I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.
Edit 1:
- Heath death of the universe, Death of the sun, etc, does not count. I feel like focusing on this is an overused point.
Edit 2:
- Loneliness does not count. I feel like we all know immortality means you’ll miss people and lose them.
Being asked your birthdate in order to view a game on Steam, and the year dropdown not going back far enough.
All the comments assume everybody else isn’t also immortal. I forget the title and author but there’s an old sci fi story (or novel?) about a future where everybody lives for centuries, and they’ve found that the brain only retains a certain amount of experience. They have long careers, get tired of doing whatever, re-educate and do something else, or even have multiple families they eventually forget about. A couple of the characters are surprised to find out they used to be married like a century earlier. To me that seems vaguely like reincarnation, and I kind of don’t hate the idea. I really don’t see any downside to that scenario, or even just going on forever.
People are focused on having regrets and negatives that last forever. But buck up li’l camper, you can learn to move on from stuff. And I say this as a dad whose daughter had cancer at age 10 (she survived). It was hell and I wouldn’t want to live through that whole period again, but I don’t consider it a reason not to want to live forever. The trick is to learn how to cope with these things and not let them outweigh the good experiences you have.
Is it: “the age of pussyfoot” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_the_Pussyfoot
That could be it - many elements are familiar, although the title isn’t at all, but I have read a lot of Fredrik Pohl. The plot synopsis also doesn’t mention the characters finding out they had been married before. Maybe that’s a small detail that just stands out more in my mind.
A scifi short story I read was set in a somewhat idyllic future.
Robots did everything. Everyone was given housing, food etc. Health was covered and people lived virtually forever. Nobody worked, and you could travel and do anything you wanted.
The most prized thing, that everyone was desperate for, was having an original thought.
Reminds me another story about an idyllic world where almost nobody worked and everything was provided. At one point a crew showed up to repair a house, and everybody gathered around to watch, marveling at their work clothes and tools. One guy yearned to use tools so he started making little craft items at home, and trading them to people for worthless little tiddly wink tokens they used for friendly bets on sports. Then his neighbors started doing the same thing and they got a little economy going, using the tokens as currency, until the government got wind of it and squashed the whole thing because commerce was illegal.
Depends on the type of immorality. Do you continue to age? If no, what age do you stop? Eventually the universe will die. So what happens to you then?
It might be fun for a while. Maybe even a long while. But that fun will be gone in an instant compared to the trillions and trillions of years you will float in a dark dying universe of nothing.
immortality doesn’t guarantee perpetual health, you’re alive, but so broken and sick you wish you could die, but you can’t
Yeah this answer.
Imagine being immortal and you get stuck somewhere.
Like in a giant land slide.
“I have no mouth and I must scream” could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.
This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus
In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten
Basically all of the time you’re alive will be after the heat death of the universe, where you will be floating in space, with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience. Complete darkness, complete silence, in a complete vacuum, for eternity. Every other particle in the universe is forever out of your reach. You know that you will have nothing forever. You will never see, hear, or touch anything again, for all of time, which will never end. The trillions of years that preceded your float through the void fade into a distant memory as you outlive twice as much time, four times as much, a trillion-trillion times as much, and infinitely more.
