What a weird post to be making, but someone mentioned living forever the other day. Maybe it was in reference to the late-queen, irony not really intended, but they would always joke about how she'll outlive death itself.

Then constantly in shows or movies, or video games, there are the people that are essentially or just purely are immortal. They have lived for thousands of years, either due to vampirism, some magic comet, or perhaps a special relic.

Regardless of how I wanted to discuss the concept of actually being immortal. Why it would be good, why it would be bad, and what to do with your immortality.

The Art of Not Dying

Our biggest asset, but also our greatest weakness; That is what the passage of time entails for us. We are bound to death through the chains of the flow of the temporal dimension.

Even if you were to live a full or extra long life, that would still only be 100-120 years if you're lucky. You never know what might happen today or tomorrow, and a car will come out of nowhere.

BOOM.

Just straight up dead on the spot, and there was nothing you could have done about it. Now in the case of this post I'm going to assume that your immortality includes not being able to die of causes such as the aforementioned car crash.

Let's try this again.

The car swerves around the corner, hits you dead on, and instead this time your life is not discontinued.

You carry on your walk to the astonishment of the people around you.

The Benefits and Cons of Time

For the first few decades it is going to be great, you travel the world, read all the books you can get your hands on, and the real benefit of the modern age immortal is the internet.

You can now play hundreds if not thousands of hours in a handful of games, and there are so many out there. Not to mention movies, shows, and other forms of media. Once you're done consuming content for a time, then you decide to write a book (or maybe a whole entire saga).

Under a pseudonym of course, as to not give away the fact that you're immortal.

Maybe you become an actor, or perhaps a content creator like myself.

Eventually however you find that you no longer feel the same joy from playing a video game, or writing a book. The dopamine receptors in your brain are so done with any sort of stimuli that you can come across. Any fleeting moment just feels like the last, every page of a book just blurs together, and the once great joy of accomplishing a grand quest of a videogame just feels redundant.

You find yourself stuck, and all of the primal urges have long since gone. Meaning that even the bliss of being with another person doesn't feel good anymore. Your past lovers have long since died, and you stopped trying to romance anyone a hundred years ago.

One thing that always gives me existential dread, that would actually probably cease as an immortal; Is the fact that there are so many restaurants in New York city alone, that if you went to a new one for breakfast/lunch/dinner every day. You would still not be able to try them all in your lifetime. Not to mention all of the places around the world.

As an immortal you'd be able to try them, but if you think about it the cooks will change. Owners will change, and certain places will close up shop before you even get to them. Even as an immortal you are failed by the passage of time.

Now this is just restaurants alone, think about the movies, books, stores, events, and more. All that you'll miss simply because you can't get to them in time due to opportunity cost.

The Mastery over life itself

When you reach the point of doing "everything", then you aren't a polymath. You are something more, conceptually the closest thing to an omnimath. However like I mentioned before you can't know or experience everything. Knowledge changes as we learn more as a species.

The interesting thing is that you can do things to help humanity progress forward. If you live long enough, then you start to see the patterns repeat themselves, and you can try to help others avoid them.

Perhaps that is a futile attempt, but conversely perhaps I'm being nihilistic.

For one that lives forever, also has forever to rectify past mistakes, and learn to prepare greater for the future.