I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years 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 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, even if you just go on forever.
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.
Time gets shorter. I’ve already experienced this going from my teens to my twenties and into my thirties. I can remember entire weeks of my childhood. By the time I was in my mid twenties, days and weeks blurred together. Now it’s like months go by and I don’t even notice.
People talk about it more as they get older. Eventually when you enter your 80s and 90s, it’s like entire decades can come and go. So imagine when you’re immortal. If you’ve been alive for 100,000 years, that’s longer than writing has been around. Entire civilizations will have come and went.
But from your perspective, it’s all a blur. Entire genealogies were experienced, yet those people barely registered in your mind. If you had a favorite food, maybe the recipe disappears when you went four centuries without eating it. Jokes and fashions you’re familiar with are completely alien to everyone else. Are you even capable of noticing when things change at that point?
There’s also the question of how human are you? Everything and everyone would seem inconsequential. Would you even be able to socialize with others, or would you be completely sociopathic? That’s if you don’t hurt anyone and get tossed in a jail cell. What happens if you spend a few centuries in prison? Fight in multiple wars? Would you even feel the slightest discomfort when you kill someone?
I don’t think you’d remember a break up from hundreds of years ago, let alone be upset about it.
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Discovering the upper limits to what the human mind can retain and just constantly forgetting all the shit you used to find important.
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.
I’ll say no one can truly know. Unless you are yourself immortal
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.
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.
So just my normal day?
You know how the curse of pet ownership is that you will almost certainly outlive them?
That, but with everyone you love
Having to keep track of that evil snail.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5ipinn/you_and_a_super_intelligent_snail_both_get_1/
Being eaten by sea anemones, tuna, sharks, swordfish, sea turtles, penguins, and other jellyfish.
If other people are also immortal, the awkwardness of all of them eventually becoming your exes
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?
That old person feeling of no longer being with “it”, and what’s “it” now being strange and scary probably compounds over the centuries.
yes, but old people can get over that and just stop giving a fuck and accept that they’re weird now. it must be liberating.
And this is why elder vampires are so vengeful.
I absolutely love the scene in “Interview with the Vampire” where Lestat is found hiding away in a room, distraught by all the creations of modern civilization.
Given a long enough time frame, the vast majority of an immortal life would be spent buried beneath something or floating in the void of space. Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don’t die…nothing to do but float in space.
You might counter that with, "well yeah, but eventually I’d find other sentient life forms and/or people again.” And sure, maybe, but that wouldn’t last as long as you…and then you’re just alone floating in space again, for the vast majority of your life. The only thing to look forward to, since you will outlast everything, is the end of time itself.
I think there is a clear difference between being immortal and being indestructible. I would think if your planet breaks apart you’d probably die with it being crushed or whatever. Also always unclear if being immortal means you don’t need to breathe air.
I think a good author makes it explicit.
Here’s a sci-fi web novel I read years ago, where a couple of the characters end up being immortal in different ways, and in one case they show exactly how far that can go (in the context of the story) even without invoking heat death.
Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don’t die…nothing to do but float in space.
LOL, that’s just the beginning – only on the order of 1012 - 1014 years. After that, you’re going to be waiting around for proton decay (1036 - 1043 years), all the way up to 10^10^120 years* for the final heat death of the universe.
(* Anybody know how to get Lemmy markdown to do nested superscripts?)
10^10^10
Does your consciousness evolve to Godhood, and you reach back beyond time and create the universe which birthed you?
You join the Q Continuom.
The fantastic animated show, Pantheon explores that very idea at the very end of its second and final season.
