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Would you want to live forever? Discuss.

Would you want to live forever?

  • Total voters
    54
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.
 
HasturTheKing said:
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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I'd agree Lovecraft wouldn't have found much more happiness at all in the modern world. Though more of his works would be fantastic to say the least, selfish but not selfish a wish I'd say haha.

And to those who would think; "But Lovecraft was racist!" Let's strive to show a little more respect to the author, he was actually turning it around near the end of his life. And if he didn't have Xenophobia we wouldn't have this very interesting style of horror we call Lovecraftian Horror XD. Fear of the unknown and Unknowable and all that haha
 
If I can retain my youth and health, yes. If I'm just going to be a breathing raisin walking around, fuck that noise.
 
Realistically I think even if you were magically kept young and age-free/sickness free with elven immortality you (anyone) would wind up going crazy or live so much life as to go into self-destructive hedonism or apathy. I think even the most aloof, short-sighted person (not calling anyone here that, just as an example) would start to get tired of the same general patterns throughout history repeating if they ever got to the point of paying that much attention and, if not, if they became wholly self-absorbed.... well.... how long can you live meaningfully? How long before you just accept you can't die and begin to take risks, or become an eternal couch potato or get so bored you want to die?

In short: No, I think living forever is more a curse than a blessing once the initial elation of it wears off.
 
Yes. As sad as it would be to lose those I care about while I live on, right now I think I'm more inherently terrified of me being the one to pass and having nothing to leave behind from my time here. As long as I had something to do I'd probably be fine.

Maybe that makes me a terrible person, I dunno.
 
Not really. I am already tired with everything and don't like the world all that much.
 
It's not so much death that terrifies me it's how I'm going to die. Despite thinking that I will pass quietly in my sleep I know the reality is I'm probably going to die of some illness and in pain.
 
One of the oldest stories in human history is the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and to cut a long story short it’s about a story of a king called Gilgamesh realizing that even if he won’t live forever, he should focus on living a good life instead.

But to answer your question. No. Death is natural. I do not fear it (anymore). I fear having not accomplished everything I wanted and saying I love you to those I cared about before I pass.
The human brain wasn’t built for immortality, you’ll go mad eventually. I also can’t imagine forgetting my loved ones, what existence would that be? Alone forever and eventually exploring the stars when the end is nigh for our beautiful planet. Forever drifting into the emptiness of space. Since immortality also entails living PAST the death of the Earth.

I for one, would rather have my bones be found millions of years from now in the ground instead of being a living fossil walking above the ground unable to even remember my family.
 
I like the idea of not fading into nothingness, but I think I'd rather have that with rebirth or something, not living as I am for all eternity. You'd need to set a lot of rules for that to make sense.
 
Heavily depends. I don't know that I'd really contribute a whole lot to the world if I lived forever, but I'd love being around to see all the video games and movies that come out 100 years from now.
 
100%, if I had the opportunity to live forever, I would. There is so much I want to do before I die. I want to write a jillion novels, I want to premier an entire opera, I want get a dedicated tabletop group that sticks together long enough to have a BOTW-style game with easter eggs to our other campaigns, yadda yadda yadda. And there's a very real chance I'm going to die before I get to do all that.

I think the only parameters I'd want my immortality to have outside of just giving me time to do everything I want to do would be that I won't trade my kindness/humanity for it. Like, I don't want to be a vampire. I don't want to kill people to keep living.
 
With some asterisks in place, such as being able to terminate my life when I want to (with some safeguards to make sure I don't do so in the heat of a moment nor under duress nor by accident), I'd like to live 'forever'. (Heat death will come sooner or later, all things must die, but still)

Like Dee said, there's just so many things that I won't be able to do in a single lifespan. It's one out of two reasons that I'm terrified of death. That feeling that every moment you do one thing, there's one other thing that'll never come to be. And stressing out and doing a whole lot won't help either, because then you won't enjoy it, so it'll be wasted. So I have to calmly walk through life, enjoying a small snippet of the pie and then just... die. That's grim to me. If I could experience a lot more of what life has to offer before dying, I'd probably be able to accept my end a little more fearlessly. Even then, vanishing for the rest of eternity, never to exist again... It's grim. But this way, it'd be less grim.
 
Living forever, no matter how you look at it, would be a curse disguised as a blessing.
You will out-live all other things, all other creatures. Nothing would have any consequence to you or be permanent to you, nothing except yourself, your memories and the lifeless void the universe will eventually become. And you know it will happen, because you will be there to witness all of it but unable to change any it.

Sure, you might be able to make your presence as an immortal known and raise a cult following. Might even become the leading figure, a true immortal leader of an Empire of a galaxy-wide civilization who all look to you for guidance. Effectively a living God(dess) walking among mortals. Or not, if humanity manages to destroy itself before truly flourishing in the stars. Regardless, you will be there to witness it all happen.

But to you, none of it will matter. Because it is just a phase in the cosmic playground that is our universe. You may be immortal and thus unable to die, but you are still human. Humans have emotions, since we are designed to be social creatures. It was how we evolved into what we are today. It's what allowed us to survive in the first place, because being alone meant certain doom.

And that is exactly what you will end up being in the end. Alone. Nobody to comfort you, nobody to spend time with, nobody to cheer you up. Eventually you will succumb to the loneliness and go mad. Truly mad. You will first begin to talk to yourself, having imaginary conversations with people you remember. And later you will have conversations with people who you THINK you remember. That's when you start hallucinate, seeing faces and things where there are none. I don't even want to imagine what happens next, but you get the picture.

All in all, no. I do not want to live forever.
I would rather live a normal, relatively happy life than live an eternity of loneliness and misery.
 
Technically you already live forever, since the soul is eternal.

As for the measuit we wear? No. I wouldn't. I couldn't even fathom what it would be like after the average lifespan is over(assuming no externals gets you and you do die of old age.) Even if eternal lifespan came with eternal youth, it just isn't worth it in my eyes.

Who knows what really follows after death, given the wide range of religions, beliefs and all that. Alone with that being another topic for debate. Though I will gladly travel to the otherside than being stuck here for eternity. Plus, I truly don't believe we live just one lifetime.
 
The short answer is no.

Why I say this? Simple.

There's already a considerable amount of people I've lost who are dear to me. I realize there's no guarantee I'll end up joining them - in fact, I kind of expect not to be judged the right way.

However, on the rare chance I do end up being able to see anyone again ... I can't have the ability to be immortal.

There's also the possibility of reincarnation. I'd actively be perfectly fine having a brand new life, starting in a brand new body and so on. So if that does indeed happen ... I also need to die in order to have that even be a possibility. Likewise, I'd want my husband and daughter to be able to see me when it's their turn to join me, as well as vice versa [me see them].

So ... nope. No immortality for me.
 
No!

When I turned 45, I was emotional about the fact that I might have another 20, 30, or 40 years of this shit to deal with.

I do long to have my 18 year old body again.
 
Nah.

Life is precious because it is fleeting.

With infinite time, I will never again tell myself 'today, not tomorrow', because tomorrow becomes guaranteed. With infinite time, I will never again be challenged, because with infinite tries, everything becomes a foregone conclusion. With infinite time, excellence becomes a given instead of something to strive for.

Sounds incredibly boring, no?
 
I'm not sure if I would or would not want it.

On the one hand. Immortality could mean being able to learn things and do things that you simply missed out on and didn't have time to go back to. There's so much to do but a mixture of time and how society makes most of us not that mobile we miss out on a lot of things. If I lived forever I think I could amass enough wealth to take a big break from work obligations and just go do whatever I fancy without too much concerns. The challenge with immortality in this scenario would mainly be to keep yourself positive and engaged in what you do for I do think that the possibly to become overly cynical could occur. There's no doubt on my mind that an ordinary job where you only have a small amount of cash on the side for entertainment and little time to use that cash would eventually drive people (even more) insane if they know there is never going to be an end in sight.

There's a lot of other concerns to bring up too. If you are the only one that is immortal you are going to constantly deal with loss and if you are a sensitive person to this then I fear that you'd just spiral deeper and deeper in dark places till you do something drastic. If everyone is immortal then society will need to change a lot or else over population of the planet will become an even bigger issue. How to deal with people wanting to raise a child but perhaps being forbidden to do so and so on would lead to new mental issues for sure. There are many more issues that can arise from this of course but I'll only go into detail about one that is the main reason for me being on the fence about wanting to be immortal or not.

Assuming that nothing changes with our minds I think it could be scary over a long period of time to forget things you once did. There's no way that if you managed to live a thousand years that you'd be able to remember what happened 500 years ago, let alone at the start of your life. I think you'd get to a point where you'd not even be sure anymore how you came to be who you are or why you've become a certain way and maybe this could lead to alienating yourself. In my mind, you'd need to have an extreme strong mental fortitude to deal with this and the solutions to this problem don't seem realistic to me. You could keep a journal about your whole life but once you reach 1000 years that is going to be an immense task to read through, so much so that by the time you're done you'll most likely have already forgotten the earlier parts again. Videos would take even longer to go through depending on how much or how little you would write. Also, written records even about our own will never be accurate so that might also have a further effect.

So yeah, on the one hand cool... I can do a lot of things that I'm not able to do now, but then there's also a lot of scary stuff about this so I'm on the fence!
 
For me, I would say yes but under something similar to reincarnation of sorts, but with the memories of my previous lives. To be fair, even if one can live forever the human body or brain can only handle so much, similar to a computer memory disk. Some people will have regrets and wishes, having multiple lifespans to try out different paths is quite appealing to me. I would definitely try it out, maybe a new profession or a new degree. I would prefer to have randomness incorporated into it, I wouldn't necessarily want everything under my control. Whether I will be placed into poverty or riches, I can still suffer and live through that life cycle.

The only issue I can think of is my mental or psychological health. Even if I receive a new body upon each death, there is only so much a human brain can remember, forget, and process. But I feel like that is part of the downsides of remembering the past lives. On the other hand, having a cheat guide to life is also fun. Some paths will be easy to navigate and others would not. For example, having pre-existing knowledge on elementary school may jumpstart your education or lack of education.

Another positive is catching up on books, shows, media, etc. Having an unlimited lives, you can complete series that you would have missed on our deathbeds.

In this case, I think the benefits and sense of adventure outweigh the negatives.
 
I wouldn't seek immortality, but I'd take it if it was offered. Just to see where it go.
Sure it might end up sucking, but that could apply to anything in life.
 
My answer is simple. I have only one condition:

To possess and retain true freedom, defined as to be able enjoy existing without negative consequences.

If that condition is met, then yes. If not, then no.
 
As long as I stop aging and am no longer at risk of the health and mental complications that come with age, and I can also voluntarily shut things down when and if I would want to do so then yes, I'd be interested in living forever. And also if there was some way to not draw attention to the fact that I am/have been living forever since that would potentially have its own complications.
 
I feel like accepting immortality is dooming yourself to an eventual eternity of wanting to die. Like, the common interpretation is experiencing everyone you care for die. That would be horrible! Yet you’d get over it.

You could move to a new town or city every handful of decades, devote yourself to the kinds of causes that can only be accomplished over many lifetimes, live a wild hedonistic lifestyle without consequence, but it would all grow boring eventually. Your excitement and interest would always wear out before you’re ability to do that thing.

You might make it 100,000 years chasing down new experiences, but what happens after that? The only thing left to see is death, which everyone except you will one day know. ☠️
 
Yes, because I'm happy to be alive and breathing and it sure beats the alternative of complete non-existence. There might well come a day when my body or mind is old and failing when that alternative appears the more attractive option, but until if/when happens, I'll choose immortality every time!
 
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