This one’s simple. If you were immortal, would you go crazy? Lets assume that you don’t know you’re immortal. You are born, you age until about you mid 20s, and then stop aging. Your spouse grows old and eventually dies, and you are left in perfect health. I would assume that you find a way to “age” your appearence, but you hang on. Your kids grow old, and it occurs that you have to hide it. Prolly at some point you’d fake your own death, but then what? You’d be left to start a new life, one totally unconnected to your old one. I assume you’d manage to do so, and to squirel away assets to start over, but then what do you do?
You’d prolly try to kill yourself at least once, when that fails and you realize what is going on…I imagine after several lifetmes that you would start to lose your mind. Could you handle staying the same while those you care about grew old and died, again and again and again? It occurs to me that so much that is basic and valuable to us as humans is prediated upon the finite nature of our lifespans. What would you do?
I dunno…it would just make my relationships with people more like my relationships with my dogs. I get dogs knowing full well I’m going to watch them die. It sucks, it tears me up, but its worth it. It doesn’t drive me mad
I
Why should it fail? Not vulnerable to ageing != immortal in the sense of cannot be harmed. I’m assuming you’re talking about “not vulnerable to ageing”. And yes, I suspect I’d probably go crazy and end up suiciding. Successfully (eventually).
Dani
Might I suggest reading Heinlein’s books that detail the life of Lazarus Long? Specifically thinking of Time Enough For Love.
While Lazarus isn’t truly immortal - he just ages incredibly slowly and can be killed. However, one of the central themes of the book (to my mind) if Lazarus’ tales of learning to live life to the fullest, despite the ephemeral relationships with others that come with the territory.
Although, b/c Lazarus can be killed, he’s developed into one wily and self-preserving son-of-a-b*tch, almost through habit.
If you were truly immortal and unkillable, I would think that you would of necessity develop coping mechanisms of some nature, whether they be psychological, hedonistic or spiritual. Even then, your coping methods might very well push you into behaviors and mindsets that would be crazy by the standards of the culture you are living amongst.
Regarding Heinlein’s book, dont miss the part where he travels back in time to nail his own mother, while she’s in the early stages of pregnancy with one of his younger siblings.
The Justice League cartoon series has an episode called “Hereafter” that shows Vandal Savage (one of the DC universe’s immortal characters) presiding over a ruined depopulated Earth several thousand years in the future. He got by with hobbies and self-help books.
Don’t know about being crazy, but wouldn’t you begin to do crazy things just in order to keep you busy, after some time (becoming world’s dictator, giving a try at necrophilia, spending a century alone in a cave eating bugs, voting for the right-wing parties, etc…)?
I could also see myself becoming paranoid about people finding out I’m immortal and for instance burrying me (necessarily alive) under 100 feet of concrete chained in a closed metal chest, or such a thing…
Thinking twice, I could also see myself becoming crazy by womdering about various questions, like : “Why am I immortal? Is the rest of the world and mortal humans for real or a dream/ hallucination of sort? What am I exactly?”, etc…
I would be incredibly sad and mourn forever the first relationship, and I would never have another. But go insane or kill myself? No.
Assuming my memory was finite and at human capacity, it is very likely, speaking dispassionately, that “bit rot” would eventually corrupt and erase my memory of my first love, making it fade away after time.
As posted before, I don’t think a person would ever get bored. Because our memory has this finite capacity, in 50-100 years we would completely have forgotten our favourite books, TV shows, movies, things…assuming we had a big book or list that said “these are good, trust me” we could just keep re-experiencing all the good things and not the bad.
If you want to add onto this some level of invulnerability, I suppose I would be a superheroine of sorts to help people. Run into the burning building to save people and so forth.
Do I get to go around with a big-ass sword and yell “There can be only one”?
Otherwise, I don’t know. This is another one of those hypotheticals I don’t deal well with, simply because the possibility is impossible. I think it would partially be a matter of the capacity of human memory.
That would be true only if going crazy was an event with a random X% risk of happening.
But if mental illness has a genetic component, for instance, there would be no chance of you going crazy, even over the course of 10 000 years. Now, if it’s strongly related to what happens to you, it will indeed eventually happen, given time.
I’m with you. I just sort of thought I was already.
Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor - Your logic is faulty. x out of y people will go insane. That does not mean that for each lifetime you have an x/y chance of going insane. If you haven’t gone insane after a certain period of time, odds are you are well adjusted enough that you would not go insane ever.
Keep in mind too that you would have many a year to get over the loss of someone close to you.
Also, it’s not like you would get any more or less bored than anyone else. The world would continue to change around you so your trip to Paris in 2006 will be a lot diferent from your trip in 2206.
That sounds like a misapplication of statistics; you simply might not possess the combination of make-you-crazy factors that are present in x percentage of the general population (if indeed there are such things) - not every roll of the dice may be available to your personal randomness generator.
If you are going to drag Lazarus Long into this discussion, you should note that, in the introduction to Time Enough For Love, the narrator claims that he is more than twice as old as the next oldest member of the Howard Families, and that the commonest cause of death among that long-lived clan is “refusing further rejuvinations”.
So it would seem that most people of that era can’t handle (near) imortality. Lazarus is a bit of an anomaly – due in no small measure to his zest for living life to its fullest.
In fact, the theme of the book is his friends’ attempts to restore that zest, which, after two millennia, he had lost. Nailing his mother was either part of that process or the result, I’m not sure which.
Heinlein got a bit odd towards the end of his career.
Well… Being a celebrity might be annoying after a while. And anyway, did you consider my “buried under 100 feet of concrete” , “dropped into a volcano”, or “tied on a spacecraft which will reach Sirius in 200 000 years” scenarios? I’m sure it would occur to someone someday to get rid of you.