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Would you want to live forever? Discuss.

Would you want to live forever?

  • Total voters
    55
J

Jericho Z. Barrons

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Oct 12, 2017
Under what conditions would living forever be an appealing prospect to you?

You can't escape entropy, so, being alive but continuing to age at the rate we do, might not be the most enjoyable or comfortable experience, the older you got.

But even if you could stay alive and beat off aging by some supernatural means, would you really want to? Forever?

I anticipate myself getting more and more cynical as the years go on beyond regular human lifespan. It's bad enough how cynical I've gotten just over the last two years.
 
You always post really fun discussions, @Hrairoo.

For me, it'd be a hard no. I resent a lot of religious teachings because the fear of 'living forever' scares me to pieces. Maybe in a different life, but I spend a lot of days mentally suffering already.

The accomplishments I do have are from using time working against me. I think knowing that fact would lead to major procrastination. I am a completionist, I don't stop until I reach the end, and with no end in sight, I'd be in shambles.

At most, I hope reincarnation is real (which I do believe), and in that sense alone would I be comfortable. Just seems exhausting, I want one life that comes with great meaning and experience. Death scares some, doesn't scare me.

Thanks for the cool discussion.
 
As long as I didn't age or get sick. The problem with modern society is everything is documented, in past centuries you could travel around without anyone ever knowing you have been alive for 300 years or whatever.

I'm already a virtual hermit so dealing with society wouldn't bother me. I would work and save like crazy, of course I could also study but that wouldn't be very useful in the long run. Unless I came up with a way of taking on a new identity every so often.

Short of living up in the remote mountains somewhere, the logistics of avoiding scrutiny would be the main problem in the modern world. You would end up being a Youtube clip! You would also have to adapt to changing social mores and customs etc. Again, not a huge problem for me as I would just avoid people.
 
The only way I think I'd want to live forever, is if I didn't age, and if I had a killswitch of sorts. I mean, forever is a long time. I mean think about it. Forever is a long time. In fact, it's a little hard for me to really conceptualize forever. Eventually I am certain there's a point where I'd have had 'enough' and would want an out.
 
Good lord, no. Sometimes I'm barely hanging on as it is. Big yikes.
 
I'm in the "I don't know" camp.

Let me explain, without getting in too excruciating levels of detail.

I have witnessed... a lot of death in my time. Like, an extraordinary amount. I just recently lost someone who was very, very close to me, and I would be lying if I said that it didn't seriously damage me, and the entire family at large. She died what I consider to be relatively young. Only 72 at the time of death. Most of the people I knew who are now gone were also young, the youngest being only 7 years old when she passed, but most of them being in their late 20s to mid-30s.

So, does that mean I want to live forever? Well, not quite. I think maybe I'd want to have longevity. I'm pushing 30 and am starting to look- and feel- older, and it terrifies me. It reminds me that time is continuing, life is continuing, despite me not being ready for the passage of time, or accepting of its relentless forward march. If I could have given any of my deceased friends and family members more time? In a damned heartbeat. But to live on forever? I think that might be a bit much.

At some point, we have to let go. All of us. But I don't believe the majority of us have as much time as we deserve.
 
It’s a tempting offer.

I’ve had a lot of existential angst the last few of months. It hits the worst when I’m trying to sleep, this stream of consciousness that begins with the fear that my life is passing too quickly, that before I know it, I’ll have to reckon with the end and not existing at all, which shouldn’t be a problem because I won’t be aware of not existing, but it’s actually pretty horrifying because what then? Nothing then. That’s pretty hard to fathom. But it all ends eventually, right? Our lives, our civilizations, our planet, our universe - even time itself supposedly ends, or it doesn’t end, which is equally strange. Every single thing we know and experience is a cosmic blip in this seemingly indifferent universe whose existence we really don’t understand at all, and the limitations of our understanding or even our capacity to understand makes me wonder if reality is a sham in general - maybe Elon’s right and this is all a simulation and maybe whoever created this simulation is in their own simulation and it’s simulations all the way down to an eventual base reality, which is just as impossible to fathom.

Anyway, you get the point.

I haven’t been in a particularly accepting place with my lot as a human, I suppose. This is where I wish I was more inclined toward religious faith, because it provides comfort and answers, and even if the answers are wrong it doesn’t matter much. I just can’t get there.

All that is to say, I’m afraid of death, and want to say yes. But it would be so isolating, and unnatural, and I’d probably go completely fucking insane.

So no, I guess I wouldn’t do it.

This would be cool, though (it’s short, read it!): “The Egg” by Andy Weir
 
Balmung said:
The only way I think I'd want to live forever, is if I didn't age, and if I had a killswitch of sorts. I mean, forever is a long time. I mean think about it. Forever is a long time. In fact, it's a little hard for me to really conceptualize forever. Eventually I am certain there's a point where I'd have had 'enough' and would want an out.
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This is an interesting idea and I agree. I think it'd be cool to enjoy experiences and life and read a shit ton of books, if I were an eternally youthful adult. But I can't foresee the burden of having 200 or 300 or 1,000+ years of memories, guilts, regrets, and mournings. It'd be nice to have a get out card to play, just in case.
 
In certain circumstances.

If we could escape or slow the rate of decay, hopefully escape, and if my loved ones could live forever too. I think like most rational people I have a fear of dying, I've been close often enough due to illness and each and every time it's terrifying. When I do decide to think about it, the thing that scares me the most is leaving behind those that I love, family but also one person in particular. I wouldn't want to miss the rest of her life, and I don't want to think on how she will feel if that happened. It will be devastating, I can't imagine there will ever be a time I'm okay with that.

I think the killswitch idea from Balmung would be good, because it has to get tedious at some point though honestly I can't think of any amount of time with that person being too much, so...yeah. I think I would. Living forever alone is a lot different, and I don't think I'd want to do that, but again I'm also scared enough of death that it's not unappealing.
 
No. It is scary to think about what happens after you die, but I would be lying if I said I didn't. I wouldn't want to live forever knowing everyone I love and care about would die before me and having to watch it. That's torture. So no. Best to just live your life and keep it moving until the end.
 
Yes, I want to live forever. Assuming we are talking about having some supernatural means of having perfect health and invulnerability. Something like Wolverines power x1,000. Though I could "live with" infinite reincarnation too. Or the ability for my mind/spirit/soul to 'jump' bodies.

In the mental sense, I'm all ready removed from the mass of humanity. I'm not with all the sheep watching sports and reality TV or worse endlessly doing nothing by choice. Like the memes you see "could you live in the woods with no internet for a year for a million dollars"....yes, easily, like with no effort what so ever.

I could sit back for centuries and just relax, or rule the world from the shadows....
 
Again, with the assumption that I get to stay in a somewhat young body or only age as I want to by some means - yes.

I would miss my hubgoblin dearly, but neither one of us believes in one true love (that's not to say we don't love each other absolutely, we are perfect for each other in the way we wanted at the time we met). There would be others out there for me. I don't have family anymore with my dad's death.

Though I do believe there is something after, I don't care or want to be a part of it, honestly. I would be happy being able to read a lifetime of literature and seeking out new hearts to pursue and lives to lead.
 
Normally my answer would be a hard no. However, there is a single condition for me living forever: if my dog was equally immortal. If he was immune to illness and recovered perfectly from every injury, then I, indeed, would want to live forever.
 
Oh yes, if it meant agelessness and perfect health. I like life, I like people and the human experience (generally, we all have our moments lol) and I'd want to explore and soak in as much of its variants as possible. I'd live a lifetime or two in a bunch of countries and be all over the galaxy once human spacefaring became a thing.
 
If presented the choice, whether to live in eternal misery or to die in peace... I'd think I'd rather want to die. Because if you were to think of it like this, you've spent an eternity absorbing all the knowledge of the world around you, you know all of its landmarks, you've mastered all foreign languages, you've traveled countless miles by land, air and sea, and yet, you don't look a day over 30, while everyone and everything you knew in the past has either been long since passed away or crumbled to dust and then blew away into the wind. What would you even do with that knowledge?

Chances are, you could rebuild civilization in your own image, but that could be taken as a literal double-edged sword. On the one hand, you could build a beautiful utopia where everyone can live their lives to the fullest, but others could see this as an iron-fisted tyranny on the other.

Death, even though it has a major league negative connotations, really isn't as bad as people make it out to be. The reason why I say that is that on the brighter side of things, people will have remembered you in their own way before moving on with their own lives. It's an interesting concept, for sure, but at the same time... Nah. I don't think I'd be able to deal with it all.

That's just me.
 
I'd only consider living forever if it came with other things, such as the ability to travel at Faster-Than-Light speeds, and the ability to survive extremes of temperatures and pressures and energies - that way I'd be able to actually explore the rest of the galaxy and really "see what's out there".

If I'm confined to Earth for the rest of my immortality...then No.
 
Im gonna go out on a limb and say, hell nah! Biologically our bodies could have chose one of two paths; That of the long living being with little to no reproduction or shorter reproduction based life. I don't care if you believe in god, the devil, or human kindness but only two things are certain in life; Death and Taxes. I don't know about you but while I despise taxes. I find the peace of death a comforting inevitability. Edit; If your confused as to why oblivion feels comforting. Look no further then Socrates opinion on the subject.
 
Much like the above, I am not sure immortality would be all it's cracked up to be. There's a certain comfort in knowing that one day things will end, for better or for worse. It's a defined endpoint in the otherwise infinite number of paths to it, a single point of order in an endless sea of chaos.

It also begs the question of *how* immortality would manifest. If you continued to age physically while living forever, eventually you would just be trapped in a weak frail body, undying but suffering worsening versions of the problems that the elderly face.

Even if you removed that from the equation, humans by nature find comfort (for the most part) in those they've grown up around. Imagine having to rebuild your entire social circle, over and over again (even if you are 'anti-social', most everyone has at least one person they confide in).
 
Razgriz said:
Much like the above, I am not sure immortality would be all it's cracked up to be. There's a certain comfort in knowing that one day things will end, for better or for worse. It's a defined endpoint in the otherwise infinite number of paths to it, a single point of order in an endless sea of chaos.

It also begs the question of *how* immortality would manifest. If you continued to age physically while living forever, eventually you would just be trapped in a weak frail body, undying but suffering worsening versions of the problems that the elderly face.

Even if you removed that from the equation, humans by nature find comfort (for the most part) in those they've grown up around. Imagine having to rebuild your entire social circle, over and over again (even if you are 'anti-social', most everyone has at least one person they confide in).
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As a avid fan of the Cyberpunk and Steampunk genres, I would assume if Immortality were to be achieved it would be in the mental space, not physical. Or rather; The Digital Space.

Edit; My thoughts turn to Soma when I say the above. Mental scanning of our brains. Or living through copies or clones maybe, like in that Arnold movie; The 6th Day.
 
Entirely possible, but then that raises an issue of maintenance.

The human brain alone is incredibly complex, and would need a significant about of storage for each person's quirks, knowledge, personality, etc. The number of subroutines to handle analytical thought alone would likely be astronomical.

And on top of all that, while we have an understanding of how the other autonomous functions would work, it would be a hazardous leap (realistically speaking) to attempt to de-couple the functions for the body's physicality from the brain's mentality (simultaneous inputs/outputs are a huge part of how our brain functions. Imagine the brain losing 80-90% of its input....That's quite a shock. Or at least I imagine it would be).
 
Hmm, the digital space huh? While interesting, I'd still die. I get the idea but it wouldn't be me living on, just a copy of my mind that has the luxury of getting to exist longer, the fear of death and all that comes with it would still be strong I feel even if that could be guaranteed. I'd be happy my legacy continued in a way, but there are other ways to do that already.

And that's before the maintenance aspect.
 
If you asked me this question five years ago, it would've been resounding yes but now I'm not so sure about immortality. I frequently think of men like H.P Lovecraft and Friedrich Nietzsche and what they would think of the world if they were alive today.


From a selfish perspective, I absolutely wish that a man like Lovecraft would become immortal but I doubt that he would find any true happiness in modernity. Though perhaps he could offer a much stronger defense of himself and his generation if he were alive to do so today. As much am I disillusioned with the world as it currently exists, I can't shake the hunger for immortality. The endless curiosity of what the world will become. Will A.I ever truly become a separate race from humanity as science has often predicted? Will man ever manage to colonize another planet or make direct contact with an alien species? These are questions that could be answered during my lifetime but seem highly unlikely to be explored fully while I'm still on this mortal coil.
 
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