I think that’s a really interesting point. Do you suppose people assume excitement is necessary to avoid boredom?
I can pass a happy day looking at a handful of sand under a microscope. Boredom has never been a problem for me.
The thing is that we are in unknown psychological territory here. Boredom has not been a problem for me either, but are we both typical?
Assuming that this magical ability confers prolonged active life but not immortality, there is the interesting question as to how we would deal with losing friends who also lived as long, but finally died. Would the loss be all the greater for losing someone you had literally known for centuries? I note your point about selective oblivion, but is that the answer?
If indeed we are unique, then there is an interesting aspect that came to point after I saw some comments that in the past people generally did not worry too much about their children until they reached their teens and thus looked as if they would survive, whereas many did not survive infancy or early childhood. Many people developed suitable psychological protective mechanisms by not being emotionally involved with their offspring if they were likely to die anyway.
This leads to an interesting question. Pets such as cats and dogs live for around 15 years, give or take a few years. If you are sure of living for perhaps half a millennium or more, but your children do not, then in relative terms they might seem the same as pets to us. I.e. in 500 years you could have multiple sets of children, and even more grandchildren. In relative terms, their lifespan might seem the same as that of a pet to us as we are today. I say “might”, because the only way to find out is to live so long!
Mangetout raises the very valid question as to whether our brains would continue to function properly, or perhaps at all, if we lived to currently inconceivable ages. While we have increased our lifespan, this has mainly been through eliminating diseases that previously killed people when relatively young. We have more people that reach the century, but they have still aged, and the main problems are brain-related, including vision and hearing. Bave we really improved the quality of life of the very elderly? Beyond alleviating their various complaints.
The brain has a finite memory capacity. It cannot endlessly generate new neurons; at some point the weight of memories will weigh down any brain, no matter how healthy. The brain will simply be unable to cope with new memories being formed by an extremely long-lived individual. (While many finer details and mundane memories maybe lost, most events of any consequence are permanently etched into the brain, even if voluntary recall is difficult or impossible.)
I believe around the 150-year mark the brain capacity to function will have declined to the point cognitive overload will leave the individual unable to function, even in the absence of obvious brain pathologies. When that point is reached, the brain will probably fail catastrophically and go haywire, leading swiftly to death. IMHO, of course.
However I personally knew of an individual who was at least 120 years old, possibly older. He did not suffer cognitive effects and remained mentally healthy until passing away recently for unrelated reasons. But he was an accomplished Yogi and would spend a major part of the day in intense meditation. When you have those kinds of capabilities, you could probably avoid the cognitive overload scenario and live much longer.
I kind of assumed the OP’s ‘permanently young body’ clause includes the brain - so the capacity to learn remains, and given the finite nature of the brain, learning some new things pushes out some old things.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know some of my problem is a distinct feeling of ‘missed opportunity’. Some of it is real, too; I can certainly no longer be an athlete, for instance. I can’t join the military, as I once considered doing, since I’m past the age that they accept people. I’m pretty sure I no longer qualify to be an astronaut, no matter how much effort I might put into it. There are real things that I can no longer do cause I’ve missed the opportunities. On the other hand, those real things that I’ve missed the opportunities for make me feel like many other things, which could still be accomplished, are beyond me now. It is, to a large part, untrue - in many, many things, it is not in fact too late. But it is difficult as hell to get over the feeling that it is. Especially because there’s almost always an unpleasant ‘preparation’ phase. It feels like there won’t be enough time to enjoy the payoff, that I’ll go through the shit to get there, only to have no time to enjoy it.
The knowledge that I’d be physically 25 forever, on the other hand…that would change that feeling. That would, I think, give me the feeling that it really is never too late. That I can always switch to accomplish something else that I might want to, if I put in the effort. I damn well know I’m gonna have the time, after all. It would change something that is a difficult demotivating factor that is really hard to get over, into a positively motivating factor. Granted, the demotivating part then would be procrastination. I would, somewhat rightly, feel like I can procrastinate everything, forever. But at least the things I want to do wouldn’t have a difficult mental stumbling block of ‘it’s too late, no point in bothering now’.
Because of this, I don’t know how long it would be before enough was enough. Maybe never? It’s…really hard to say. For instance, if I had been born in the year 700 and was immortal, I might be ready to call it quits by 1200 if not sooner. Things were so stagnant for a long time, even if some advancement could be seen, that I could certainly imagine feeling bored of it. Today, on the other hand, where each day and year seems to bring more and more interesting stuff with it, and we are, like some people mention, creating both entertainment and advancement at a pace that no one could keep up with? Yeah, I think I could see wanting to go on forever. But I absolutely would want an escape hatch. I want to be able to cease existing if I decide to.
Judging by their replies, it seems some people do - and that they also assume excitement is like some drug, where you need a greater hit each time to get the same effects.
I know I get the same high off my hundredth handful of sand as I did off my first. More, even, now I’ve got my eye in.
I was answering the OP for myself, not some generic person.
I would say so.
I have the same emotional attachment to short-lived hamsters as I do to 75 years-and-counting tortoises. The degree of emotional attachments normal people have to pets isn’t the same as that we have for humans because they’re not humans, not because they’re short-lived. Because of human empathy.
I hear your point about emotional distancing, but I don’t agree that past people didn’t develop emotional attachments to their children - we have enough art that suggests they did - they just were better at coping with a common enough occurrence like child loss. We don’t handle loss the same way because we’re not used to it, not because past people were emotionless. Modern Western people are the overly fragile ones, in this regard, I’d say. Death is normal and expected, but modern society shies away from it - Caitlin Dogherty frequently touches on this in her Ask a Mortician Youtube channel and talks.
Me, I’ve had enough loved ones die to know it’s far from nice, but also not the end of my world, nor causes me to shy away emotionally from the living.
Same here.
Yep, I will never grow tired of steak and kidney pie. I might even have already eaten the best pie I will ever experience, but even the ones that aren’t as good as the best, are still good.
BA - DA - BING!! This wisecrack wins the prize! LOL!!
Are we assuming that the ‘Man from Earth’ problems of immortality are solved for us in this hypothetical? - because I reckon I could probably get tired of life if I was kept captive indefinitely whilst people tried to figure out how to study and replicate how my immortality was working.
The “can your brain handle it?” problem is resolved by the fact that our memories are unreliable to begin with. Psychologists talk about “plasticity”. Our brains are constantly editing our memories, and often discarding stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to our current situation. My last high school reunion was interesting: I expected to encounter people who didn’t remember me; but when they remembered me, and I did not remember them, that was a bit scary. It might complicate long-term relationships between immortals. Someone might nurse a grudge for a thousand years, then try to murder you for a quarrel you don’t even remember. On the other hand, you would have more time to resolve differences, and end quarrels.
As for the economic questions: if you are never too sick to work, and never too old to start over, then you have a better chance of achieving wealth than 99% of the people on the planet.
That was kind of what I was thinking. At some point, you’ll have had all the experiences that you can- you will have had extraordinary barbecue a couple hundred times, you’ll have explored every sex variation you want, you’ll have climbed all the mountains, etc…
At that point, I imagine it would come down to one of two things- searching for needles in ever-growing haystacks, or if you have the intellectual capacity, setting about solving big academic problems. I can’t see the former having a lot of long-term staying power- you’re eventually going to get frustrated and that’s when the “life fatigue” sets in.
But I could see the long-term academic route giving an immortal a great deal of purpose.
There certainly, logically, has to be a point where novelty becomes impossible - given actual eternity, all possible combinations of experience could be tried out, but I think it’s interesting how people consider that to matter. Whilst exploration of novel things can be exciting, revisiting familiar favourites is also lovely.
I just imagine at some point, boredom and frustration would set in; you’d need SOMETHING to do for the longer term- you will have done all the novelty searching AND revisiting familiar favorites you care to do.
I think given we’re not gifted with a brain of infinite capacity in this scenario, you might not remember things on the second visit, after they’ve been shuffled out of memory to accommodate more recent experiences, so I think we’re probably good for that.
I mean, that can already happen within a human lifetime at present. Trivial example: I’ve revisited code I wrote in my 20s and forgotten how on earth I could have done that. I read the comments in my code (which contained some dry wit about the futility of the program being written) and laughed at them, not recalling for a moment that it was an earlier version of me that wrote them.
Just an opinion, but I think the OP was couching the hypothetical happening in relatively normal circumstances.
I think a lot of “life fatigue” has to do with aging. When your body gets old and slow and achy, and when it no longer functions properly, and when you lose a lot of your hormones and hormonally driven verve, your feelings are affected. In his hypothetical, you have eternal youth and the energy that comes with it.
Hah! I’ve done that on here in fact; I’ve read posts in zombie threads and thought “This guy really got it!” and then noticed that I wrote that post 15 years ago.
I might do something like get my photograph taken in the same spot over a period of say 150-200 years. But in each photo, I would change my position slightly so if you ran the photos together like a flip-book, you would see me do a little dance or something.
Yeah, I’ve actually started threads with a question that was almost a word-for-word duplicate of one I started years ago on the board, and while I was typing it, I was thinking “this is something new, original and I am so smart to be asking it”…
Then the first post is “Same answer as last time you asked…”
New experiences are always being created.
One thing to note is that living off of compound interest is an attainable goal for one immortal person, if everyone starts living indefinitely it’s not going to work for everyone. The economy as we know it requires a certain amount of productivity per person, and if most everyone is 200+ years old and just traveling and pursuing hobbies, there won’t be enough young people to do the actual work (barring some dramatic increase in productivity, such as in a post-scarcity robot worker utopia).
But perhaps only a few people live indefinitely. They could all attain an adequate level of wealth, and then roam the world, sometimes seeking each other out and dueling each other with swords of a type inappropriate to the era and location they’re in.