What would you do if you had centuries or millennia of life to accomplish it?

In My Humble Opinion
21

There’s a lot of different answers depending on when/what age I became immortal, because if it was the me of the now, I’m afraid I’d probably be in @LSLGuy’s camp. Or if I was immortal in an earlier age and had building up my skills until now.

But assuming it happened to the 51 year old me of right now in 2025…

  1. Get really in shape. I’ve been exercising to loose weight/better health, but given where we’re at in this world right now, and having all the time to do so even by slow steps, yeah, who wants to live for a few more centuries/millennia in an overweight dad bod.
  2. Get an EMT certification / equivalent information. It’s not certain I have a highlander-esque immortality, or just a resistance to aging. If I’m going to live a long time in an already pretty-heavily used bod, being able to treat myself as much as possible is a great idea! Note, this is a minimum, but I’d probably keep improving the practical skills as much as possible.
  3. Go back to working on something I’ve enjoyed once, but with the improved physical ability from (1) above - Blacksmithing. My FiL has done this as his hobby since retiring, though he’s doing a lot less of it now due to age. Still, I did a few courses with him, and it was fun and interesting to note just how ductile iron can be, and experiment with both modern and pre-modern techniques.
  4. Learn other practical skills, especially carpentry/woodworking, which has a lot of use as a creative way to pass time given the long road ahead.
  5. Learn other pragmatic skills, such as gunsmithing (and I’m actually interested in it), farming, and survival. No, I don’t think we’re going to end up in a post-nuclear wasteland (:crossed_fingers:) but things could get quite bad between increasing authoritarianism across the world, climate change, and a willingness to harm each other rather than try to understand each other. Odds are very good given a long enough lifespan that a major collapse is going to happen, and if I’m wrong, they’re still be useful skills to have.
  6. Learn other entertaining skills. I mean, the above are about hobbies, skills, and practical techniques. But even if I live through countless disasters in more-or-less good health, being able to keep my spirits isn’t a given. So now I’m into things like a lot of others have posted - learn one or more instruments [ ideally simple, portable things like a harmonica but I’d love to be able to play acoustic guitar] and sing as well as my poor natural abilities allow. Study multiple languages, especially Spanish, Cantonese, and recover and improve my high school French.

Sadly, the thing that worries me the most is that I’m seeing all that -time- and ignoring that it means I will likely never be able to stop working full time. I mean, not much of the above is going to happen given a 40 hour work week because the trappings of modern life are going to keep requiring income, and while you might squeak a few decades off retiring you’re going to eventually have to find a way to create a new identity (which is another colossal undertaking!) and start all over again, though probably with some form of limited handout from your last life. Though that might be a good way to pick up more practical skills.

Best case is that I’ll manage to accumulate enough wealth to set up a trust to maintain a small piece of land in reasonably civilized nation (a place in Canada with access to decent local water supply sounds nice!) and control it through the trust. But that’s best case. Worst case, working a bunch of boring but unremarkable jobs for a few centuries avoiding a collapse, and immortality is going to suck very quickly.

22

I would like to go back to school as a part-time student and just take classes here and there as they amused me. Long-term, I would try to collect a PhD, an ScD, an LLD, and either a ThD (which officially, is a Doctor of Theology, but which I would refer to as a Doctor of Thinkology) or an STD (Doctor of Sacred Theology, just to snicker at the initialism).

I would like to move to the seacoast, learn to sail, and learn to navigate by compass, sextant, and chronometer. Then I would like to circumnavigate the globe twice, once in a one-person sailboat, once as the captain of a clipper ship.

I would like to learn several different art forms, and several different musical instruments. When I was a kid, I loved to perform, but hated to practice. I would spend a couple of decades building a nest egg, then hire instructors to stand behind me with a bullwhip, forcing me to practice.

23

If everyone was as long lived, you couldn’t have everyone retired on their investments because short of total robotic production or replicators, somebody’s still got to do the work. This would probably manifest as investment opportunities being both risky and volatile, with the vast number of investors seeing their holdings go under and only a handful of adroit/ lucky/ crooked people staying on the top of the heap.

24

If everyone were (mostly) immortal, I think that would speed up the deployment of robots. Who the hell wants to wake up and go to work, 5 days a week, for the next thousand years?

One big thing, economically, is that a lot more people would end up actually owning their own home. Currently, a 25 or 30 year mortgage means that most people only get their house paid off at about the time they retire, and most probably end up selling within a decade and half after that. But if you didn’t have to worry about dying, or ending up in some kind of nursing home, once the mortgage is paid off, it’s yours, for as long as you want it. Housing costs go down by at least an order of magnitude, basically taxes, utilities and insurance, and maybe a bit of lay-away for maintenance work. That relieves a big part of the pressure to work every day, or frees up income for savings and investments.

So, even without robots, most people would probably end up working less, at least part of the time. I’ve often thought we’d end up with some kind of “episodic retirement”. Get training, get a job, work it for a decade or three while building up savings, and then ‘retire’ when the work becomes a bore. Spend a few years or decades in leisure and travel, and when the ennui starts to hit, find some new career that can interest you for a few decades. Wash, rinse, repeat.