I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.
I don’t think you’d remember a break up from hundreds of years ago, let alone be upset about it.
Discovering the upper limits to what the human mind can retain and just constantly forgetting all the shit you used to find important.
Life will pound you into an uncaring jaded disinterested unloveable husk of a being after too many emotional scars from losing loved ones, too much of seeing humanity make the same mistakes, and too much watching the knowledge you gained turned irrelevant.
Or, life will beat into you an uncanny ability to converse and relate to others, even if fleetingly.
Watch The Man from Earth.
I’ll say no one can truly know. Unless you are yourself immortal
On one hand, you have eternity to come to grips with everything you’ve done. On the other hand, it might take eternity to come to grips with everything you’ve done.
Seeing all of your friends and family die, knowing you’ll never stop missing them.
Having the perspective of centuries. Seeing society make the same mistakes over and over again because they forget, but you never do. It would drive me mad. Already does, considering I have the ability to, and have, read history. I just imagine living it over and over to be tedious.
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.
So just my normal day?
I wrote a story that features such an entity and what was interesting about it to me was how even the slightest glimmer of life beyond their void would lead to an all-consuming desire to experience “living” again.
You know how the curse of pet ownership is that you will almost certainly outlive them?
That, but with everyone you love
One of my books features an immortal protagonist and I’ve as such thought about this quite a bit. More than the answers already provided here, what I found interesting as a writer was the balance I needed to find between making an immortal detached from mortal values while still being engaging to mortal readers.
Said as a pithy question, if you can outlive everyone’s decisions and mistakes, what would it take to make you do anything at all?
Having to keep track of that evil snail.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5ipinn/you_and_a_super_intelligent_snail_both_get_1/
Being eaten by sea anemones, tuna, sharks, swordfish, sea turtles, penguins, and other jellyfish.
If other people are also immortal, the awkwardness of all of them eventually becoming your exes
That old person feeling of no longer being with “it”, and what’s “it” now being strange and scary probably compounds over the centuries.
And this is why elder vampires are so vengeful.
I absolutely love the scene in “Interview with the Vampire” where Lestat is found hiding away in a room, distraught by all the creations of modern civilization.
Given a long enough time frame, the vast majority of an immortal life would be spent buried beneath something or floating in the void of space. Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don’t die…nothing to do but float in space.
You might counter that with, "well yeah, but eventually I’d find other sentient life forms and/or people again.” And sure, maybe, but that wouldn’t last as long as you…and then you’re just alone floating in space again, for the vast majority of your life. The only thing to look forward to, since you will outlast everything, is the end of time itself.
I think there is a clear difference between being immortal and being indestructible. I would think if your planet breaks apart you’d probably die with it being crushed or whatever. Also always unclear if being immortal means you don’t need to breathe air.
I think a good author makes it explicit.
Here’s a sci-fi web novel I read years ago, where a couple of the characters end up being immortal in different ways, and in one case they show exactly how far that can go (in the context of the story) even without invoking heat death.
Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don’t die…nothing to do but float in space.
LOL, that’s just the beginning – only on the order of 1012 - 1014 years. After that, you’re going to be waiting around for proton decay (1036 - 1043 years), all the way up to 10^10^120 years* for the final heat death of the universe.
(* Anybody know how to get Lemmy markdown to do nested superscripts?)
10^10^10
Does your consciousness evolve to Godhood, and you reach back beyond time and create the universe which birthed you?
The fantastic animated show, Pantheon explores that very idea at the very end of its second and final season.
You join the Q Continuom.
Without getting into the heat death of the universe and all that, I can think of something that happens much, much sooner. I’m only middle aged and I already don’t like where the world is going. Can you imagine being centuries, or eons past the era you identified with? Can you imagine how insufferable young people and old people alike would seem when you have centuries worth of life experience and wisdom? Can you imagine a horde of little edge lords on the internet confidently yet incorrectly telling you about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when you were there when it was signed?
Knowing the answer to some of history’s biggest mysteries, because you were there, but being unable to speak about them because, 1, that would expose you, 2, nobody would believe you either way because nobody expects you to be THAT old.
Also, it is already frustrating seeing kids being dismissive or denying events that you yourself have lived. Imagine being thousands of years old and seeing so much shit, but those events are rarely retold, forgotten, or straight up denied by conspiracies or future governments that won’t admit their fault on it.