The grim reaper knocks on your door. After an entertaining game of chess, which you graciously lose, it becomes apparent that the hour of your demise is at hand (just when it was getting fun!).
Oddly, the hooded figure gives you a choice (and let’s say for the sake of the hypothetical that you completely believe the offer is genuine and in earnest): Live Forever, or Be Remembered.
If you choose to Live Forever, you will be transported to a place that you can only describe as paradise, to live in whatever way pleases you, without pain and disease and with whatever pleasures you care for, for as long as you wish to live.
BUT, every trace of your earthly existence will be erased. Your friends won’t remember you; your family will still exist but you will have been cleverly edited out of their memories (they’ll remember someone else - a whole assortment of other someone elses - doing the things you actually did). They’ll get some fictional backstory of their whole lives that is not objectively better or worse than at present, but just doesn’t include you at all. All of your Earthly works will be attributed elsewhere.
If you choose to Be remembered, you’ll go quietly and painlessly into nonexistence, but you will be remembered - in fact there will be an extra sprinkling of fondness, fame and admiration added to many of the memories people have about you.
(If you fight the hypothetical, you get to be forgotten AND cease to exist)
I’m assuming the paradise is necessarily separate from Earth? Otherwise, living indefinitely and all, I could make much closer social relationships and achieve a hell of a lot more than I could with my lifespan as it is.
Regardless, I would choose the live forever option simply because even if my paradise is limited to what I’m capable of imagining, it’s already vastly superior to life as we know it.
So I’m much, much better off, and everyone else is the same. Easy deal.
I don’t really care if I am remembered, to be honest. Mostly because it would be by no more than a handful of people anyway. And then only for a few years past my own death, most likely.
That said, I can imagine no more horrific fate than to live forever. So I’ll opt for being remembered, as the lesser of two evils!
No, it’s basically heaven (not the chilly church service version, unless that’s what you want) - your loved ones will join you later - and have their memories of you restored, if they make the choice to live forever (and if theirs and your definition of heaven permits this).
Easiest poll ever. Live forever, without a shadow of a doubt. I have strong hermit tendencies anyway, and I’m horribly afraid of illness and a drawn out, painful death. Paradise sounds like, well, paradise.
I’ve got news for you if you want to be “remembered”.
Nobody is going to really *remember *you for long. Sure a few people will show up at your funeral, but after that, forget it. Even for close friends and relatives, you quite quickly become a (very) distant memory.
As my mom used to say before she passed, “Life is for the living” and “Today is the first day of the rest of your life and your days are numbered”.
Interesting choice. Either way I have no further contact with my family, so does it really matter if they remember or not as long as they’re happy?
Choosing the croak and be remembered would mean that the kids would at least inherit some stuff from me and be financially OK. I’m not clear what happens to that stuff if I decide to live forever, does that all just become the property of the other me who is written into my life like the second Darren in Bewitched?
Interesting. Can I ask why? In this hypothetical, you are pain and disease free, and your every want is met… Your personal paradise. Whatever that happens to be. How could you NOT want to see what tomorrow holds?
If I could stay healthy and active, not worry about ever getting sick or paying a bill, I would never want to die. I can’t imagine getting to do everything I ever wanted to do without any restrictions. So many places I want to see someday and never will.
I cannot imagine not seeing tomorrow. And I wouldn’t care if anyone remembered me, because few people will anyway… Unless I leave them something or unless I do something to better humanity. I could do that anyway and skip the platitudes.
Living in paradise with every want and desire met would get boring very quickly. What makes us human and life worth living is overcoming adversity (and before you say it, if I know that paradise comes with programmed adversity that I might or might not overcome, it’s no better). I can’t see a way to make that work where I wouldn’t eventually figure out what was going on (sounds like a nice premise for a series of sci-fi novels, though; sort of like Riverworld or something).
Since the death part of the bargain is painless and immediate, I think I would choose to be remembered. I haven’t made that many strong connections in this world (I have all of 20 Facebook friends, only 10 of whom I really like) and I think it would be nice if those few people who know me reasonably well would remember me fondly. Of course, once I’m dead I won’t know that, but I don’t think that matters.
