On the Tragedy of Immortality

I suppose we all want to live forever. I can’t imagine what we’d do with all that time, though. After you’d read everything and been everywhere, what would you do to occupy yourself? Would you watch TV? Would your vast perspective of culture and history make all but the very greatest of human performances in art, literature, film, and sport seem mundane? And what would you do when all your friends died? Who would you talk about the good old days with? How would you engage yourself with the new generations, with their impatience, their idiocy, with the fact that they would really believe they had invented sex, rebellion, rock and roll?

You’d be decreasingly understood, decreasingly thought sane. You’d adjust to thinking in terms of millennia, planning in terms of eons, looking for projects to last as long as could be—making s statue out of an entire mountain, maybe, or writing a history of all peoples. The foreseeable future, the longer you lived, would get longer too. Vast cycles of time you’d remember as easily as the rest of us remember a season. The paroxysms of governments wrecked by scandal or disorganization or political mischief or war would just seem like so many minor domestic tiffs.

Or worse, equipped with only a feeble human mind, you’d be driven actually insane by the endless passing of days, the mindless sameness of it all. You’d forget to stay stable, be thrust back to dealing with reality moment-to-moment, fail to plan at all since planning would mean releasing the maddening tumble of time, revealing all that you had purposefully forgotten, all the confusing monotony you had tried hard not to recall.

You’d perhaps grow steadily less and less human, less and less able to see the mortal’s need to make today important: “There will always be more time where that came from,” you’d say, or “There is no time at all; we’re captured by our mortality to see these differences, to suffer through the beautiful minutiae.” But beauty, you’d see so much better than we, fades as fast as an unwatched sunset. Beauty, perhaps, would be the biggest tragedy, the greatest loss, revealed by its temporality to be a dropping leaf, the vapor that forms above a still pond on a cool morning.

You’d know, at least, that the rage of day itself is no more real than the moon reflected in glass by a base and unfocused perception.

And maybe, forced into an imbecility of forgetting, you could recapture that essence of being alive by actually living only in the moment. Having executed memory, you’d be blissfully reduced to living like a cat—or less—like a lizard: pissing, shitting, sleeping as it struck you. Chances are you wouldn’t fuck.

You almost couldn’t fuck because who would believe you? How could you gain the confidence of mortals, with their petty plans, their naive little histories? How could you raise a family? How could you suffer through so many deaths of lovers, children, grandchildren? How could you work these silly little jobs to support them, work predicated on the asinine concerns of market fluctuation, of the boss’s desire for a new boat?

Maybe you’d kill a mortal or two, just for fun, spend some time in jail. How would the authorities feel about having to let you out in apparent good health after 150 years?

You could master every martial art, kick anyone’s ass. But imagine the scars you’d have by 175 or 200 years old, provided in your immortality you’d heal in the same, imperfect way. Forget about fighting: mere accidents would pile them on. You’d be an unrecognizable lump of knotted, healed-over flesh, a wad of twisted skin. A piteous sight you’d be, and in your hideousness, even less likely to get lucky.

But let’s say you’re merely immune from aging, that you could die of accident or injury, immune from disease but not from bodily insult. How long before you did yourself in? How many years before you just got bored and wanted to go? How long before the loneliness drove you over the edge? Would you begin to take risks, be careless, punch bikers, speed incessantly, skydive every day?

How small is our scope? How innate our ignorance?

So when the shamans of the new science, the promoters of the artificial intelligences that will model our minds and take us into perpetuity say that this will make us live forever, I ask who would want to?