I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    1 hour ago

    All the comments assume everybody else isn’t also immortal. I forget the title and author but there’s an old sci fi story (or novel?) about a future where everybody lives for centuries, and they’ve found that the brain only retains a certain amount of experience. They have long careers, get tired of doing whatever, re-educate and do something else, or even have multiple families they eventually forget about. A couple of the characters are surprised to find out they used to be married like a century earlier. To me that seems vaguely like reincarnation, and I kind of don’t hate the idea. I really don’t see any downside to that scenario, or even just going on forever.

    People are focused on having regrets and negatives that last forever. But buck up li’l camper, you can learn to move on from stuff. And I say this as a dad whose daughter had cancer at age 10 (she survived). It was hell and I wouldn’t want to live through that whole period again, but I don’t consider it a reason not to want to live forever. The trick is to learn how to cope with these things and not let them outweigh the good experiences you have.

  • Nytixus@kbin.melroy.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    49 minutes ago

    If you’re injured and you survive with the scarring from said injuries. Well, good luck because you’re now going to wear those and wish you had died from them. If you’re incapacitated or amputated? Gotta live with that for years and years.

        • Spacehooks@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 minutes ago

          That was a horror cause he wasn’t willing. If he was willing then it would be like cult mechanicus, ghost in the shell, or Adam smasher. Embrace the certainly of steel! Or course if your brain is damaged and you can’t die that is a curse.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    2 hours ago

    Life will pound you into an uncaring jaded disinterested unloveable husk of a being after too many emotional scars from losing loved ones, too much of seeing humanity make the same mistakes, and too much watching the knowledge you gained turned irrelevant.

    Or, life will beat into you an uncanny ability to converse and relate to others, even if fleetingly.

    Watch The Man from Earth.

  • FryHyde@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 hours ago

    Discovering the upper limits to what the human mind can retain and just constantly forgetting all the shit you used to find important.

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 hours ago

    I’ll say no one can truly know. Unless you are yourself immortal

  • SuiXi3D@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 hours ago

    On one hand, you have eternity to come to grips with everything you’ve done. On the other hand, it might take eternity to come to grips with everything you’ve done.

    Seeing all of your friends and family die, knowing you’ll never stop missing them.

    Having the perspective of centuries. Seeing society make the same mistakes over and over again because they forget, but you never do. It would drive me mad. Already does, considering I have the ability to, and have, read history. I just imagine living it over and over to be tedious.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    5 hours ago

    Basically all of the time you’re alive will be after the heat death of the universe, where you will be floating in space, with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience. Complete darkness, complete silence, in a complete vacuum, for eternity. Every other particle in the universe is forever out of your reach. You know that you will have nothing forever. You will never see, hear, or touch anything again, for all of time, which will never end. The trillions of years that preceded your float through the void fade into a distant memory as you outlive twice as much time, four times as much, a trillion-trillion times as much, and infinitely more.

    • mobiuscoffee@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      4 hours ago

      I wrote a story that features such an entity and what was interesting about it to me was how even the slightest glimmer of life beyond their void would lead to an all-consuming desire to experience “living” again.

  • Tiefling IRL
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    5 hours ago

    You know how the curse of pet ownership is that you will almost certainly outlive them?

    That, but with everyone you love

    • wellDuuh@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 minute ago

      Pets? Dude, everyone around you will just perish. You will have to move state to state after three decades, new identity, new job, basically new “life” so as not to raise any suspicions.

      You do not wanna spend the rest of the eternity being a state government “lab rat”

      I believe there’s a movie about this.

  • HipsterTenZero@dormi.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    8 hours ago

    That old person feeling of no longer being with “it”, and what’s “it” now being strange and scary probably compounds over the centuries.

  • mobiuscoffee@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    4 hours ago

    One of my books features an immortal protagonist and I’ve as such thought about this quite a bit. More than the answers already provided here, what I found interesting as a writer was the balance I needed to find between making an immortal detached from mortal values while still being engaging to mortal readers.

    Said as a pithy question, if you can outlive everyone’s decisions and mistakes, what would it take to make you do anything at all?