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.
Being asked your birthdate in order to view a game on Steam, and the year dropdown not going back far enough.
Date pickers that assume you have a 5 digit birth year.
Or not being able to play a board game, because it says “ages 9 - 99” on the box.
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)
Worse still, no manual entry of the birth date, so it takes ages to scroll down and select the year.
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.
Is it: “the age of pussyfoot” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_the_Pussyfoot
That could be it - many elements are familiar, although the title isn’t at all, but I have read a lot of Fredrik Pohl. The plot synopsis also doesn’t mention the characters finding out they had been married before. Maybe that’s a small detail that just stands out more in my mind.
Swear I’ve read that. Anyone?
Isn’t the movie Hancock a bit in this direction?
A scifi short story I read was set in a somewhat idyllic future.
Robots did everything. Everyone was given housing, food etc. Health was covered and people lived virtually forever. Nobody worked, and you could travel and do anything you wanted.
The most prized thing, that everyone was desperate for, was having an original thought.
Reminds me another story about an idyllic world where almost nobody worked and everything was provided. At one point a crew showed up to repair a house, and everybody gathered around to watch, marveling at their work clothes and tools. One guy yearned to use tools so he started making little craft items at home, and trading them to people for worthless little tiddly wink tokens they used for friendly bets on sports. Then his neighbors started doing the same thing and they got a little economy going, using the tokens as currency, until the government got wind of it and squashed the whole thing because commerce was illegal.
Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.
The rest of humanity will eventually evolve into something you don’t recognize and can never be part of.
My thought. In 500M years, you would be like the slime that crawled out of the oceans to the dominant life.
Neanderthals wanted to live forever and now we have bigfoot.
People are commenting ‘fates worse than death’ and ‘being made into a labrat by the 1%’, but really, if you have infinite time to just do stuff and you can’t be killed – And you don’t somehow squirrel your way into a position of power then what are you even doing with your time and immortality, oomfie?
The loneliness part is also questionable. I know OP said it’s overly done, but I also think it’s just wrong. If you’re an adult you’ve had people in your life die before. It sucks. You miss them. But then you move on. And you meet other people. You’ll still go “:(” when you think about the person and such… But life goes on.
And that’s just life. It doesn’t get any worse if you extend it longer – If anything it gets better. You might have lost your beloved today, but you have another dozen lifetimes to heal your wounds and meet someone else and fall in love again and (…)
So here’s some lower-stakes, frustrating inconveniences of being immortal:
- Your favourite fashion? It’s not just out of fashion. It’s so out of fashion it is now considered ‘historical costuming’. You can no longer find any articles like it at all. Because the only people even trying to recreate the techniques are costuming nerds and theater people who always exaggerate stuff
- You got a song stuck in your head. It is either from before recording was invented, or any recordings of it that existed are too old to be reliably listenable. You have a song stuck in your head.
- You used to really enjoy a job you did. That entire career path is now obsolete. As per the first paragraph of my post, if you’re immortal you have probably snuck your way into the upper echelons of society at some point during your infinite time… But like. You’re bored. You loved being a Court Jester, now there are no Court Jesters.
- Actually tedium just in general. Sooner or later you’ll run out of new things to try, because you’ll have done everything that even remotely caught your eye already. So what the fuck will you do with your time? You’ll eventually just get depressed and not do anything.
Feeling bad for the immortals who were professional garden hermits.
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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.
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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.
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Losing all of the skills you gain. No matter how good you get at something, after a few centuries you’ll have lost your edge. You can also only practice so many things concurrently without giving something up. At some point, years down the line, you might try to ride a bike again and completely fail to do it, or try to sing and fail to hit all the notes that came easily before, or do gymnastics but the muscles you need are underused. It doesn’t matter that you spent years mastering every skill, your abilities will degrade over time. You’ll never really be able to feel sure about your own abilities except for whatever you’ve done most recently.
You don’t know the expression, “it’s like riding a bike”?
If you haven’t ridden a bike in 20 years, go try it. But now 2000 years.
But the famous thing about learning to ride a bike is that you don’t forget, even after decades. I’ve just looked it up to double-check and all I got was articles about why you never forget. It’s like saying you’ll forget how to walk up stairs or something.
Famous sayings so not equal reality.
I mean, you could look it up yourself if you doubt it so.
Herpes is forever.
HSV vaccines are being developed thankfully, so nothing is forever. ✨
Getting trapped under something for a few thousand years.
The longer, the worse it is, not because of how bored you’d be, but the knowledge that you’d be more and more out of touch if ever found.
Cancer. So much goddamn cancer. It doesn’t matter what kind of immortality you have, you WILL get cancer. Repeatedly. Over and over. Forever.
That really depends on the type of immortality you get. Brain upload to a cyborg body doesn’t get cancer.
Immortality means you could, just keep ripping it out 🤣
Cut the head off to heal
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If it’s the realistic kind where you just don’t age, the statistical certainty that you’ll eventually die in an accident, or to war or murder. Your odds of getting to the heat death of the universe without making backups is pretty slim.
If it’s the kind where you’re indestructible, you’re highly likely to encounter someone who tries to bury you alive in a subduction zone eventually, because humans are like that, and then you get to spend eternity slowly moving into the scorching mantle.
I would hope to get realllly good in avoding people who’d put me in a subduction zone 😭
It would be an obsession of mine, if I was cursed with the inability to die under any level of duress.
I’m not saying it’s common, but punishment by live burial is a thing, and billions of years is an awful lot of human history.
At least I won’t be a snail in a metal ball full of salt.
EDOT: Typo, snail <-> small
Is this a quote from something? I’m OOTL.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/immortal-snail
One of the solutions was to put it in a giant metal ball and throw it into the sun or something. The salt was just out of spite.
Ah. And you typoed.
Oof, that was a hard one. Autocorrect strikes again.
The death of the sun will then eventually set you free into the gravity well of the sun where you’ll live burning hot untill heat death of the universe. What to do after that is anyone’s guess
Well, depends. The Earth is actually right near the edge of where the sun will expand to, so there’s a chance the scorched glob that used to be Earth will stay in orbit. Either way, it will still be hot for a while, and you’re ultimately stuck in something solid - be it a dead planet or a white dwarf.
There is such a thing as merciful death; it would not be good to be cut off from it.
If you have epilepsy or Parkinson’s or MS, you’re just going to likely get worse forever.
Wage slaving never stops
If your immortal what’s the motivation? Not like you have costs to maintain your laborforce .
immortality doesn’t guarantee perpetual health, you’re alive, but so broken and sick you wish you could die, but you can’t
Yeah this answer.
Imagine being immortal and you get stuck somewhere.
Like in a giant land slide.
Alive, but stuck in nutty putty cave for eternity
Not eternity, just a few billion years until earth is vaporized by the sun going supernova.
Then you’re free - to drift through empty space forever.
My knees hurt already. I can’t imagine living with constant aging forever until you’re just a crumpled pile on the ground and then it still goes on.
This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus
In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten
“I have no mouth and I must scream” could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.
Just listened to that recently. I could see this being a thing.
I also couldn’t believe how graphic it was for how old it is.
If we’re talking magical immortality, as in you can’t die, at all. Then the fact that however much enjoyment and experiences you get while the universe still exist, it will be followed by an infinite stretch of nothing after the heat death of the universe.
Then again, you have billions of years to come up with a solution to this problem.
Then there are options:
- You find a solution. Great!
- You do not find a solution, but spend whatever time is left in the universe working on it, and then spend infinite time in darkness. Not great.
Kind of a gamble :D
I think the estimates are much, much longer until that happens.
