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Who Wants To Live Forever
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"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"
— Sergeant Dan Daly, United States Marine Corps, Battle of Belleau Wood, June 1917 (Strangely echoed by the title of the movie Stalingrad - Dogs, do you want to live forever?)
Do you want to live forever?
— Valeria coming back from the dead in a Valhallan white glow to save Arnold Schwartzenegger from an attacker in the Conan the Barbarian film (She said this earlier in the film when she was alive.)
For a TV character, the worst curse possible is immortality. Sure, you get to live forever and keep your good looks hundreds of years from now, but what's eternal life and youth compared to the anguish of seeing your loved ones die, one by one, as you stay fixed in time because of an ability you were apparently more "special" to get than them?
It doesn't stop there either: any friends you make will only become grave resters in time, and you'll never have a permanent home because you have to keep on moving from location to new location every few years before your neighbors get suspicious that there's something just not right about you. Even worse, you must steel your heart against love because, for you, love is fleeting. You got your eternal life, now give up your connections and life bonds with your community and everything you ever loved or could possibly love. (The fact that you have forever to get over it isn't mentioned, but sanity always has its limits.)
And if you aren't traumatized by the deaths of the people around you, you'll be bored out of your skull, as there are only so many movies you can watch and life-defying antics you can perform before life settles into a monotony. A rut you can't ever get out of. Scared straight yet? And that's with eternal youth added to the package. If you get only eternal life, you'll be lucky if you become only a grasshopper after your wrinkles and bent back take over. And then there's the fact that the memories of things that the world will never see again, one of the few rewards of immortality, may also one day vanish from your mind by sheer dint of memory capacity.
Any characters who initially jump for joy at the prospect of living forever will find within a few centuries' time that immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be. Their quest will become a search to find a way to return to a normal, mortal life. Sometimes they'll even allow themselves to be killed outright by supernatural means to be able to rejoin the natural life cycle at last. Sometimes the ones who can be killed but not age are rather picky; they won't commit direct suicide, they just want to be able to grow old and eventually die of organ failure. If this would happen in real life you would probably slowly forget everything (your brain can only hold so much information before it starts losing older bits) so it wouldn't be so bad.
A special case of Blessed With Suck. When done Anviliciously, this can seem like sour grapes on the part of the very much mortal writers. See also Cursed With Awesome.
Oddly, elves or naturally immortal species seem to be immune to this (although in some cases they too may grow weary of immortality, given enough time.) Maybe they're good at finding hobbies? At the least, living among fellow immortals is a good way to ameliorate the strain. After all, they've had a lot of time to work out cultural mores and general psychological structures necessary to deal with the relatively unchanging social landscape.
It's not all hopeless, however. In some cases, you actually are better off with living forever. You may be bored, but at least something is going on.
The title is from the song of the same name, written by Queen for the soundtrack of Highlander, which features some of the downsides of immortality. (Ironically, another Queen song from the same soundtrack, Princes of the Universe, takes the exact opposite view, that being immortal is awesome.)
Its polar opposite is So You Want To Live Forever.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- 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. Also, his ex-girlfriend (wife?) Dante, who used the same method and ended up insane- or just really, really coldhearted. She was willing to sacfrice millions of lives just so she could look young and beautiful for a little bit longer, and nearly suceeded. 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 she gave him.
- 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 two main girls and the unexpected readiness to forget past conflicts and foil for each other when crap hits the fan.
- Played straight or subverted in Baccano, depending on who you're asking:
"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!'"
- Actually, 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).
Comic Books
- 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, who expect him to come begging for death in a couple centuries—only to find out that he's still enjoying it, even after seven hundred years - including after being unable to eat for literally years due to extreme poverty. 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 also suffered from immortal loneliness.
- 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 the comic 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 it's 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 the 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.
- 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 an Ancient Rome gladiator 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...
Film
- 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.
- This was the entire premise of Death Becomes Her. The twist was that while the potion granted eternal youth, the eternal life part, not so much: accidents or murders could still leave the taker dead, and forced to inhabit their rotting body. At the end of the movie, the two heroines, in an obviously advanced state of physical decay, show up at their husband's funeral and scoff at the assertion that one can achieve eternal life through one's friends and family, then fall apart (literally) in the parking lot.
- They might have done better if they hadn't killed each other for jealousy. The film hints that many celebrities who we believe died young are still alive and kicking, thanks to said potion. They have successfully hidden, although some *cough* Elvis *cough* can't resist being seen in public.
- 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.
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.
Literature
- Two words: Dorian Gray.
- In Gaunt's Ghosts, the Tanith First and Only have a battlecry: "Men of Tanith! Do you want to live forever?"
- Three more words: 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.
- Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, 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.
- A partially subverted example is Tuck Everlasting. The main character sacrifices the chance to live forever with an immortal who loves her for a normal life. The subversion is that 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.
- 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.
- The character Tithonus from Greek myth 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.
- Rather chillingly (at least, it rang with this troper) adapted in The Gods of Pegāna. "Shall a man curse a god?"
- The character Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology, or "Reg" from the Douglas Adams novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, is an immortal time traveller who suffers from a terrible memory, as he has lived for many thousands of years, but only has a regular memory capacity. 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...". The again, the original character was that of a Doctor Who time lord, so perhaps not.
- One of the stories in Ursula K. LeGuin'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. Of course, 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.
- There are at least three sources of immortality in Harry Potter.
- The Elixir of Life, created with a Philosopher's/Sorceror'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 of 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.
- You can create a Horcrux, a piece of your soul hidden in an inanimate object. 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.
- Averted quite nicely in David Edding's Belgariad and Mallorean series. Anyone who learns how to wield magic becomes immortal as a side effect. Of all the sorcerors 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 Belgarath had to be physically and mentally restrained to prevent him from following them after Poledra's "death".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, by time travel and getting "daughters" which are really sex-swapped clones.
- 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.
- 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.
- In the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, citizens of the Culture have the option of dying of old age (after six 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. 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) . The machine citizens, and especially the Minds, are immortal by default (again, barring no accidents), but emotional trauma will occasionally lead to a machine mind commiting suicide, though this is uncommon.
- 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 Mc Carthy's anti-Ace hearings.
- 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.
- In C J Cherryh 's Morgaine novels 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.
- The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt Evans. The main character recieves 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.
- In Stephen Baxter's novel 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 year's 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.
- 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.
- 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. This Troper found it odd that Jonathan Swift felt the need to satirically comment on people wanting to live forever. Maybe this was a big problem back then?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. Also, Narnia is protected from her by a tree coming from one of the apples; she cannot stand to come near it afterward.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 must serve until there is no war on Earth; Time, who lives his life backwards, and Death, who must be killed by his successor.
- 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.
- Why has no one mentioned Lord of the Rings yet? I mean, death isn't called 'Eru's gift' for nothing, you know.
Live Action TV
- 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").
- 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").
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Several episodes of The Twilight Zone. One 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. Another 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.
- 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.
- And then 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.
- 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 immortal are shown to become psychopaths or devoted to the point of zealotery to some cause that gives meaning to their existence, may it be "The game" or eliminating potential dictators.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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!"
Tabletop RPG
- 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.
- 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. 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 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.
Video Games
Webcomics
- 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.
Western Animation
- 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. 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.
- Gargoyles plays this straight with Mac Beth, while subverting it with Demona, who has no problems with immortality. Mostly because she is too busy trying to eliminate the human race, whereas Mac Beth has little else worth living on for.
Real Life
- 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.
- 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 1x10^1056 years...) 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...
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