I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.
Edit 1:
- Heath death of the universe, Death of the sun, etc, does not count. I feel like focusing on this is an overused point.
Edit 2:
- Loneliness does not count. I feel like we all know immortality means you’ll miss people and lose them.
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?
Or you get to experience another big bang. That would be worth the wait.
Then you could call yourself Galactus
Being asked your birthdate in order to view a game on Steam, and the year dropdown not going back far enough.
Or not being able to play a board game, because it says “ages 9 - 99” on the box.
Date pickers that assume you have a 5 digit birth year.
Worse still, no manual entry of the birth date, so it takes ages to scroll down and select the year.
I once entered an extremely far back yet technically plausible birthday there and steam just wouldn’t accept it. I remember thinking “what if Kane Tanaka wanted to check out this steam game, you just wouldn’t let her?” (RIP by the way, she was the last oldest person whose name I learned. They change too often)
Read this on the largest number every used in a mathematical proof.
Then ask yourself, if you think you could handle this number in microseconds let alone an eternity
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
Also, it is already frustrating seeing kids being dismissive or denying events that you yourself have lived. Imagine being thousands of years old and seeing so much shit, but those events are rarely retold, forgotten, or straight up denied by conspiracies or future governments that won’t admit their fault on it.
Knowing my memory I’d forget it all very soon after it happened and need a history book to help me recall any of it and the stuff left out or distorted would end up warping that recollection enough that it’d be so unreliable I may as well believe the historians. I can scarcely remember the previous day as it is.
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
IDK, I feel like researching for supporting evidence of a theory you already know is correct would be much easier than researching to try to piece together a theory from no information. I think you could put the truth out there as credible and well-regarded theories, even if there are incorrect alternative theories that people also have to consider.
I’ll say no one can truly know. Unless you are yourself immortal
secrets!
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.
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?
Nobody is answering the prompt lol. Everyone says all of this shit all the time.
You live long enough to never feel at home. Sure the loneliness sucks or whatever, but who do you root for at the football game?
Having to buy new shoes for the rest of eternity. You know how much work I’ve literally just put into finding shoes that 1) don’t suck and 2) aren’t made with slave labor? It’s impossible. Drives me insane. I’d found my own shoe company once I become immortal rich just to fix that problem alone. Maybe other stuff too we’ll get there
I suppose on that note: it seems like a really bad idea to become a public figure after a while. Like you obviously don’t want your immortality found out. You have to have like illuminati power before that point though, but it could happen at any time. Like if something happens and you become a news item (i.e. helping someone out and a video goes viral online). Not saying everyone is all that close to going viral, but over a sufficiently long lifespan you’re effectively rolling that dice a lot.
Upsides: You can create a cult where they believe in you as a god, because you will live for eternity.
Having to keep creating fake identities to prevent people and governments from finding out that you’re immortal. That would be a massive pain in the butt, especially in a world where mass surveillance of the population is common.
This would just be an occasional nuisance I reckon. You’d get pretty good at it. Just like all the other mundane things we have to do in our mortal lives.
What I meant is that it would get more and more difficult with more mass surveillance. Think about it, in 1950 it would take relatively little effort to fake an identity by inserting fake documents into a few physical cabinets. In 2000, cyber security was so weak that hacking to some government agency to modify their databases would be relatively simple. Now it would require advanced social engineering, and is extremely risky, and on top of that, they have a lot of mass surveillance.
If we assume everything will have a biometric database, you’ll have to find ways to change your fingerprints and face every few decades.
Over a long enough duration, you are guaranteed to be caught.
(Edit: grammar)
Unless you have a lot of money to rely on I don’t even know if it’s reliably possible right now. You’re basically in the same situation as an undocumented immigrant.
And the more times you do it, it’s like playing a Russian roulette over and over again, you’ll eventually be caught.
If everyone gets to be immortal, imagine never being able to get rid of dictators. Putin’s 600th won election.
People in the future wouldn’t be allowed to have children, Earth will be filled to the brim with very old people and very few new ideas.
As OP mentioned, a lot of replies focus on loss, that friends will inevitably die and objects will break… we already face that reality with regular life! That’s hardly a downside of immortality itself.
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.
Sounds like you have time to figure out alternatives. Like cyborgetics or using cloned parts.
And robocop was born
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.
Agreed
Cross the wrong people and you end up not dead, but irrecoverable. Cement shoes, buried alive kind of stuff. Cross a different set of wrong people and you become a labrat. To avoid either scenario, you’ll be in a constant state of “undocumented” or false-documented which will keep you in a pretty consistent state of poverty.
There’s a book I heard about where the main character is immortal. Nevertheless at one point he pisses off some mafia dudes, and they nail him inside a barrel full of urine and throw him in the sea.
Just a random thought, but it would take a lot of work (or institutional access to some portable toilets) to be able to get enough piss to fill an entire barrel
All the people trying to dissect you for science.
The Sun will eventually fry all life on Earth and boil off the water & atmosphere. Eventually the Sun will die out completely, leaving you on a cold, dark rock.
Heat death of the universe though 🥶🥶🥶
Once with no atmosphere and the sun going nova, there’s a chance of the rock getting obliterated. With a nice boost you might fly off to another planet eventually. Might not be inhabited or even inhabitable, but hey.
I think I’d have enough time to build a rocket…
You’d have Musk-levels of wealth before long, so maybe.
