I had assumed, from the OP’s references to outliving others, that I was the only one, or at least one of a very few.
I’m not entirely sure I"m the same person I was 30 years ago, so I’d argue for “continuum”.
Yeah, I had initially assumed that too, but then people started talking about other people holding 1000-year grudges against you and stuff, perhaps imagining that medical science finds the secret to halting aging across the board. I think the scenario of one or a few people living indefinitely is rather different from all or most people living indefinitely, though perhaps not so much in relation to the core question of ‘life fatigue.’
I’m not sure if it’s fighting the hypothetical, but I thoroughly expect that reality will be a moving set of goalposts such that I would not get bored for at least thousands of years. Because we’d have space travel, and hyperreal VR (e.g. you could live entire lifetimes in historical periods or as fictional characters)
In any case, I’m old enough (41) to appreciate that my mind has sort of “reset” several times already. What I mean by that, is that a lot of my memories have either faded or been reinterpreted in light of new experiences. And my self-image has changed completely.
It feels a bit like a hard drive where I am overwriting stuff now, not solely (or even mainly) adding. So I’m unlikely to ever feel like I’ve done everything, because I can’t store it all anyway 
However, depression is the real problem, rather than “life fatigue”. It’s a bit of an achilles heel of the human brain, and I’d estimate the age at which 50% of people with eternally young minds would experience suicidal depression at least once* is probably only around 200.
* I say “at least once” because being “suicidally depressed” doesn’t necessarily entail you actually follow through.
I don’t think suicidal depression is something everyone inevitably suffers, I think it’s a result of brain chemistry, and to me “healthy body” includes not suffering from any chemical imbalances.
Also, as per the OP’s “heal from injuries” , killing yourself is not going to be a trivial matter. It would have to be “jump into lava pit” kind of suicide, not the “eat a bullet” kind.
I’m happy to put suicide to one side for the purpose of this thread. Just thought it was worth raising because depression is a much more serious issue compared to life fatigue in humans as we know them.
But responding to the specific points:
Well it’s a bit more complicated than that. While it’s true that you can actually tell whether a person is depressed with certain kinds of brain scan (PET / SPECT in particular), and even anticipate depression this way, it’s also the case that most depression has a triggering event in a person’s life. Plus of course rates of depression vary a great deal across societies and over time. The situation is not clear enough at all to say it’s just a matter of brain chemistry.
Now if we’re going to say there’s a certain susceptibility, then I’d agree with that. But whether that susceptibility is enmeshed with other aspects of human psychology is hard to say right now.
I would disagree with that. I’d leave it to the OP to chime in, but I assume (s)he did not envisage suicide being extremely difficult, nor that brains being splattered out on to the ground should necessarily count as an injury.
Agreed. But given the same sort of event doesn’t trigger the same response in different people, events are not sufficient in-and-of themselves to indicate inevitability, which was the premise I had issue with.
The OP seemed to indicate that you’d recover from losing your eyes or spinal cord injuries, brains are just a matter of degree from that.
Of course, that would also make it easier to deal with the “fatigue” of a long life for those who think it’s inevitable - just “reset” by blowing your brains out (after making arrangements for your own care and re-education, of course)
If we focus only at earning a living, I wonder whether this might cause problems. Compound interest is at present problematic due to extremely low or even negative interest rates. If you have to have a job, it may become hard to obtain an up to date resume. Would you hire someone with a degree from the University of Bologna ca. 1500 AD?
But we probably should forget about these practical problems, the hypothetical is sufficiently interesting as it is.
There is more than just interest on savings. Any reasonably diverse market portfolio should be growing quite nicely.
It would be interesting if this immortality had begun well into the past. Up until a hundred years or so ago, it would be easy enough to move to a new place and make up an identity every couple decades. This would become much more problematic in our modern world.
As a curator of a museum, sure. You’d have personal knowledge of many things that are twenty-seventh hand for everyone else. In a STEM field, maybe not so much.
If you wanted to work, and I assume you would occasionally, it seems like going back to college would be part of it.
From what I saw when we had kids it would be pretty easy to bribe a tech at a hospital to say there was a new birth. They gave us a really basic birth certificate which we then filed with the county and the federal government. As long as you got the initial form no one ever checked on the rest. You could home school yourself and then 18 years later your off to college to start your new life.
That’s not overly practical for identity theft today but if your permanently 25 passing for 18 wouldn’t be that weird. Waiting 18 years for your new identity wouldn’t be too hard either if you were living for millennium. Once you’ve enrolled in college and have a legit social security number, driver’s license and passport you can let your previous identity fade away.
Of course, all of this was assuming you wanted to keep this a secret. If you were openly immortal then you could probably just enroll in college whenever you wanted a refresher and add to your dozens of degrees.
Right. Everyone else is a normal 80-year lifespan human. You are the lone living-on-indefinitely exception.
JFK, it is so trivial to just forget stuff so you can experience things as if for the first time again if you so desire. The idea that you could get bored along a single temporal dimension sounds so laughable!
Bored people are boring. I don’t think Seinfeld has any interests other than comedy. Not true of all comedians, but it’s true of him. Says more about him than about me.
I would have use for the time. Economically, I think the urgency would go away. Likely I’d build up funds over time, but if I wanted some low key existence for decades, as long as I’m fed and comfortable, the urgency isn’t there. Probably less fast travel, but set down for as long as I want in a place as long as I’m happy.
One question is how do we find out we’re immortal? Do we just guess by the time we’re 80 or 100 that we’re really different? Get in some accident that should hurt you far more than it does?
This was used in the comic book series Powers with the main character, Christian Walker. He’s a retired superhero who’s now working as a cop. It was shown that despite his relatively young appearance, he has actually been around for decades at the same apparent age.
Then the writers revealed in a flashback that Walker is actually tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of years old. He was a caveman living in prehistoric times and has been alive ever since.
But he doesn’t remember any of this. As you noted, the human brain can only hold a limited amount of memories and Walker only remembers only about the last hundred years of his life. So he has no idea of his origin or how old he is.
But people are notorious for vivid memories of their childhood and less memory of more recent events as they age.
Now we’re talking someone who doesn’t age, so perhaps their memory retention remains equally vivid, but I don’t know if the first memories would necessarily be supplanted by more recent ones.
Yeah, there’s a lot about memory we don’t understand, and if there were humans somehow surviving 200+ years, there no doubt would be some weirdness.
But what we can say with confidence is that the brain does not work like a hard drive that gets full and then is “unable to cope”. Forgetting is something we do every day. Every waking moment in fact, and then double-duty during sleeping moments. It won’t get “full”.
Like everything on any Internet board, I think this comes from a male slant.
But it might be easier for a woman. At 25 she’s still fertile and will never face aging and menopause. She also might be better suited to roll through the seasons of life, the cycles, and the fact that there’s just so many more of them would not be as much of a change.
Oh, yeah - give me an eternity of monthly cramps and moodiness! Also having to buy menstrual products and birth control forever.
Frankly, menopause has been a relief and not nearly as bad as some would have you believe (of course - your mileage may vary. Not everyone sails through it the way I did, more’s the pity).
Funny how as soon as we start trying to talk about the woman’s perspective it goes straight to sex and reproduction. Not sure the experience would be that different for a woman, although if society reverts to restricting them outside the home/marriage it could become a problem.
A positive spin on this observation is that everything else upthread hasn’t been from a necessarily male perspective, but from a generic human perspective.
At that point, once we do decide to split off and talk about distinctly male or female perspectives, they should be pretty much limited to sex and reproduction since, in a progressive society and given the individual wisdom of the ages there shouldn’t be too many other differences worth mentioning.
Given a progressive society… but how many of those have there actually been?