The Curse of Immortality is going into an eternal all-fluid diet. I hope you like the texture of smoothies.
𝗦𝗲𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 & 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗳𝗳 𝗮𝘁
Bluesky |
Mastodon |
𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗺𝘆 𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗿 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺
I mean, vampires are immortal, not indestructible. If he really had it that bad I’m sure a date with a vampire hunter would solve it quickly.
Dude definitely needed therapy.
I mean, vampires are immortal, not indestructible.
They’re also instinctively driven to cannibalism and mass murder. The vampire is a metaphor for the aristocracy of old Europe. A seductive but ultimately grotesque ravenous monster that feeds on the common people as livestock and corrupts the very soil of the land they occupy.
Dude definitely needed therapy.
Tony Soprano also had a therapist.
I think the biggest problem with immortality is memory. How long until you have literally forgotten the person you have been before. Is that person then truly you, or have you died somewhere along the way?
How long until you have literally forgotten the person you have been before.
Hum… Probably some 5 to 10 years. Maybe less.
All those philosophical questions about personhood permanence (like the transporter one too) are a joke when compared to how impermanent people actually are.
I think it depends on the individual. I get gobsmacked at peoples limited memory of history. I find its like 5 but if you one standard deviation over its like 10 and then like 5% its 20 and some small number is likely 40 and then not sure how its like for those folks that seem to be able to remember every detail of their lives. Granted even then its like a feel for who you were and memories of how you handled things or did for particular things you can bring up. Then you have to add in though all that evidence that every time we remember something we have a chance of changing it.
Hum… Probably some 5 to 10 years. Maybe less.
Your personality changes over time, but there are formative memories that stay with people until they die. You can see it in phobias and other mental disorders very explicitly, but also in favorite foods or cultural preferences or adherence to certain dogmatic beliefs.
Like, imagine if people who came of age in the 1950s were to just live forever ruling over the rest of us and imposing their standards and beliefs generation after generation, with new members only added to the gerontocracy by demonstrating a nostalgia for an era they never even grew up in. Imagine what kind of place that would be like to live in.
imagine if people who came of age in the 1950s were to just live forever ruling over the rest of us and imposing their standards and beliefs generation after generation
I really recommend you look at history because most of those people did not have the values you associate with them back then in the 1960s and 1970s.
The problem with the gerontocracy is not really the inter-generational differences.
those people did not have the values you associate with them back then in the 1960s and 1970s
Oh yeah. Nobody was suggesting we round up all the immigrants, criminalize homosexuality, segregate people by race, and deny women rights over their own bodies in the 1960s and 70s. And we definitely weren’t cooking up a Cold War with an Eastern Power, or picking fights with left-leaning democracies in Latin America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa, during this time.
It’s actually totally different now!
Nobody was suggesting we round up all the immigrants, criminalize homosexuality, segregate people by race, and deny women rights over their own bodies in the 1960s and 70s.
Old people were. There was entire movement around it.
Those people weren’t the old ones at the time.
They were. Donald Trump was as much of a racist, sexist, xenophobic shitbag when he demanded the execution of the Central Park Five as he is today. Joe Biden was as committed to the Zionist project under Ben-Gurion as Netanyahu from Philly. Dianne Feinstein was fighting to put the Confederate Flag up over San Fransisco over forty years ago. Mitch McConnell has been fronting for fossil fuel companies all the way back to his days as legislative assistant to Marlow Cook and and campaign aid for Tom Emberton. My man was an aid to Robert fucking Bork ffs. Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl.
These people all sucked back then. They have always sucked. They were the teenagers screaming at the first black students to cross the segregation line after Brown v Board. They were the Vietnamese veterans doing war crimes at My Lai and flying bombing runs over Cambodia on behalf of Kissinger. They were taking money from Walmart and DOW Chemical and Raytheon and Salomon Smith Barney as soon as they were old enough to cash a paycheck. They were at the forefront of the Red Scare and the first in line to bend the knee to Ronald Reagan.
These people have been awful for eons.
In Iain M Banks’ Culture novels people get several hundred years old. Death is pretty much optional, they just usually choose to die at some point. The way they deal with the problem of memory seems to be that they just take longer to do things; working somewhere for 30 years is a stint. You might follow a hobby for 20 years, or take a 10 year vacation.
But there was one character who chose to not die. He was over a thousand years old and an important witness to something that happened during the Idiran wars (iirc). He did have that problem, and he had outsourced large parts of his memeories. Electronically, and in the form of an explorable virtual world.
edit: I’m now not 100% sure about the 2nd paragraph. Maybe it was in a Culture novel, but differently, maybe somewhere else, maybe I’m mixing up two stories…
He did have that problem, and he had outsourced large parts of his memeories. Electronically, and in the form of an explorable virtual world.
Ah, yes. Sherlock Holmes’s Mind Palace. I really hated that arc.
As someone with aphantaisha I sort of hate that, but the annoying part is that it still works. YMMV
I thought he kept dna memories in different parts of his body?
We all forget what it really was to be 6, yet we’re still us. To never change yourself isn’t a virtue and change doesn’t mean “losing yourself”, that’s a fallacy made up by the fearful. Friendship is also a temporary thing, you always lose some and gain some no matter how close (we as humans just hate to think about it that way).
All these supposed problems with immortality really are just made up, or an attempt to romanticise the painfully inevitable.
Theres is a rpg gamebook called “thousand years old vampire” that covers this.
Over time you literally forget parts of your life.
It’s a great way to spend a night with a single friend.
An immortal character from Doctor Who also covered this. She chronicles her life in a library of diaries but also destroyed some of them when the memories were too painful (her own children dying of old age).
I could play chrono trigger again for the first time! Hell yeah
You can do it now. It’s a rich enough game that I only vaguely remembered the high notes and was delightfully surprised at a bunch of lower key plot beats I’d forgotten.
Also, the mobile adaptation is pretty good.
I played it again about 5 years ago? Really holds up but being able to completely forget the story would be awesome
Why should one care? Live in the moment.
I have a book of underground monsters called Veins of the Earth, one of them is a vampire that got swallowed by a landslide and fossilized, still alive
That’s probably the scariest thought of immortality. Living normal life is one thing… hell most the things are just… more of the good and bad. But yeah over the course of thousands of years, the million to one scenerios that could get you trapped. (landslides, earth quakes, building collapses, swept out to sea, intentional “murder” (IE an enemy knows he can’t kill you, so he entombs, burries you etc…)
I hate blood. Im one of those folks. Often thought as a vampire I would just not be able to eat. But as I have tried to cut down on meat I suddenly realized that I would get taste receptors and such so that it would be easy. It gave me a better perspective for the vampires drinking animal blood in the settings that allow for it. Its like being vegan. I mean Im sure I would really really not want to drink humans blood. but its just so damn tasty.
The curse of true immortality is somehow still being consciously alive long after heat death of the universe… or during the next bing bang.
Either way you spend the vast majority of your eternity floating around in nothing but conditions where your body cant properly contain if self.
Tell us the story again, about how your immortality-wish went wrong, grangrangrangrangrangrangrandaddy!
