modern society makes it pretty hard to be independent as a child, but she still can't wait to see what life brings next.
Wild Cards has Golden Boy who stopped aging at his early twenties and shows no signs of aging. Since he's also invulnerable as part of his Combo Platter Powers, it's unlikely anything else will kill him either. His situation is somewhat aggravated by the fact that he's already cut off from his peers, who despise him for rolling over and testifying at McCarthy's anti-Ace hearings. Thus he is presented with the possibility of an immortality of being reviled and hated by anyone who knows who he is.
- Even after risking his life by falling to his possible death - one of the few events in which he is uncertain to survive - to help foil the plot of a major super-villain to become President, he is still almost universally reviled and only grudgingly given credit for his help by a bare handful of people.
- Dr. Tachyon, a long-lived Human Alien, also has to deal with seeing humans age and die around him. To comfort himself, he drinks heavily and sleeps around. (Of course, it's implied he'd do those things anyway.)
- There's also Demise, who had already died from the virus and had been resurrected by Tachyon and may well have been able to live forever had his corpse not been reduced to ashes after he'd been killed for the nth time.
- The Sleeper wakes up young and healthy (relatively) every time he sleeps, ever since the first outbreak in 1946. He lampshades this with the occasional "they sure didn't (X) like that when I was your age".
The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt Evans. The main character receives a sword which has the interesting property of not allowing him to die until he has killed 100 men with it. He wisely decides to live forever and not kill people, but reverses this decision because of the other problems with the sword. It doesn't save him from age, and it doesn't protect him from injury. At one point he nearly "dies" because of blood loss but is still mysteriously alive the next day. When he discovers his eyesight is fading, he goes off to kill 100 men and rid himself of the sword before he becomes unable to do so.
- The end of the book subverts the trope: The main character discovers magic that will keep him young and can be added onto the immortality the sword already gives him. Once he does so, he's actually quite happy to be immortal.
This becomes a vague plot point in Brisingr, when Eragon and Roran discuss Eragon's immortality. Eragon has concluded that this forces him to marry an elf, who are all immortal, rather than a human woman, and so thus his drooling over Arya (who refused him multiple times) is apparently justified
Some fantasy fiction this troper has read, such as R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks published in the 1980s and 1990s, depicts demons as being horribly bored and depressed by their endless existence in Hell, the novelty of torturing their servants and fellow demons having long since worn off. Of course, their boredom and frustration make them all the more eager to torture humans and other mortal creatures when they find their way to our world.
Twilight. At first played straight with the Cullens (and maybe the other vampires). Later averted, since Edward finally gets to change Bella to be a vampire too.
- Likewise, the members of the Quileute tribe that are blessed with spirit wolves rapidly age to probably about their early twenties and then stop aging until they choose to willingly give up their ability to transform by remaining human for a certain amount of time. Jacob is lucky enough to have imprinted on the half-vampire Renesmee, who likewise ages rapidly before abruptly stopping somewhere around age 16. While the future is never confirmed, it can be assumed that Jacob probably opted to keep his wolf form for as long as possible.
- Completely subverted (inverted?) with Bella. She wants to live forever immediately after learning Edward will do so.
Byron's closet drama Manfred is a melodramatic refashioning of the Faust legend. When he summons seven Spirits who swear to do his bidding, he asks not for power but for forgetfulness. The entire play is his search for death, since the star under which he was born cursed him to live forever.
There are many immortal individuals and species in the Malazan Book Of The Fallen, most of whom suffer from this trope. Examples include Kallor, who was cursed with immortality but not eternal youth for being a genocidal bastard (the punishment also preventing him from ascending - the usual method of obtaining near immortality for very powerful people[it's a complicated process]), and the T'lan Imass, zombie neanderthals who stripped themselves of their mortality to better cleanse the world from the Jaghut and now wish nothing more than to be freed from their Vow and just die already. Averted with Onrack, a T'lan Imass that's quite happy with his condition, as "there was always something else to see, after all."
Nathan Brazil, the immortal Guardian of the Well of Souls from Jack Chalker's Well World saga, suffers this from time to time because his role as the emergency repair man for the universe means he absolutely cannot die. The universe simply won't allow it. Every time he reboots the universe (it's happened at least five times so far) he's been forced re-live all of human history until the next time he's needed. Oh, and did I mention that rebooting the universe requires him to kill every living creature in creation? He's tried various coping strategies, from blanking his memories to recruiting another to be his immortal companion (they had a falling out after 15,000 years or so) to "accidentally" recreating himself as a woman during the latest reboot, probably in the hope that will make it all different this go-round.
While the denizens of John Varley's Eight Worlds books may all be potentially immortal (due to really advanced medical technology) but very few of them actually live much beyond 300 years, largely due to the effects of this trope.
As Ijon Tichy finds in Stanislaw Lem's Observation on the Spot, most people who've tried immortality in a seemingly "everything-is-possible" society of Lusania, didn't really liked it. It seems that mortals' psychology (the guys in question are aliens, but surprisingly humanlike psychologically) is simply ill-suited to immortality. There are just six immortals who finally learned to cope and hasn't ended it all in different ingenious ways, and all of them don't like to talk about it.
- In an another Ijon Tichy story, he meets with an inventor who created an immortal soul. However, for that, the body has to be destroyed, and the soul is kept in a box, without any external stimuli. Tichy realizes that this is a fate worse than death. He tells to the inventor that people don't want immortality; they just want to live.
Almost the same story happened in Strugatsky Brothers Noon Universe, except this time immortality was brought not by nanomachines, as in Lem's case, but by full-body cyborgization (although, given the state of technology in Noonverse at the point, nanomachines still would play the role, at the very least). Only one among the subjects remained stable and sane in the end, and it's implied that it was only because he wanted to observe the society and snark at its failings.
- And he's got a Nice Hat!
Nights Dawn. The Western Europe Supervisor, part of a council that has secretly controlled Earth for centuries, leaves Earth when it appears to be falling to the Possessed and exiles himself on a prison planet where he can live a rougher but more interesting life.
Diana Wynne Jones's The Homeward Bounders, which features multiple characters (including a number of mythological figures) condemned to eternal existence bouncing from world to world by the whim of malevolent beings known only as Them. In the end, They are defeated, but the protagonist elects to keep wandering in order to keep Them away because he cannot accept the place his world has become in the intervening time as "home."
In Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis of The Man Who Fell to Earth fame, the robot Spofforth—doomed to live forever—constantly fantasizes about committing suicide, but his programming prevents him from attempting it until the last page, when the protagonist helpfully pushes Spofforth off the edge of a tall building.

Across the Highlands by Kamelot.

The Azumanga fanfic Forevergreen, is a Tear Jerker that dives into this in detail.

Care to guess how often this is done with vampires? One example that sticks out is Buffy The Vampire Slayer: in the third season, characters seem to take turns pointing out all of the above to Angel. Even Spike (although he mostly mocks the idea of him and Buffy being "friends").
- Also, Sid the demon slayer, cursed to immortality in his puppet body, points out that his body is dust and bones, but all he wants is to be free of the damn thing. While the EU later shows that he may still be both alive and trapped in the puppet body.
In the same line, the main point of the series Forever Knight is that, after a long life as a vampire, Nick "wants to become mortal again" (which perplexes the other vampires in the series).
2000 year old Godric from TrueBlood fits this trope in that he becomes weary of his exsistance and chooses to expose himself to sunlight at dawn.
In Doctor Who, Jack Harkness was made immortal as a side effect of his death and resurrection in "The Parting of the Ways", and since then, he has been seeking a "cure" for his condition. He gave up after learning that even the Doctor couldn't help him.
- Also in Doctor Who, the Doctor himself, though not exactly immortal, has an immense lifespan (in the new series, he gives his age at around 900), so falls into some of this. He actually refers to this problem as the "curse of the Time Lords"; he notes that he never ages, while his companions "wither and die". Unlike straight examples of this trope, however, Time Lords can permanently die by getting fatally wounded and refusing to regenerate (as the Master did in "Last of the Time Lords", although it is debated whether or not he is truly dead) or simply by being unprepared for having to start the regeneration process (as is claimed befell the Doctor in the alternate universe depicted in "Turn Left").
  - Though, the nature of the death this troper always wrote it off as more the Doctor went through his remaining regenerations prior to reaching the surface.
  - This troper always asumed the Doctor stopped the regeneration process, letting himself die having lost the will to live.
- Several other episodes of Doctor Who have explored this trope, namely "Mawdryn Undead", "The Five Doctors", and the "Human Nature" two-parter ending with "The Family of Blood", in which the Doctor, as John Smith, receives a "dream of a normal death"; a wonderfully ordinary life were he to remain human.
- The Fourth Doctor story, "The Brain of Morbius," is a direct articulation of the trope. The Doctor openly states that the Time Lords reject permanent immortality, even though they could theoretically extend their regeneration cycle indefinitely.
- Time Lords may not be completely immortal, at least not naturally. It's implied that the 1st Doctor was dying of old age before the Cybermen killed him & elsewhere it's stated that they have a limited number of regenerations, though there are means of obtaining new ones.
  - whaa?? The Cybermen never killed the First Doctor, he collapsed in the TARDIS after the end of the adventure and regenerated. He literally died of old age.
- As a contrast to Jack, in the second series of Torchwood, after Owen dies and is resurrected, there's an entire episode about how his life sucks now that he's super-undead. Great quotes include "You get to live forever... I get to die forever", and "I can't drink, I can't sleep, I can't shag... and those are three of my favorite things." Also, he doesn't heal anymore, leading to inconveniences when he slices his hand open with a scalpel. Admittedly this is more about the character having to live through being dead rather than having to live forever, but it's pretty close.
  - Indeed, Jack's distate for his own immortality means it's rather strange that he should choose to resurrect Owen.
  - In Children of Earth viewers are frequently reminded how horrible it would be to have Jack's immortality. Despite seemingly coming to terms with his 'condition' in series three of the new Who, his weariness towards his immunity to death appears to be rekindling. And if you've seen Children of Earth, you probably understand why.
An episode of Star Trek Voyager centered around a member of the Q continuum, who wanted more than anything to kill himself after growing bored with eternal omnipotence, and who had been imprisoned by the continuum to prevent that from happening.
- After he gained an emotion chip, some of the Star Trek The Next Generation books started dealing with Data's knowledge that he would likely outlive all of his friends, family, and everyone he's ever cared about.
Several episodes of The Twilight Zone. "Long Live Walter Jameson" focused on the "friends die, you don't" angle, with the added loophole of only being free of death-by-natural-causes but not invincible to lethal accidents. "Escape Clause" focused on the "everything is boring now" angle, to the point where the character killed his wife, expecting to get the death penalty and hoping the electric chair would be exciting enough. Too bad his lawyer managed to get him life in prison. He pulled the escape clause in his Deal With The Devil, somehow finding eternity in hell more appealing then a prison he could eventually break out of (he had forever to do it) and could have almost instantly by faking his own death.
In the Lexx episode "Brigadoom," we find out that the Brunnen-G race had largely become effectively immortal toward the twilight of their existence. They could be killed by unfortunate circumstances, though, and most of the populace was absolutely batshit paranoid about not doing anything that could possibly have a remote chance of having that happen. But when they found out they were going to be wiped out by His Divine Shadow anyway, they all decided to not bother putting up a fight and die like animals.
Heroes: Takezo Kensei/Adam Monroe appears to be one of the immortal. And by extrapolation, the possibility exists that Claire Bennet may be as well. Maybe even Peter and Sylar, since they have Claire's power. And yes, the eternal youth comes as part of the package here. But so far only Adam has addressed this trope.
- The best part to this editor, and the part which plays this trope straight, is that after Monroe is caught, he winds up buried alive, where not a single person can hear, rescue, or save him. Hence, trapped underground, only to eventually become a Sealed Evil In A Can.
- This trope is subverted when he actually dies. His power is stolen by another character, and the years catch up to him: he ages centuries in a matter of seconds and turns to dust.
  - Also of note, at the moment when Adam realizes that Arthur Petrelli actually intends to kill him is the first time he has felt mortal peril in four centuries, and his Oh Crap face is the stuff of legend. Guess he really did want to live forever...
  - Or maybe he just didn't want to die. There's a difference, you know.
In the new series New Amsterdam, John Amsterdam was given immortality by an ancient spell that will only end when he finds true love. True to this trope, after a few hundred years he wants to do just that.
- Played to the amusing extreme that his driving desire to find the True Love stems not from romantic inclinations but instead suicidal ones.
  - Well, it could be argued that anyone looking for love really IS crazy...
Pretty much the whole point of Highlander The Series. Many immortals are shown to become psychopaths or devoted to the point of zealotry to some cause that gives meaning to their existence, whether it is "The game" or eliminating potential dictators.
- Except when it's averted by showing immortals generally having a good time with their lives when not fighting to the death. "The Stone of Scone" being a particularly good example of this.
In one Supernatural episode, an increasingly desperate and unhinged Sam tries to get immortality for Dean (and for himself so Dean wouldn't be alone), to keep Dean from going to hell. Completely forgetting that this could be the worst thing he could ever come up with. In so many, many, many ways.
- He actually suggests doing this by means of emulating a villain of the week and replacing his and Dean's worn-out body parts with other people's. He doesn't seem to understand why Dean is so horrified by the prospect...
In the sixth season episode of The X Files "Tithonus", a photographer documents violent crime as soon as it happens in the hope that he will see death and allow death to finally come for him because he is bored with living after two hundred years and wants to know what happens to people after they die. As a result of the events of this episode, Scully is now immortal, but it seems like she hasn't realized it yet.
- That explains the psychic's answer in the episode "Clyde Bruckerman's Final Repose" when Scully asks him how she will die. (He says she doesn't)
  - "You know, there are worse ways to go, but I can't think of a more undignified way than autoerotic asphyxiation"
On Smallville, it's implied several times by precognitive characters that Clark will have to deal with outliving his human loved ones. He's not looking forward to that.
- The character of Curtis Knox actually has had to deal with this multiple times, leading him to commit multiple murders to acquire meteor-infected body parts so his (current) wife can live forever with him, since he is immortal
Charmed had a villain go mad after getting immortality. At one point, he's about to put himself in a guillotine and gleefully saying "I can't wait to see how I survive this one!"
- That would be Cole, occasionally evil, UST-ridden kinda-demon-with-a-soul-maybe love interest to Phoebe Halliwell. Oh, and he doesn't actually use the guillotine on himself in that episode. Though that would be sorta neat in a squicky way.
Red Dwarf. The Inquisitor is a self-repairing simulant who lasted until the end of time and, having concluded that there was no God or afterlife, decided to travel through history eliminating from existence those who have wasted their lives.
Invoked and averted in The Middleman, where a character was made immortal as a punishment for leaving others to die on the Titanic. After a few decades of remorse he got a job as a stuntman, invested in some profitable stocks, and started dating.
On Babylon Five Lorien mentions that immortals cease to bother with anything because everything fades with time. Indeed most of the immortals on the show have fared poorly, the Vorlons and Shadows are both almost universally insane, some of the First Ones have ended up so insular they've never talked to anyone in centuries.
In the show Roar, Longinus is cursed with immortality after killing Jesus.
In Andromeda, the characters encounter a ship which murdered her crew along with an entire planet, and spent three centuries mad. She ends up pulling a Suicide By Cop.
The inhabitants of the World of the Immortals suffers from this in Spellbinder: essentially a group of Georgian-era nobles made immortal by a botched cure for world-ending plague, all of them are infertile. Without children, their society is hopelessly stagnant, to the point that the only real creativity demonstrated by the Immortals is in the construction of robots- especially robots that can mimic children. And then Kathy shows up...
Helen Magnus from Sanctuary feels this way after the death of her daughter. Her attempt to find a cure for her immortality does not end well.
- Actually, it does. The episode was a reset button showing what would happen if she had taken the cure.
In the British drama series Misfits, Deadpan Snarker Nathan Young is somewhat aggravated by his rather idiosyncratic brand of immortality, not so much because he finds the idea unappealing, but because it only causes him to be resurrected several days after his death. By which time he has been buried alive.

In both of the World Of Darkness Vampire games, immortality is never considered a blessing. The foremost problem is that one spends eternity wrestling the Beast, but there's the matter of boredom as well. The Masquerade didn't really address this, as the Metaplot kept everyone busy, but it's an important issue in The Requiem: ennui is so pervasive that vampires have constructed a massive political/social framework, the Danse Macabre, almost solely to keep themselves occupied.
- The main sourcebook for The Requiem also tries to prevent P Cs from sitting around and moping about all of the things mentioned at the top of the page by pointing out that anyone who wasn't strong-willed enough to deal with all of the assorted nastinesses of vampire society or didn't have a long term goal in mind would probably have just killed themselves by staying outside during the next sunrise after they were Turned.
  - ...which is of course an act that would require a pretty serious strength of will to do in the first place. When you're mostly immortal, suicide methods are all going to be very painful and protracted. There will be no quick shotgun-mouthwash or sleeping pill exits here.
  - Not to mention the fact that the things capable of permanently destroying a vampire (fire and sunlight) are very likely to cause the aforementioned Beast to temporarily hijack control of their body and cause them to flee from the potential source of Final Death.
The troubles relating to eternal life are quite averted in Warhammer 40000, at least in the cases of beings like Space Marines or their Chaos cousins, who merrily spend their unending lives shooting the hell out of each other. In the Eldar's case, their immortality is the best they can manage, because if they die, their souls are consumed by the Chaos God Slaanesh. Orks are technically immortal, but spend their lives hitting each other about the head with choppas and looking for a good fight, which kind of limits their lifespans. No one's ever bothered asking the Necrons how they deal with their immortality.
- Marines aren't actually immortal (with the possible exception of the Blood Angels), though they are exceedingly long-lived thanks to their spectacular health; however, they rarely die of old age due to living a life of almost constant warfare. (And then they stick your dismembered torso in a Dreadnought.) Chaos Marines live a lot longer due to living in a Negative Space Wedgie.
- The Necrons feel nothing, except possibly contempt for the living and awe for their Star Gods. If there is no sentient life around for them to exterminate in sacrifice to said gods, they will simply go into a state of hibernation (possibly for millions of years) and await the evolution of new life to exterminate, in an endless cycle.
- The ones with enough of a mind left to be self-aware are probably feeling glimmers of bitterness or irony. The Necrontyr had short, miserable lifespans before they met the nigh-immortal Old Ones, whom they declared war on out of jealousy. They got trapped in undying metal bodies after making a pact with the C'Tan for aid, in a sort of Karmic Un-Death.
The Soulless in the GURPS supplement GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures in the Mad Lands are an ancient culture whose members neither age nor reproduce, so their civilization has been populated by the same few thousand individuals for millennia. They reached the limits of their creativity in the distant past, got tired of every possible form of entertainment during their culture's decadent period, and now are stuck in an eternity of boredom and repeating variations of the same old pastimes in an effort to discover something that would still interest them.
Gamma World adventure GW6 Alpha Factor. The mutant flying squirrels known as Rakees are extremely difficult to kill. They've lived so long that that they're constantly trying to end their lives, such as by attacking adventurers in the hope that they'll be killed.

The protagonist in Chakan: The Forever Man (based on a comic book) is given eternal life after besting Death in a duel. Problem is, he didn't also get eternal youth, and Death will not take him until all evil has been wiped out. So unlike pretty much every other game ever made, the entire goal is to not survive.
In Planescape Torment, the player character cannot die (unless he pisses off a god or some other damn fool act), but instead returns to the starting point (the Mortuary) every time his health drops to zero, and regenerates there. The catch is every time he cheats death, another person somewhere in the universe dies in his place. Plus there's the whole memory-loss thing—each time the character died in the past, he lost his memory, though this time he has somehow developed the ability to hold on to what he learns from the start of the game. The putative "goal" of the game is to find a cure for the Nameless One's immortality, and hopefully recover his memory at the same time.
- In the best ending, He goes to hell. It doesn't seem to bother him either, implying this is better than the torment immortality had turned out to be.
  - It is also partly because he accepted that he deserved to go there, after having sought immortality in the first place to escape eternal damnation for some atrocity he committed in his first incarnation.
In Soul Calibur III, one of the fighters and the main mover of the plot is Zasalamel, who discovered the secret to eternal Reincarnation but at this point is tired of life. He pulls a vaguely defined Xanatos Gambit to use the combined power of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur in an attempt to end his endless cycle of lives. This is because he found out in one of his lives that getting Soul Edge wasn't enough. He was just corrupted and enslaved by the sword before being killed normally.
- His reincarnation is also coupled with a soul-rending agony that he is put through every time he comes back; which seems pretty often to a man of such advanced age.
  - This is subverted in Soul Calibur IV, when while being resurrected, Zasalamel glimpses the future and the zenith of human civilization, and is now determined to see that day in person.
In the Suikoden series, one of the side effects of possessing a True Rune is being preserved at the age at which you acquired the rune. Some people revel in their immortality, while others, (like Ted) view it as a curse. The mysterious Flame Champion, bearer of the True Fire Rune, decides to seal it away for 50 years so he can marry and grow old with his sweetheart, Sana. (Of course, the fact that the Rune had gotten out of control and blown up a large portion of the countryside might have had some part to play in that decision as well.)
- Given that the True Runes are supposed to be quite aware and possess the nasty tendency of not only snaking on your OWN soul if you happen to get killed at some later point but many having unfortunate side effects as well. Like Soul Eater taking the souls of friends who die near you, Sun driving you insane, Punishment eating your soul, Blue Moon turning you into a murderous vampire, and so on. It's no wonder that some people come to view it as a curse.
According to Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, this also affects Vincent Valentine.
Depending on your interpretation, Fran's relationship with Balthier may also be influenced by the fact that her lifespan as a Viera is much longer than Balthier's human lifespan in Final Fantasy XII.
- It is possible that Fran could be quite old in Hume years, but be close to Balthier's age in Viera years.
In Drakengard, Seere's pact with Golem makes him lose his "time", meaning that he will never age. This wouldn't normally be a downside, except that Seere is six years old.
Lost Odyssey may be the most well fleshed out video game example of this trope in recent memory. Main character Kaim Argonar (and supporting immortals Ming, Seth, and his wife Sarah), realize fully and consciously that living forever sucks, and the game is wholly capable through the many unlockable Dreams of a Thousand Years (essentially short stories with some aural assistance) of convincing the player that it sucks too. Kaim has lived for a thousand years, and he's watched hundreds of loved ones die, including his own children, and killed thousands of enemy soldiers in battle. Worse yet for him and the other three "good" immortals, the main villain is the only other immortal on the planet and a power-hungry maniac hell bent on using his eternal life to control the planet. Worse still for the 4 "good" immortals, he's pretty savvy as to how their immortality works: they cannot be killed. Period. Kaim survives a meteor impact at the beginning of the game, and the others have all survived one catastrophe or another. So the villain does something even worse: to each of them, he uses their most beloved friends and family, and his considerable power and, through a combination of mind control and supreme manipulative ability, inflicts psychological pain worse than death, after which he seals their memories, rendering them (in their own words) "walking corpses" who have no purpose in life and can only wander, fight, work, whatever, burdened by the knowledge that they'll never get to go to the afterlife and the emotional pain of the losses he inflicted on them. Immortality sucks, all right.
- After all of this, however, the game's ending subverts the theme, as Kaim and two of the other good immortals settle contentedly into their immortal lives, reasoning that eternity isn't so bad after all. It helps that two of them are married to one another, and the third, although her husband is mortal, is a queen with a whole country to keep herself busy with throughout the centuries to come.
While technically ageless rather than immortal, Kratos Aurion from Tales Of Symphonia doesn't seem too happy about the situation. To be fair, that's partially due to guilt over everything he and Cruxis have done with eternal youth, as well as grief over losing his family. The other ageless characters don't seem nearly as bothered by it. Interestingly, Tales of Symphonia also partially subverts the elf immunity clause, with Genis sadly reflecting in a skit how he's going to outlive all his friends.
In Diablo II, the mage Ormus gives a short speech that's similar to the one from Vampire Hunter D during a quest related to the lost treasure of a sage who sought immortality:
"What he [Ku Y'leh] did not realize is that there is no life beyond death. There is only life. Once it is prolonged unnaturally, it can become a living hell."
- As a result of the same quest, Meshif muses:
  "Can you imagine having to get up to piss every night for the rest of eternity?"
Albedo from Xenosaga. His descent into madness starts the moment he realizes that he is special in his immortality and would outlive all his brothers.
- Albedo also displays well the problems of having immortality from birth, as he is unable to even comprehend such things as death and pain. This gave him a childishly sociopathic worldview, he seemed genuinely terrified when he learned that other people died when you tore their heads off.
In Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Dalboz of Gurth casts an immortality spell on himself, but is forced to endure being immortal when the Zork Underground Empire becomes abandoned. The player can even find his diary, in which he writes about the ways he tried to kill himself, one being "Stabbed myself through the heart; just ended up with heartburn".
Subverted by Chrono Trigger. Queen Zeal's Mammon Machine has made her effectively immortal by infusing her with Lavos' power. If the party visits the Black Omen in 2300 AD, she's still as happy and insane as in 12,000 BC, reveling in her immortality.
Final Fantasy XI's Blue Mages probably have it the worst... for Final Fantasy at least. Blue Mages, being artificial super-soldiers developed by Aht Urghan alchemists to be employed in the 'Immortals' military unit, have to deal with soul-threating demons literally waiting to burst from their bodies for every waking moment of their career. Each member of the Immortals are ageless and able to live forever, with the only casualties belonging to Blue Mages that fail to restrain the beast within. Not to mention they're usually screwy in the head, save for important characters such as the Immortals leader, Raubahn, who is responsible for for the player character's transformation into a Blue Mage should he or she decide to become one. Still doesn't prevent the player from being K.O.'d by bunny rabbits sadly.
Anything living in Katamari Damacy. Think about it. When you roll up a human, doesn't it still flail around? The answer is yes. Now, wouldn't it make sense that it'd still be living even after the Katamari is done? Well, there's proof. In the final cutscene for Katamari Damacy, the Hoshinos are seen on the moon. They acknowledge that they have been rolled up(spoiler tagged for those who haven't beaten the game). This being said, it's obvious that the humans are still alive, and stuck inside the Katamari. What's even worse is when you choose to make the Katamari into stardust. The King blasts the Katamari into bits. Even more horrible is in We Love Katamari, in the sumo stage. it's obvious that the katamari has become either the Komosubi, Ozeki, or Yokozuna, depending on if you choose Small, Medium or Large, respectively. If you choose to turn it into a planet, the sumo wrestler is stuck in space. When you choose to make it into stardust, the king vaporizes him.
- In all fairness, it should be the sumo kid who gave you the request that should get vaporized, not the poor rolled-up champ (who didn't have to cheat to get where he was). It's especially heinous if you got the sumo katamari big enough to start eating people.
Touhou has a variation: "naturally immortal" beings like youkai and Lunarians are either ageless or just very long lived and don't mind their extended lifespan in the least. Humans can join the ranks of these youkai by studying magic until they become magicians; Alice Margatroid did this and doesn't seem to mind, but she hasn't lived long enough for this trope to manifest itself. In addition, drinking the Hourai Elixir (or eating the liver of someone else who had) grants complete, irrevocable immortality—the body does not age and regenerates even if completely destroyed (even beyond From A Single Cell). The elixir was created by the Lunarians and given to humans as a test with the expectation that they'd go insane from this trope if they drank it. Fujiwara no Mokou (who murdered someone for it) has managed to mostly retain her sanity by focusing on her hatred of Kaguya Houraisan, a Lunarian princess who was banished from the moon for also drinking the elixir (she preferred exile so much she murdered the emissaries who came later to bring her back). The two fight to the death on a regular basis.
- And they love every minute of it.
Odin Sphere has the Pooka's Curse, which causes the afflicted individual to become a rabbit-like creature that never ages. The Pooka want to remove the curse so they can become normal mortal humans again. In the unlockable final scene of the game, this trope is part of a conversation between Cornelius and Velvet, when they are finally given the chance to return to human form. Cornelius notes that if they stay in Pooka form, they'll live forever. Velvet replies by explaining the reasons she wouldn't want to live forever, convincing Cornelius to return to human form as well. The curse is broken, and they embrace. Awww...
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 has the Gifted, which apart from special powers also seem to live forever (and are immune to deadly illnesses, apparently). Lennart, the first Gifted you meet when Adelle starts to accept that, pretty much became an outcast because of the whole "seeing your friends die" deal. Adelle had a similiar experience when her whole village was wiped out by a plague that didn't affect her.
The most recent Fire Emblem games feature Lehran/Sephiran, one of the heroes of the war in which the goddess Yune was sealed away, still alive after all of these centuries but without any of his laguz abilities because he fathered a child with the beorc Altina. He responds by inciting a war that will wake up Yune and call down Ashera's judgement on the world, destroying everything, because he thought it was the only way he could die.
- To a certain degree in those two games, Branded/Parentless (the children of laguz/beorc unions) live far longer than beorc. Since the side they get this from can instinctivly sense them (laguz), and they are pariahs in both societies, this trope ends up applying. Reference the relationship between Micaiah and Sothe once you've played through the entire game.
In Lunar: Silver Star and its sequel Lunar: Eternal Blue, the character Nall, a young white dragon, is forced to deal with this trope. In the original game, he was a party member who was good friends with all the heroes. He returns for the sequel as an NPC and mentions the burden of his curse to fellow immortal Ruby. He finds himself doubly pained as one of the original party members, Luna, was really the goddess Althena in disguise. Though she should have been immortal and, thus, able to stay with Nall through the ages, she gave up her immortality for a mortal life, thus condemning Nall to remain alone.
In Arcanum this is stated as a reason that mature elves do not live amongst human society, "In maturity, elves tend to settle down and keep to their own; it may be that burying several generations of short-lived friends and spouses causes them to lose the taste for human company." -Arcanum manual.
Yggdra Union has poor Nessiah, a very sad example of this trope, who never wanted to live forever—his immortality is his punishment for not wanting to fight in Asgard's wars, despite the fact that his powers would have made a drastic difference in them. Even if he dies, he is painfully resurrected shortly afterward, and at the outset of the game, he's been trying to free himself from the nearly-unbreakable chains which control his immortality for over a thousand years. He never manages it.
Sonic The Hedgehog proves to be a firm proponent of this theory at the end of Sonic and the Black Knight. It may or may not have more to do with the fact that the woman who brought him into the story wanted to twist it into a Hell on earth to do so than ideology, but still.
Sort-of immortality is possible in the Nasuverse but most prominently for this trope, Fate Stay Night has Heroic Spirits and Guardians. Archer, during his life, swore over his existence to the world so that he could continue to save people. Eventually, he died still believing in his ideals, but after that he, in his position as a Guardian, is sent back repeatedly to stop devastating conflicts by killing people instead of saving them. He doesn't even get to remember any of this, but he knows it happens and it affects his psyche. Small wonder he decides to wait until he can pulled into a time with Emiya Shirou so he can kill his past self and hopefully commit suicide that way and escape his current life, where he has no free will. Then again, that is a pretty sucky form of immortality and no one takes it up for that reason.
Tsugumi of Ever17 has eternal youth, immunity from infection, high healing factor and possibly increased strength. On the downside, the handful of people who know about her really want to study her lots. Oh, and she gets sunburned really easily, but she can see in pitch blackness anything due to infravision. She can even pass the immortality on to whoever she pleases. Except two specific characters, one of whom is implied to be changing into a being that exists in the fourth dimension and is thus outside time and effectively immortal as well. Yet all she can do is whine and complain about how much it sucks. She gets better but never seems to see it as a good thing.
This is a constant, omnipresent motif in Lucas Arts' adventure game The Dig: Stranded on a deserted alien planet, a group of astronauts discover crystals that can bring back the dead, and use it to rescuscitate their fallen comrade, who turns completely insane and addicted to the crystals in the process. Meanwhile, they discover that the former residents of the desert planet found other means to make themselves immortal, but never found a way to undo this.
You've showed us all the pathway back to life, to reality... to a place where some day we will die yes, but where we'll have a life before we die!
Subverted in Final Fantasy III. The three immortal students received the gift of magic, the gift of dream, and the gift of mortality. Mr. Mortality is PISSED.
Also Subverted by the Night Elves in the Warcraft series. At the end of Warcraft 3 the race as a whole loses their imorttality in a heroic sacrifce. Many members of the race are unhappy with this and are currently searching for a way to restore the race's immortality, despite still being an extremely long-lived race without it. It should be noted that due to the race's reclusive nature and racial Immortality before their introduction in Warcraft III, they never felt the heartache of losing friends of other sentient races to old age.
Porky Minch, the main villain in Mother 3, is an odd, but particularly powerful, example of this. Screwing with time travel has aged him, previously a child no older than 13 or so, past the point where he can die naturally. For one reason or another he is stuck in the time period that the game takes place in, and although he pretty much rules what is left of the world, he's still, in the end, a little kid who wants his mom and the closest thing he had to a friend, Ness, giving the viewer sympathy towards a character one has been built up to loathe both for his actions in the previous game, and for the terrible atrocities the player experiences first hand in this game.
- The entire plot is also caused by a large and convoluted attempt to destroy the world, leaving Porky the only thing left alive in it, giving him the closest thing to death he can possibly achieve, but in the end he is trapped inside an inescapable capsule forever, which achieves essentially the same effect.
This is The Punishment for Dr. Weil of the Mega Man Zero series, in addition to eternal exile to the wasteland that he created. Apparently, the ones who gave him this punishment weren't counting on him coming back, seeking revenge.
- The manual for the first Mega Man X game has a bit a Dr. Light's notes saying that X can function indefinately as long as he can maintain his energy level.
Brought up in the visual novel Songs Of Araiah, where it is mentioned that most magicians (who can be immortal) revoke their own immortality after having lived about a thousand years. In addition, immortality works by "freezing" the state that the body is in, meaning that immortals do not age, women can not have children, and their bodies will get neither better nor worse (for example, the lead female, Melissa, will always have to wear glasses, despite the existance of spells which could fix her vision). Outliving loved ones is a minor issue, as a magician can grant immortality to anybody.
Ayano from Luminous Arc 2 considered immortality to be a cursed. Although she initially becomes one with the help of the Big Bad, Mage Queen Elicia, it doesn't take long for her to realised that life itself became pointless without death.

As the title suggests, Die Now or Live Forever has this trope, but inverted. Nobody wants to become a vampire, but once you are one, you enjoy it.

In the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, one race attempted immortality through technology, only to have it backfire on them rather badly - as their people invariably went insane after a few normal lifetimes as their mental health didn't regenerate like their bodies did - almost destroying their civilization. The few survivors altered themselves so as to live in a permanent state of senility to prevent something like this ever happening again. The whole ordeal is described in more detail here.
Subverted in The Gods Of Arr Kelaan - Claremont asks a fellow god for a favor to bless a potion destined for his daughter to give immortality upon consumption, to which is refused - death is a birthright to all humans - but Thanatria does nuances it the right way. Whomever takes this potion will not die until they wish to.
In the Back Story of Rice Boy, a being who identified itself as God gave a mission to three people to find and nominate a Fulfiller, with the promise that as long as they continued searching they would not die. Many centuries and many false Fulfillers later, one of them has abandoned the mission and resorted to prolonging his life unnaturally with the Black Spirit. The second commits suicide by abandoning the mission, knowing that it will kill him. The third, after seeing his friend killed, finally despairs and asks God to kill him as well; but God has something else planned for him.
In The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja, Dracula thinks he's Seen It All and is interested in dying. However, he's not stupid enough to die without knowing what comes next, so he comes up with an elaborate scheme to perform reconnaissance on Purgatory.
In Fetch Quest: Saga of the Twelve Artifacts, Lionel has to suffer through seeing his Love Interests and other people close to him die while he remains immortal.

In an episode of Justice League, Superman is sent into a barren future, seemingly devoid of humanity... Save for the lonely, insane, immortal Vandal Savage.
- The fact that the reason the earth is barren and ruined is because he destroyed it probably had something to do with it as well.
- Savage does acknowledge that if he didn't keep busy, he would go (more) insane with the boredom and loneliness. He occupies himself with many projects, from farming to restoring the ruins of Metropolis to dabbling in time travel (which he explicitly can't use to fix things, as he cannot coexist with his past self... Good thing Superman came along). The only thing that really seems to bother him is his guilt of destroying the planet, to the point where he has constructed a fully operational spaceship but doesn't use it because he feels that his isolation is a suitable punishment for his crimes.
  - Could be considered a subversion because he started out insane, but became sane after years of loneliness
  - He started out evil and became ...quirky. But he sure isn't sane at any point in the timeline.
Gargoyles plays this straight with Macbeth, while subverting it with Demona, who has no problems with immortality. Mostly because she is too busy trying to eliminate the human race, whereas Macbeth has little else worth living on for. So she thinks he wants to kill her out of vengeance for her betrayal years ago, but he's really just... tired.
The Transformers don't seem to have a problem with their extremely long lifespans, although a race of sentient robots who can theoretically replace any body parts that become broken or worn out are obviously going to have different perspectives on life than humanity.
Somewhat mentioned on a much less emotional and spiritual scale in Jackie Chan Adventures - currently made immortal due to holding a magic object, Finn of the show's Quirky Miniboss Squad, hits a low-hanging bridge from being on top of a train as it goes under it. Indenting the bridge, he notes "Immortality... hurts."
Parodied in The Emperors New Groove, when the leader of a groop of Mooks shouts "C'mon men! Nobody lives forever!" before jumping into a hole and literally dropping out of the movie.
In The Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog, one episode involves Robotnik traveling to Mobius's equivalent of ancient Egypt to retrieve the Chaos Emerald of immortality, which turns out to be in his ancestor's pyramid. Said ancestor's animated mummy actually thanks Robotnik for taking the emerald from him, as he couldn't bear to spend an eternity with Sonic's ancestor who was also in the tomb.

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Socrates' "defense" was specifically designed to make the jury condemn him to death, since he was tired of living, and perhaps suffered life as a disease. (Whether this is what Socrates himself actually thought is anybody's guess, though to be fair being a wise man in a world of phenomenal idiots could have one looking for the sleeping pills.)
Though not all are unhappy, This Troper knows several elderly people who out-lived all their local friends, and live on the opposite side of the world of their old friends. Unfortunately, that you're gonna die eventually doesn't necessarily mean that you go out with your friends.
If you assume the theories of universal entropy and the big crunch are true, then millions of years floating in completely empty space, eternally suffocating, only to to be eventually crushed into a singularity sound like a very hard price to be for a (relatively) short amount of extra time doing things you enjoy. But you also have forever to get used to it.
- That's if you're lucky. If there's no Big Crunch, all you get is an eternally expanding universe. By the time all protons have evaporated in ten thousand million million million million million million years' time, you might be getting a bit bored.
  - This Troper would like to volunteer for the experiment in either proving or disproving this theory.
  - As would this one. Far too eagerly, perhaps.
- One advantage to being immortal if the eternally expanding universe is true is that according to one wacky theory that given enough time, say a googol (thats 1x10^100) years of waiting and the now vast empty universe might humor us immortals and spit up another big bang. So we immortals get to live a universal life time all over again...
  - The universe will (might, could) only do that if it's empty — no massive particles. Floating immortal astronauts would screw that all up.
- On the other hand, immortality will likely break the second law of thermodynamics. If you try to starve yourself, where does the energy come from to keep you functional?
  - Zero-point energy.
  - This is the most serious argument for "no afterlife" too. However, people with opposite views are quick to point out that the big bang itself screws with rules of thermodynamics ( a universe appearing in a setting where the opposite - stuff falling apart and energy dispersing, is the norm)
  - Also, only if you assume that the afterlife is a physical life in the same physical universe as this one! If it's wholly other (as this troper believes) then talk about entropy and the eventual death of this universe is irrelevant.
  - Only if you assume a closed system. We can only speculate what existed before the initial expansion, but that the expansion itself occurred is based on very solid evidence and observation.
- This troper thought up an escape plan for the Floating In The Void scenario - dreams. If you can retreat to a dream world, then you need NEVER face the same doom. Essentially a Lotus Eater escape, yes, but it intrigues him.
  - This prospect is discussed in the book "The Last Five Minutes," where it is postulated that if a conscious entity were able to become an AscendedEnergyBeing, said consciousness would be able to skew its own sense of time before the inevitable end and enjoy a virtual immortality. If you can't, you're screwed, because a physical body would be destroyed long before the end, no matter what kind of longevity you've got.
- This troper thought up another plan. All you have to do is build a machine that traverses dimensions, and go to a dimension that isn't so close to dying.
- It is reasonable to expect that, unless an immortal being has severe memory problems, it will become sufficiently advanced long before the end of the universe, and would be able to make its own. Or at least go back in time to stay in a living universe.
This. No, really.
The modern Transhumanists heavily avert this trope, most holding the opinion that if you do get bored eventually, then you are free to end your own existence, but why not try to see how long you last just in case that doesn't happen, after all. Lots of interesting hypotheses have been made for escaping the universal heat-death, as well, although how well those would work in practice is still anybody's guess. Then again, there's countless of billions of years to test them, so there's hardly any hurry.
A recent survey all around Eruope from Readers Digest asked the question "Do you want to live forever?" On average, only 30-40% of people said yes.

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