Is Living Forever Really Awesome?

I am 23 years old and life is getting tough but if I continue to live to one hundred, I think I might go a little insane and I might need someone to kill me. I ask this question because I had watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End and what Teague said got me thinking.

"Living forever is one thing, the real trick is to live with yourself."

Whether is through magic, genetics or other means, you will are going to be living with yourself forever. Is living forever really as awesome as television makes it sounds?

Whatever it is, it's better than being dead.

Presuming the Earth doesn't explode or anything, living forever would be awesome.

I mean, it's not like I have that great a memory anyway, so this whole "everyone you love dies" thing probably won't bug me that much.

edited 7th Dec '11 10:03:19 AM by MangaManiac

It very much depends on the person.

Yeah, stories like Tuck Everlasting just bug me, where the Aesop is that dying is some kind of payoff for a righteous life. Death is the Big Bad. Every second wrenched out of its cold grasp is a victory.

edited 7th Dec '11 12:06:51 PM by FastEddie

The idea that my consciousness (or whatever passes for it) could simply cease to exist is unfathomable to me. I prefer existence to non-existence; ergo anything that prolongs said existence — as a conscious entity — is preferable to the alternative.

The idea that there are people who really buy into the Who Wants to Live Forever? mentality boggles my mind. It really seems like it exists only as a Sour Grapes Trope - we can't live forever anyway, so we'll write about how it would actually suck as consolation.

Well, human beings aren't really wired for living-forever; even if you manage to solve the decrepitude problem, our brains have an upper storage limit. The Fog of Ages isn't a trope by accident. Immortality and transhumanism go hand in hand; we can't effectively have the former without the latter.

edited 7th Dec '11 1:18:39 PM by Fighteer

Isn't this better for on-topic conversations than for trope talk?

Unless we got immortality when I wasn't looking, I don't see how it would be.

Yeah, this is about the trope. It is not a real-world issue. Unfortunately.

I don't see the problem. Yeah, you'll forget things that happened a long time ago, but is that really relevant? Immortality without perfect memory seems fine to me.

Unless you mean our brains are wired such that we just stop learning things after a certain point. Which means you always remember your childhood but can't remember what you did yesterday. Which is more of a problem. That's not what the The Fog of Ages trope is about though, so I'm not sure if that's what you meant.

edited 8th Dec '11 7:26:07 AM by Clarste

To the original poster:

Living forever would suck. You would do everything, and do it again, and then become increasingly perverted and evil as less and less seemed to manner to you in any way and curiousity led you to experimentation. You would become evil.

That said, getting old is not bad at all. You are 23. One of the common changes as people age is that when asked HOW they want to die, young folks say, "Quickly", wanting to avoid pain; Older folk start saying, "Slowly", they want to make sure they get out the messages to loved ones, and settle what they need to before they go. Life might be crappy now, it won't be forever (though it will keep going up and down. No perfect partner, job, or anything else will make it always happy).

P.S. To all you folks who think death is the end of consciousness, does that not mean that there is nothing at all scary about it? If YOU aren't after you die, you won't care.

That was addressed. Cessation of being sucks. Please don't try to make this into a religious thing. It's tedious.

In terms of equalities set up by a work, equating death to a positive outcome affirms death. Equating continuing life to a positive outcome affirms life.

Becoming jaded by experience is something you don't really have to worry about if you are mentally healthy. You vary your experiences to keep things fresh, seek out challenging work, etc.. The only people who succumb to ennui are depressives who aren't on their meds.

edited 8th Dec '11 9:44:53 AM by FastEddie

I can imagine becoming pretty bored if I got thrown in prison for hundreds of years or something. You'd have to be careful about that kind of thing. You wouldn't want to go spelunking and get trapped by a cave-in either.

edited 8th Dec '11 10:48:46 AM by Clarste

There could be situations where opting out is the best option, I guess. The trapped under a rock slide scenario would be pretty bleak, assuming whatever phlebotinum is causing the immortality also makes it so you don't need to eat or drink. I think, though, that with immortality at risk people would be damned sure to have communications with them when they went spelunking.

There are different kinds of Immortality. There's the Nigh-Invulnerable version where you literally cannot be killed (or in some cases, instantly come back to life after "dying", or other odder versions that amount to the same thing), and there's the more realistic Clinical Immortality version where your body does not "wear out" over time, or can be replaced/rejuvenated indefinitely when it does. In the latter, you still need to eat, drink, breathe, etc., and you can still be killed; you just aren't doomed by the clock.

Robert A Heinlein addressed the latter in his Future History series, particularly in Time Enough For Love. One notable outcome of an indefinite lifespan without invulnerability is that you'd still lose people, either to the aforementioned ennui or simple mischance. Those individuals who survive for truly legendary periods of time would no doubt be highly revered as a result.

edited 8th Dec '11 11:35:55 AM by Fighteer

Death is feared for very understandable reasons. But there's a reason why the Fate Worse than Death trope exists. If I had to choose between dying and spending an eternity being hated, depressed, arrogant, rejected, and things I don't even want to mention directly .... there aren't any better alternatives other than dying in this case.

One of these things is not like the others.

edited 9th Dec '11 5:47:50 PM by tropetown

Hey, I was under pressure when posting that. It was the next thing it came to my mind

Well, everyone else wouldn't enjoy being around an arrogant immortal, at least.

Ahh, the dreaded posting pressure. An eternity of that would be pretty grim.

edited 10th Dec '11 3:15:59 PM by FastEddie

Quote for much truth.

Fast Eddie, I'm not sure if you're upset with me, or if I'm reading tone into your post, but it quite frankly confuses me.

I asked why not being would be bad. I did this because I really don't understand it. You told me it had been addressed, I read up and saw indeed that a couple people have said they would rather exist than not exist. That is their opinion, which they are welcome to have. I did not understand it. That is not addressing my question about why. I would like to understand an opinion which varies from mine, not merely know it exists.

Then (and to be honest, this did irritate me), you told me not to 'try and make this a religious thing'. I am at a loss to understand how me seeing 'not being' as a positive or neutral result is making this religious in any way. The thread title starts with "Discussion". In my world, that involves communication back and forth and whether or not you ever agree, seeking to understand the other's position.

Now the middle of your post (about use in works of fiction) I agree with entirely. The presumption of the ideal state by the author (without in-story explanation) can make character choices, or story morals very unpalatable to readers coming from a different stance.

I LIKE the last bit of your post, because you are engaging my point. I suppose that I would agree that an individual could maintain a healthy mentality for a very long time without become cruel, but I guess I just see forever as forever. At some point (be it 120 years, or 650) every person is going to try killing someone simply because they can, or amuse themselves by seeing if they could manipulate the stock market, or governments, or whatever. Endless time seems like the surest way to eventually bring out the worst in everyone. Not that they couldn't then go on doing good, but that at some point they would try evil.

This is, frankly, what irritates me so much about the Who Wants to Live Forever? mentality - that people think that they, from a lifespan of seven or eight whole decades, can somehow predict what someone who is literally immortal would do. Maybe eternal existence would suck, but we can't know that as we are. Until and unless there's some kind of empirical evidence to support it, I'm not buying claims that "everyone would try evil eventually" or any similar allegation.

edited 10th Dec '11 4:56:51 PM by nrjxll