I’ll take live forever. The problem with being remembered is that the people who are doing the remembering will eventually die. No matter how nice a person or beloved you are, even being remembered will eventually fade away.
To clumsily paraphrase James Joyce, imagine a mountain a million miles wide and a million miles tall. Imagine that at the end of every billion years a small bird took one grain of sand off the mountain, flew a thousand miles, and deposited it on a flat surface. Imagine how long it would take for the bird to make even a small pile of sand. Now imagine the amount of time it would take this bird to completely reconstruct the mountain; imagine the time to reconstruct a thousand mountains. A million mountains. As many mountains as there are stars in the sky. That length of time is not even a fraction of a percent of forever.
When most people imagine living “forever”, they’re thinking thousands, millions, maybe even billions of years. That might be interesting - our current lifespan is certainly much too short. But forever forever? I’d go insane.
I explicitly catered for that argument in the original post. ‘Live forever’ actually only means here ‘as long as you like’.
I’ll opt for “heaven.” I don’t care about being remembered, except by my partner. But if he’ll join me later, that’s good too.
On reflection, being forgotten could be considered a great mercy to those you are leaving behind. They won’t suffer the pain of grief at your loss.
I’d rather serve as another man’s laborer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.
Yeah, but that dude was a heel.
Yep. And even if you are mega famous and so “remembered” for generations, that’s not really you, that’s some bullshit legend. It’s worthless even if you were alive to see it.
I guess it depends a bit on whether your memory is an inspiring example to others (Rosa Parks maybe) or whether you’re just famous for being famous.
Is this about Achilles?
That’s the choice Achilles has: If he goes to Troy, he will be killed, but he’ll win everlasting glory. Or he can stay home and live a long life, but win no glory, and be forgotten.
Achilles went for the glory, obviously, and we all remember him to this day. Although, when Odysseus meets him later in the underworld, he seems to regret his choice:
Apparently, obscurity above ground isn’t so bad after all, because being below ground pretty much sucks.
But then again, Achilles always was prone to sulking.
This is not even a question. If you become the most famous person on the planet, but you are not existing to perceive it, it didn’t happen for you. Let’s say I tell you that in a parallel universe, you are the most famous and important person in the world. How does that affect you?
Meh… I’m not really sure I want either. I’ll fight the hypothetical.
I certainly care nothing for being remembered. I want to do my little part to make the world a better place, but a level where I can live and die anonymously.
Living forever might be nice for a while, but if it’s not a good old-fashioned Christian Heaven, then it’s not really high on my list of priorities.
It’d be like reading a book with no ending. The ultimate lack of closure, I should think.
Life is meant to have a span, a beginning, a youth, teenage, twenty something, etc through mid life and then, decline, frailty and an END !
How could you view the context of the life you’ve lived, correctly from an age of 200 yrs or more. You won’t be out of step, you’ll be out of context.
::::::shiver:::::::
Live forever. What’s the point of being remembered if I’m not here to enjoy it?
I’d rather choose neither or both.
True, but this is shifting the question somewhat. If the OP had been whether I would live indefinitely or significantly change the world for the better, then I would have hesitated.
But the option was just “be remembered”, and I don’t think anyone is remembered for long; most of us will be forgotten within a generation, and the rest live on as a legend that is not a real person.
Don’t you ever get to the end of a book and wish the author had written a whole series of them? I do.
You could have a whole series of lives, each with its own beginning and end. Think of all the different ways that people live their whole lives; their different crafts and professions. Are you happy trying only one of that multitude of options?
Name all the Immortal characters you know:
Dracula
Wandering Jew
Zombie
Doesn’t Voodoo have a mindless person said to have risen from the dead?
None of these are noted as ‘fun people’.
You watch as all your friends age and die. Forever.
I would choose ‘Eternal’ only if it came with a guaranteed method of dying at the time of my choice. If there is any chance that I’d end up as a Terri Schiavo (comatose and brain dead - but this was Florida, so all Hell broke loose) and I’d go whenever the universe decides my time is up.
Being ‘remembered’ is the very least of my worries.
I’ve gotten this far without getting a Wiki article, so I doubt that I will do or become anything noteworthy.
Given my tendency towards episodes of depression, I wouldn’t want to live forever. It doesn’t really appeal to me. Plus, I’d get to see many of my friends and family members die, which would trouble me, even though I imagine I would make new friends.
Though the way it’s phrased in the OP, saying you’d have an extremely good life and get what you wanted, it sounds kind of appealing, especially since it says you can live that way “for as long as you wish to live.” Though in my case, that might not be “forever,” exactly.
If I understand the hypothetical, I die and go to heaven. All the good I did on earth remains; it is just attributed to someone else. And my loved ones join me when they die.
I don’t see a downside. Apart from not being remembered, I don’t see how it differs from how things work now, two or three generations after my death.
Regards,
Shodan