by Centurii-chan
Ancient Chinese recipe. Guarantees you won't age.
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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People in media always make immortality sound awful. It really wouldnt be that bad, they always make little twists like you can't ever die or nobody else can be immortal with you, all because its hard to make giving people more time to live seem awful without those twists. I find it fairly annoying.
Every time something uses the ‘life only has meaning because it ends’ trope I want to scream
It's a philosophical point of view and like anything, it's debatable.
Death create an urgency, and we cannot substract ourselves from that.
When we imagine immortality, it is framed within this urgency. You might think : well there is so much I haven't seen. But by being immortal in the litteral sense of the word, at one point, you will have seen everything to not care about it anymore. Then what? You go interstellar in the hope of finding something new in a few millions years?
If I could live a thousand years, I would definitely be interested. But living billions of years with no end in sight? Absolutely not.
Nah, no way. Even for an immortal being, time is limited. You can never watch every movie, listen to every song, or play every game. They're made at a faster rate than you can consume them.
If your dream is to meet Oprah and you're immortal, that doesn't mean you get to meet Oprah. Oprah is busy. You're still going to have to bust ass to become important enough to merit an appointment before she dies of old age. There are still obstacles and limits and timers.
You might not meet Oprah, but you'll probably meet a thousand like her and you will get bored.
I stand by my point that the urgency is created by death and it is extremely hard to separate ourselves from that when we imagine immortality.
The death of your close friends and family will hurt. But after the 1 000 000 death of a close friend, you'll either be crazy by that point from all the grief, or it will be another Tuesday.
The point of grieving is to overcome the feeling of loss. Drag thinks an immortal would get really good at grieving. Really efficient. They'd have moved past their loss, and be ready to love again.
Besides, you don't need friends to be happy. Look at aplatonic people. They say they still enjoy life. That's empirical evidence, we don't need to speculate. If you didn't want friends, you'd get by without them.
I am not sure I get drag's point?
My point is that the loss we suffer and grieve is still framed by our limited existence. In our life, if we are lucky, we have what? 15-20 people we really care about generally that will hit hard the day they die?
Imagine drag had a million of them. At one point, it becomes either extremely heavy to the point of insanity or it becomes the new normal. Even in our limited life, a lot of people come to term with the grievances of death.
Drag is right in the sense that we would become good at grieving. And that is exactly my point.
It would be the same when trying to meet Oprah 1000.0.
When time is virtually infinite, boredom for absolutely everything is bound to happen. And then what? Drag lives a boring life indefinitely. And even with a million happy years, it is still a tiny tiny tiny tiny percentage of billions upon billions of years.
I am still afraid of death biologically (we are animals after all), but I've come to term with death and I wouldn't wish to be immortal.
I appreciate talking with drag, so please continue to do so if you want to continue this conversation.
An immortal doesn't tend to love a million people at the same time.
Drag can imagine loving someone who becomes drag's entire world for 60 years, and then they die. So drag spends the next 200 years wearing black and listening to sad music like Linkin Park. And then drag heals and becomes ready to love again.
Mortals don't get 200 years to grieve. So if they need that much time, you don't get to see the other end of that. But drag believes there is another end. This too shall pass.
Drag is right that we don't love a million individuals at the same.time, but over the course of immortality, it is not that much people.
Does Drag thinks that after 10-12 60 worlds dying, Drag would probably change how relationships are perceived? And this is what I am trying to clumsily convey. All of our thoughts are framed with urgency. But if the urgency isn't there, is it far fetched to think that the frame is bound to change?
I want to say that I understand what Drag is saying, but I am offering a differing point of view. And to be honest, 10 years ago I would have chosen immortality in a heartbeat. Not so much now that I've (mostly) came to term with my mortality and I am much more afraid of immortality than of mortality.
The relationship is still framed with urgency, because you know that one day your partner is going to die. Drag thinks that would make an immortal being love hard and fast.
I get what Drag is saying and I agree with that, but my nuance is that over time, that urgency would disappear. After a thousand heart break, eventually it becomes normality.
Drag thinks that's like saying after eating a thousand meals, food would stop tasting good. Drag has had many thousands of meals throughout drag's life. They're far apart enough that drag is usually hungry by the time the next one comes along. Drag's sense of hunger keeps on returning, day after day, because hunger is a biological function that's designed to work that way. Drag thinks love would keep coming back, again and again, for the same reason.
I go back and rewatch movies or replay games I've forgotten about all the time and that's just like within the last few years. The universe will have plenty of repeatability.
I wanna jump into a black hole and then ride it out when it turns into a white hole. But I'd need to be both immortal and invulnerable for that.
I would probably do that eventually when the heat death of the universe is abound, at least it would be different and a chance at something new.
Or this is how Lovecraftian creatures are born, and I welcome it.
Worse case scenario you get Isekai which for an immortal would probably be kinda nice.
I would accept immortality if I could choose to die at any moment
(Quasi-heatdeath and all that)
Elf immortality would be enough for most people, can't get sick, can't die of old age, but can still be outright killed.
Ah Mercury. So Shiney and so deadly.
I was more excited about life at 8 than ~~at~~ after 20, so for me it's def reversed.
Tho I do need to know if an elixir causes immortality, I do not want to drink it by accident.
Imagine still being alive to witness the slow, agonizing death of the universe, when all matter and energy are evenly spread across an incomprehensible vastness, and nothing will or can ever happen again. The next billion years would be fairly interesting until the sun expands and swallows the Earth...or, at least, dries up its oceans. Hopefully, you've found a way out and onto another planet for another billion or so years. But after about 170 quattuorvigintillion years of cold, dark, nothingness, you'll probably get pretty bored of it all.
I don't think very many people, if any, want to be unable to die forever. Most people just want more time.
I would
I don't think very many people, if any, want to be unable to die forever. Most people just want more time. Except this guy.
I don't think very many people, if any, want to be unable to die forever.
sign me the fuck up broham.
more time = more opportunities to roll the aristocracy over and spank their ass raw.
Making a lot of assumptions here that our models are accurate enough to correctly predict the end of the universe - whether it's a big crunch, big rip, heat death, some clumsy git dropping the marble so it shatters, or something else entirely. I would take eternal life+youth so I could find out.
Once I know everything, then I might get bored.
So far, I think the general consensus is heat death. Being an optimist, my hope is for the big crunch. If that one's true, what'd be infinitely hilarious is if it always repeats in exactly the same way.
If that's the case, then I guess all of us do truly live forever. We just microdose the same exact snippet of eternity.
So much of what exists is spheres and circles. Who's to say time doesn't also run in a circle?
Like the song goes,
Consensus is not a fact-based exercise
;D
I was promised eternal life, not consciousness. That's cryosleep conditions right there.
Imagine becoming immortal at the dawn of the age of science. then spending the next 8000 years secretly building a ship in your free time to take you off this godforsaken planet.
only to find that:
a) you're not the only one
b) you're not even human
Immortality with the ability to end it at will is great. Immortality with absolute invincibility will eventuality become a living hell.
Idk, have you looked around lately? Not sure I could put up with much more of this tbh.
Also how immortal are we talking here? Like several thousand years of vamping, then kaput by unnatural causes/moidled? Or like, orbiting the last dying star for warmth as the universe goes out, immortal?
Protip: fill each day with novelty.
When we're young, everything is new. Our minds are on constant overdrive taking everything in, followed by more each and every day. As adults, we're simply not challenged at the same clip and wind up throwing out all these dull and repeated experiences - so fix it! Keep reading, keep learning, keep exploring, and never stop asking questions.
Easier said than done.
Seeking daily novelty would get expensive quickly.
That being said, if I were immortal I'd probably just sock away funds into a low risk investment vehicle and do a variety of drugs to keep me comatose until my investments made life easier.
If you can't die, you don't need a lot of fentanyl to keep you under, and from what I gather it can be had relatively cheaply - though I've never looked into it much. I realize from my brushes with opiates that were legitimately prescribed and mostly taken as directed (I'm sorry, if I'm in enough pain to warrant them, I'm popping two of em and going to lay down for a nap, then taking as directed) and I like them waaay too much to think of doing it for fun - I would ruin my life, and fast.
Not all new things cost money. You can walk a new way to the same places. You can find new books at the library or online. You can just do things you already do in a different way, and that can be novelty.
No, not all things.
However, we're - in this post - operating on the premise of immortality.
There are less and less "free" things to do as the days pass.
Something something capitalism, something something monetization.
Not entirely relevant to the hypothetical, but as LPT - it falls a little flat.
People optimize to make their life easier, less chaotic, or stressful.
I'm not gonna take an hour detour for the views and risk losing my job. I need that. To live. Of course, immortality solves that - but that falls outside of the "Life" part of the Life Pro Tip.
Maybe my perception is warped however. ADHD and the requirement for constant novelty can be draining. I freely admit I don't have the healthiest views on everything, and what works for others may not work for me.
I'm a gamer. And I can LOVE a game. For a while. As I get older, it seems to take less and less time for the honeymoon effect to wear off. But hey, that could be the bipolar disorder clouding perspective as well.
So focus on my mental health? See a therapist, get different meds? Yeah, not in America. Not easily, and not cheaply... oh wait, back to money.
What you're talking about is something bigger than simple novelty. It kinda sounds like depression, and that's a lot harder to fight against than breaking routine. I mean, breaking routine helps me a little bit, but it's certainly not the cure.
But if you want to argue there's only a limited number of things to do for free, you can spin that the other way, too. There is only a limited number of things to buy. I dunno, that kinda makes me feel better, but I'm weird like that.
Barbra age 23 works nighshift
at dollar general
#facesofmeth
oof imagine being immortal, but you keep on aging and getting diseases and stuff but they just can't kill you
Love centurii-chan
some Aussie disagrees
So like, what problem does immortality solve? Because when I think about, it's just giving me more time to deal with more problems. Like how good of a person I am doesn't change if I live longer.
How would being immortal make your life better? because I'm just not sure I get it.