The thing about living forever is that you have to live forever. What do you do after the heat death of the universe?
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Simone de Beauvoir (along others) wrote a novel about that. Hers is called All Men are Mortal, and after a slowish start it’s really good.
Living forever, nah. But given how much longer it takes to get to where my parents were in their mid-20s, another 50-100 years would be appreciated (if one could get the health to go with).
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See 50 more years isn’t quite so bad, for those who want more time. It’s multiple centuries and longer where you really run into trouble. It’s still long enough to cause trouble, though.
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Meh. 18 months is long enough to cause trouble.
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I agree with this. It’s part of why I kind of have mixed feelings though. In our current economy, it might be possible to work and save/invest for 30-40 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life (whether it be 5 years or 500) using the returns on those investments, so having a 500 year lifespan would be great. But if the economy adjusted such that we couldn’t retire until 490, that would be a bit of a bummer.
I’d like to think that, but as I get older, it gets more difficult. I love learning, and even in the past couple of years I’ve tried taking a couple of online courses. But paying the bills, being an adult, and simple exhaustion from, as Nytespryte described so well, ‘treading water to keep from drowning’, all get in the way.
But there’s more than just that. As both a hobbyist and professional in software tech, I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. A lot of them were fads that died out pretty quickly. A lot were ‘new inventions’ that just reinvented things. A lot of re-implementations that ended up with problems that had already been solved in the older technology. In the end, what we’re actually trying to do with the tech doesn’t change that much (automate tedious stuff, give people easier ways to communicate, and to store, find, and process data). Most of the new stuff to learn is just churn, and each new thing has its own trade-offs and compromises. So I’m not all that motivated to learn the latest new javascript framework or whatever compared to how I was when I was younger.
Similar with hobbies. It’s a cliched scenario that someone is excited about trying out a new hobby and they (or their parents) rush out, buy all the supplies, schedule lessons, and shortly thereafter the person realizes that they don’t really like the hobby or just got bored of it. As we get older, we find things that we do consistently enjoy and we stick to them. Safety and security, set in our ways, or just realistic that these are things we like?
The article author said “We crave stasis, because our lizard brains crave safety and security.” but I think we also get tired of learning a lot of useless crap, trying out a lot of worthless gadgets, and spending a lot of time and energy on new stuff that turns out to have been wasted. After awhile, a lot of new ideas just aren’t that interesting because we’ve seen so many before.
I like your idea that if we had more time, that would pass and just be like teen angst. But it feels to me like it might be more of a cumulative effect.
That said, I’d be willing to try it out. With enough time, you could meet and get to know almost everyone. Try almost everything without having to worry much about the cost (plenty of time to make up for any sunk expenses). Relax and take a decade-long vacation or whatever.
I wonder how other things would adapt. Would we still produce so many disposable things, or would we start to prefer things that could last and be repaired? I imagine we would all collect/stockpile things for awhile, but eventually move to a less property-based society, (after all, who wants to cart around 500 years of accumulated junk?) I can see some ideas for scenarios where an extremely long-lived or immortal society would collapse after awhile…
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I’ve always assumed that if one remains healthy, one would continue to work. Hopefully not the current type of wage slave style labour, but contributing. I see retirement as a concession to decay that isn’t needed without age related illness. Sabbaticals and vacations, sure, but not dropping out of all further community responsibility.
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I suspect that, for this very reason, a pseudo-immortal society would try to reduce scarcity, automate crappy jobs and free people up to do fulfilling work. And part of that, as you’ve imagined, might be to stop producing so many disposable things. Many of the jobs in our current economy simply aren’t necessary. We might, in fact, be better off if it wasn’t someone’s job to manufacture “truck nuts.” Maybe I’m being idealistic, but it seems to me that the prospect of having to stay on Earth for several centuries would cause people to insist upon a better arrangement than we currently have.
My experience has been kind of different. I’ve always sort of drifted from one thing to the next, being keenly aware that each pursuit is its own rabbit hole that you can spend your entire lifetime exploring, yet unable to settle on one. The connections between things are perhaps more fascinating to me than any one alone. As I get older, however, it only becomes more frustrating that if I pick up something new, the time I have to get really good at it is limited—and there are still so many things that I haven’t tried.
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“Stick around to have your atoms torn apart at the end of the universe in a billion trillion years and yet still have some painful awareness of self” sort of immortality? No thanks. It’ll suck enough when the sun expands and swallows the Earth that I’m the last living creature on.
“Don’t die of natural causes or age but can thankfully be snuffed out with the Earth when the sun expands.” sort of immortality? Sign me up. There’s always new shit to see and experience. And yeah, it’s sad to see loved ones die, but I’m mortal and I’m seeing that anyway.
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