What are some good drawbacks to immortality that aren't just 'hah hah you forgot to say eternal youth as well?'

What are some good drawbacks to immortality that aren't just 'hah hah you forgot to say eternal youth as well?'

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You run out of "room" to remember shit so you need to forget something to learn/remember something new.

Limited practical memory storage. Gods have beefs with you over shit you forgot eons ago.

Depression of seeing the world passing you by, and becoming increasingly bereft of compassion as a result of seeing everything cycle so many times.

The ability to be tortured indefinitely.

Live forever does not mean cant die

Every ounce of life gained must be taken from another. Potentially in the form of blood, souls, internal organs, "life energy," etc.

So, wishing for immortality would result in a multiversal genocide?

You know how older generations frown upon the newer generations? Being immortal you will see society and the world advance around you while you will remain caught in the wind, in a world with a language that is like yours but not truly yours, with people that no longer understand you, with fleeting fashions that will mean nothing to you. Eventually you will become so out of touch with the modern world you will isolate yourself with the reality you managed to get a grip on, a reality that has already faded to being little more than an antiquity. A world of memories, of mummies and ghosts that is all in your head. And this isolation will become bigger until you realize you truly don't want to keep on living.

>Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged was - indeed, is- one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings.

Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had his immortaility inadvertantly thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.

This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this:

He would insult the Universe.

That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.

Perhaps, but it'd probably be more dramatic if as the bearer of immortality continues to live beyond the time they would naturally, they gradually (or in sudden bursts, if they survive a normally mortal wound due to the power) drain the world around them of life in an ever-increasing radius. After all, they don't need all the life, like, right now.

You're immortal, but your body isn't.

So imagine your body gets killed. Your soul is still around in your body. But it cannot use your body because it is dead. The body requires energy to be alive again. So the soul lingers around, trying to gather energy to revive the body. But the body is already rotting away - it is dead. So it takes more energy to revive the body.

By the time your soul has enough energy to revive the body, the end result of the revival of your body looks more like a golem made of graveyard soil than a body.

So now you can spend the next few years eating huge amounts of meat and bone, so you can reconstruct your fleshy parts - and you better hope no one thinks you're some undead zombie, or you'll have to start all over.

>you will see all your loved ones pass away
>after a while you'll probably be afraid of getting close to people since you know you'll just outlive them
>you will feel out of place as the world changes, empires rise and fall, cultures evolve
>eventually mankind will likely be destroyed, then you'll have to walk the earth alone for millenia
>eventually all life on earth will be snuffed out as the sun expands
>after untold millenia you will witness the heat death of the universe and have to live in a world of permanent darkness, where nothing grows or changes

The rnd of time will fucking suck.

Actually that's exactly what it means you dolt. You can't very well keep on living if you die, can you? No, no you can't, and you're not clever for deliberately misinterpreting the definitions of words. In fact, that makes you an idiot. An illiterate idiot. So stop it.

I like this idea. A sort of conservation principle. There's only so much life to go around, so a the fact person who lives forever would conversely mean that all life is gathered in one place. The reason everything doesn't die instantly is because the lifespan is not made infinite from the start, it is extended in real-time by the continuous siphoning of life force.

You could take it further by making it cyclical. All life is gathered in one person. That person is functionally God, as all life ends and begins with them. Through division of that singular life, the world is reborn. But if the same principle of gradual concentration of life still applies, you end up with the same result as before, ad infinitum. It reminds me of the creation myth of Kill Six Billion Demons.

What's it called when you have a potentially unlimited lifespan, but can still get killed? I don't think I've heard any word for that but "immortal."

That's biological immortality. It's a different thing altogether than what we're talking about, which is just plain, regular, actual immortality.

Eternal growth? Not that it works like that IRL, but who cares. An infinite growing period sounds pretty bad. You could make it worse by saying the brain doesn't develop to keep up motor control.

Really simple, but also profoundly fucked if you think it through and it would just occur naturally with out any gotcha clauses like forgetting to ask for youth.

Perception of Time.

Think of the difference between how you perceived time as a child, then a teen, then someone in their twenties and then thirties. Now carry that over to your eighties still normal more or less. Then your hundreds weird but manageable, ideas like 24h days kind of start to lose their meaning. Then your thousands of years when things like weeks and months just blur together and even years kind of seem to get jumbled up, maybe something like generations are you new 'basic' unit of measurement.

You could still interact with people in the moment, when they're right there in front of you. But otherwise? Your perception would be so screwed you'd have to take really meaningful measures to ensure the concept of time as other people know it doesn't become irrelevant entirely. From your perspective, it'd be like having having an annoying alarm clock wake you up every two to three minutes, otherwise you end up with situations like.

"I just saw you, what do you mean it's been ages!? And since when is baby Timmy 6 feet tall?"

Getting trapped would be pretty shitty in this situation.

Maybe Benjamin Button syndrome, but back and forth? You're born, you grow old, then you hit a point where you start growing younger, then you grow old again, and repeat it like so.

Everyone you've ever known will grow old and die while you don't age a day.

'You' can't die, but 'you' for the purposes of this magic is 'your cells', which can still be separated from your body like normal. Attempts to kill you usually result in you regaining consciousness centuries later, as soon as one of your followers or some mage who just wanted to learn your Most Ancient Wisdom manages to painstakingly stitch enough of you back together, cell by immortal cell, to wake you back up.

You've managed to keep most of your original bone marrow in one place, but the bones themselves are a regular Ship of Theseus, an awkward patchwork of calcium you've had to magically knit together in just the right way or else suffer incessant, infuriating aches all over your body. The little bones in your ears are an absolute bitch to get right, and you've spent many a deaf century tracking down the spirit or descendants of the person responsible for destroying your last ones and extracting vengeance upon them (and/or a new set out of them).

You've spent Gods know how many hours removing tumors from your body, but, constrained by the tools and knowledge of Medieval medical practice, it'll be a long, long time before you even know just how thoroughly you'd have to cleanse yourself to be rid of the entire cancerous lineage whose progenitor was in your body the day you drank the Draught of Life Eternal. Said tumors have to be carefully contained away from any material they could grow in, and on occasion you'll remember the ever-growing pile of You sealed away in an airless, waterless, demiplane, and groan softly to yourself.

>go to take a nap
>wake up and a bunch of regressed primitives have taken to worshipping you as the Sleeping God, who will lead them to a golden age upon his awakening
>"This was a diner moments ago, what happened?"

It is it's own drawback. Everyone and everything you know and love and care about will die.
New life every generation or so, because people will notice you not ageing.
Centuries of memories to sift through, associations everywhere, everyone reminds you of someone you knew, progress everywhere trying to outpace you.

>get to have sex with teenage chicks for a few years once or twice a century
Eh sounds pretty good.

>loses bowel control for decades at a time
It's not ideal.

You'll live to see a world without [insert your ethnicity here] people. You will be the last of your "kind" eventually.

Pity the immortal man, for he is humanity's janitor/handiman, No sooner did he finish putting up another get off my lawn sign, only for another herd illiterate knuckle dragging primitives start traipsing through his garden the very next day.

You get really bored. Because you've been there and done that.

Heh, like that part

Being buried alive

If you were immortal, why would you eat in the first place?

Having to eat a still warm and bloody heart once a month was my personal favorite proviso I ever dropped on someone.
Party Warlord: 'I want to be immortal!'
Fey Sorceress: "Great, get in my fey party van, this'll totes go the way you want."
>10 minutes later
Party Warlord: 'How did this go so wrong!?'

Mercifully, sexual gametes don't count as 'you' per se, which means you can safely pursue the biological function you rendered irrelevant all those centuries ago. You're not up to the emotional turmoil of mortal lovers and the children that come with them, though, which means you're pretty much stuck with succubi and incubi (the summoning of which is the only other reason people become wizards anyways), and that works out surprisingly well. Your Infernal lover can at least respect that a contract's a contract, and that Devils don't really have a right to complain when someone gets stuck in a deal that doesn't pan out the way they were expecting. After all, they were the ones who set the terms, 'I shall serve you in all ways until the day you die, whereupon your soul becomes mine for all eternity.', and you haven't done anything to violate your end of the bargain.

Sure, they were horrified when they realized what they signed up for, but they never really took it personally; That's just how things work in Hell, and they were mostly upset they were the loser this time. After a while of getting used to it, though, you can tell that something's changed deep within them. They've been permanently taken out of the endless cycle of ambition, betrayal, and paranoia that is Devil society, and as rage faded into despair into boredom, they've slowly taken an interest in the trivialities of the life they're now stuck in, and are coming to appreciate human existence. On your end, back in those first few years, when you were still mentally the hot-blooded young mage who you will physically remain forever, you of course pursued every debauched and deranged fantasy the Bargain entitled you to, but as that inevitably got old, you came to value them more as an assistant, and eventually as a genuine companion. In the end, you both ended up in the only remotely healthy relationship you could have ever achieved, and eternity seems a lot more bearable.

Given enough time, you'll become a living fossil a la Encino Man.

You're body still continues to degrade without ever properly dying. Even if you are perfectly meticulous in maintaining your body, it will start to fail.

>Your teeth will rot away, making it impossible for you to eat anything that isn't liquid or not mashed into a fine pulp
>Your eyes will cloud until all vision is eventually obscured by cataracts. Removing them affords only a temporary respite
>Your memory will degrade, until you forget even the most basic functions. You will not recognize people around you, and before you forget how to speak, you'll be left reciting nursery rhymes when you were a child, the only thing left your brain refuses to lose. Eventually that too will leave, and you will be trapped in a body that refuses to move, your nervous system to degraded to properly respond.
>Your bones will erode and become fragile, breaking much easier. Immortality means this will never kill you, but it also means you will find no relief from the pain

Does it specifically need to be a human heart?

Have you tried not eating? It sucks.

Not if you're an active player in world politics.

Many stories of Kings of Old kept their people alive and strong.

See: Armenia, Greece, Crimea etc.

The only problem would be a cultural shift that the immortal forgot or did not appreciate as being significant.

If you want to know the future, imagine a mighty wizard standing at the door, asking a succubus reading a book in her jammies, if she wants him to pick up eggs while he's out. Forever.

Okay, I don't know or care if anyone else read this, this thread let me come up with a character concept I love and am putting in my games sometime. Thanks for existing, Veeky Forums.

>massive natural disaster wipes out entire human population/planet/etc.
>you are forced to drift endlessly alone through the universe, hoping you'll happen to land on pleasant enough planet instead of getting sucked into the gravitational pull of a gas giant or a sun or a black hole

>completely immortal
>meaning that after the heat-death of the universe you're damned to eternal conscious limbo

Veeky Forums has some of the dumbest dregs of humanity sometimes

I have. First couple days suck but when you overcome them it doesn't really feel bad at all. Well, that is until your body begins to wither from the lack of nutrition.

>Immortality MUST have a drawback because I'm a mortal human and the idea of someone else getting to live forever hurts my feelings
Anyone else tired of this shit? It's all over fantasy and fiction.
Why can't you have simply unconditional immortality from high technology and sheer number of fail safes?
Same with those fags who think death is some moral righteousness or some bullshit like that and therefore rail against others attempting researching into stuff prolonging age.

You mean aside from the existential dread and eventual loss of everyone you've ever known or cared for?

I could only imagine that you'd eventualy get tired of humanity in general.

And to expand on what I mean exactly by that, a lot of people have been talking about memory being a problem, but with your body being immortal I would think your memory cells in your brain would also be immortal, or at least wouldn't deteriorate. So you would run into the nasty end of the old saying that History repeats itself, but on a grand scale; you would not only see the world repeating itself but you would be stuck in the infinite loop of watching it happen with new peoples in new places.

It would almost be like watching the same season of a show over and over. It doesn't matter how much you liked the show it would become boring. Likewise; an immortal being may try and learn about different people and experience life in new ways with each generation as a way to stave off this fatigue but eventually you'll notice the patterns as people repeat what's come before with only light thematic changes.

Eventually you'd just fall so out of touch with the rest of humanity that you wouldn't be able to effectively communicate anymore. I mean imagine a Templar trying to have a regular conversation with a modern man his age and you'd get the picture.

The human body INEVITABLY develops cancer soooner or later. It obviously won't kill you but it will hurt like a bitch

this

Let me go one step further and say that I also get pissed off when time travelers are forbidden from "changing anything." Motherfucker, why does it make a difference if something was changed in the past, or if I decide to do something right now which changes the world.

technology obviously doesn't make people unconditionally more happy in general, so why would technological immortality make them happy?
humans weren't made to live forever, no being was. forcing unending life on yourself would probably be a huge strain on your body and especially on your mind
it's clear that technology generally creates as many problems as it resolves, so why not apply that to immortality?

Nah, credit where it's due, he got around it by capturing a troll and chaining it up in his sex dungeon for the rest of eternity as a supplier of hearts.

Still, I managed to convince him to eat more than a few hearts during battles and eventually he degenerated into a Vlad the Impaler tier monster.
All in all, a win for the bugfuck insane fey.

Wow, way to read, bucko.

>technology obviously doesn't make people unconditionally more happy in general, so why would technological immortality make them happy?

false dichotomy. Immortality could result in no net change to happiness, rather than either making you unconditionally happy or having drawbacks just for the sake of it.

>it's clear that technology generally creates as many problems as it resolves, so why not apply that to immortality?

No it isn't. It creates some problems but it solves far more.

I want to say our games never really degraded into body parts consumption. I really do...

Kallor from Malazan Book of the Fallen.

He's cursed to live forever, but never get what he actually wants.

>immortality could result in no net change to happiness,
Notwithstanding the fact that happiness is not objectively measurable.

Bah, you haven't lived until you've had one of your characters be compelled to eat the hearts of his enemies.
Watching the look on the other players faces when my supposedly mild mannered mage snapped like a twiglet and tore the bloody heart from the (female) BBEG and eating it because he'd secretly been a predatory fey monster for the past 2 years of playing and they never really 'got' it until that point was amazing.
He totally lost control after he found out she'd pulled some NTR tier shit involving his Nymph lover who'd disappeared 5 years previously in character, pretended he had it all under control.
Next thing they know he's standing with his boot on her throat, is coated up to the elbow and down to the chin in viscera and she's had her chest cavity cracked open like a walnut, great scenic moment.

whatever, there are more choices than just "I'm immortal now so all my worries are gone" and "oh god no what have I done"

Narratively, immortality isn't particularly interesting unless it has a drawback, fucko. That's the entire point of this thread. I know you want an excuse to be angry about the whole 'Mortal's Sour Grapes' thing, but we've all heard it a million times before and that's not what this thread was supposed to be about.

Don't be a faggot.

>technology obviously doesn't make people unconditionally more happy in general
Spoken like a true flesh primitive.
If I reeingneer your mindspace to unconditionally generate happy hormones then yes you will be unconditionally more happy.

>Bah, you haven't lived until you've had one of your characters be compelled to eat the hearts of his enemies.
In WoD: Vampire that's kind of given...

Unless your perception of those hormones numbs down over time... I don't have enough neurobiological knowledge to tell either way, but it's certainly a consideration.

>Narratively, immortality isn't particularly interesting unless it has a drawback, fucko.
>implying death in a society of immortals doesn't have far more weight than a society where hundreds of thousands die every day

Eventually running out of new things to try will suck, food eventually tastes like nothing, sex loses its appeal.
All your days blur together, because you have so many, and you've seen so much that it all just seems like one long day.
There's no suprises.
At a certain point, you just start cursing immortality, wishing you had succumbed to death like everyone else you knew, long ago. You fall into depression and soul crushing boredom, and occasionally something big will happen that snaps you out of it, but that's just for a while, right until you remember that this is just a blip, a momentary distraction in an endless life of misery, loneliness and boredom.

i thought it was good user

just so i understand, the body itself and the soul have two diffrient immortal states. the soul is your awareness and is directly working (awake from a perspective of living) when the body has enough of it together to start working. the body cells are infinite in durability and living length, and can be seperated from each other, but will fuse back together if they get back together. unless there is enough of a mass of 'you', you can't actually wake up. any missing parts you do not have will impede your ability to function, but as long as you have the bare minium of organs required for life, you can keep chugging

did i get that right?

>Notwithstanding the fact that happiness is not objectively measurable.
the same can be said about this
>It creates some problems but it solves far more.
technology doesn't make people happier. it may increase the living standards, cure diseases etc. but people will always find new things to worry about, if it's not malnutrition and diseases it's loneliness or a life devoid of meaning.
if humans are miserable they're miserable because they're humans.

Well, now you're just being contrarian, but at least you're being contrarian in an interesting way.

Douglas Adams is a treasure.

That's exactly what OP said he didn't want brought up.

I dunno, I'd rather be really bored and disconnected from society than dead.

You carry a bunch of ancient diseases.

You properly build up resistances to new ones, but anyone who isn't used to being around you eats a loads of exotic plagues.
Think colonial Europe spreading European diseases everywhere, etc.

>endless misery
>a state without consciousness in which you do not feel anything
the choic is quite simple I'd say. it's not like you can FEEL death anyway, it's just like going to sleep but never waking up
you die every night in a way

I've no idea why that's so commonly repeated idea when it's so easily proved wrong by actually talking with actual old people. They still have a fucking sense of time and won't reply to you hours later because they zoned out.

Note that people over 20 are not old. People over 80 are getting there.

I imagine you already have your wish

Any feeling at all is better than death, in my eyes.

Give me endless suffering over death. Show me two buttons, one says 'Immortality but get tortured forever', the other says 'Die immediately', I pick the former, every single time.

Wait a short while for the trap/room/mountain to crumble to dust.
Even black holes evaporate, eventually.

>i_understood_that_reference.gif

interesting. most people would generally prefer death to eternal hell. do you have some kind of phobia regarding loss of consiousnes?

Then you fucking imagine a new universe.

Well, there's a theory that given enough time you get used to even the worst of the pains...

Shouldn't you say the loss of existential dread?

Permanent cessation of consciousness is terrifying.

I literally don't understand why everyone else seems to be 'okay' with the idea that they will eventually die. I really, really don't want to die, and would accept pretty much any form of contractual immortality as long as my consciousness persists indefinitely. Sleep doesn't count, I wake back up when I'm done with that.

"One can eventually get used to everything, except an icicle up the ass. It will melt first."

Well, to be fair mate, none of us are really cool with the idea.
Basically when you get down to it, the reason we always look for stories where immortality sucks is because of Sour Grapes.
'Oh, it wouldn't be that great, who really wants to not die, I bet it sucks, having a chance to see the rest of eternity, right?'

No one believes it but by god can we try and convince ourselves.

>Sleep doesn't count, I wake back up when I'm done with that.
Except for once when you will not.

>every single time
Is this some sort of psychological torture where you get forced to make the decision over and over again?

I mean it is a bit scary but it's just such an irrational fear. Why would you be afraid of something you won't even notice and that will happen anyway at some point?
It will most likely happen when you're old, way past your prime and your health is shit anyway, so why the hell not?

I think maybe you don't comprehend what it'd be like to be eternally tortured. There's nothing wrong with that, mind. I don't think most people can comprehend what it's like to be tortured. I know I can't.

But I do think after a much shorter time than you'd think, you'd really wish you'd chosen oblivion instead.

"The hardest part about being immortal is that it is difficult to find something to do, the first 2000 years I did nothing, the next 2000 I did good things and the last 2000 I've done bad things"
Mr. Mxyzptlk from Whatever Happen to the Man of Tomorrow by Alan Moore & Curt Swan

Anyone watched The Man From Earth?
It's about a guy who claims to be alive for some 14k years, and he discusses with professors from many areas about how that could happen and the consequences, like:
>everyone you know dies, their lifes passing in the blink of an eye
>everything you know changes until it's unrecognisable
>you wonder why you're like this, if you're cursed, blessed, if anyone is doing something wrong
>have to move on every now and then because people get afraid that you're stealing their life energy or something
>get tired of people making the same mistakes over and over
>spoileruyour attempt of teaching some human fraternity is deformed into a religion, and you watch it spreading across the world for two thousand years

>watch your son have a heart attack and die in front of you

Yeah but a society of immortals is going to have difficulty because reproduction would have to be highly regulated. Also, in the words of Max Planck, "science advances one funeral at a time"; technology would get in a rut as old people slowly change their ideas of things. It may even end up like elves in pic related. A whole society of mortals downplays the loneliness and increases the stagnation. I'd snap personally.

I can confidently say that I wouldn't.

You don't understand the lengths I would go to if it would let me avoid the inevitability of death. Like, I've known pretty severe, prolonged pain in my life, and it was basically nothing compared to what I would willingly endure if it meant living forever.

I don't want to die. If I could be immortal, nothing else is relevant.

Buried alive.

Damn user

>What is the plot of Anne Rice's vampire series.

Eternal suffering once the sun goes supernova and you're drifting in space with no oxygen

The alternative isn't that attractive either.

People do perceive time pass faster the older they get.
Not in the "delay when talking to you" sense, but in the "oh, it's been 3 years already? feel like it was last month" sense.
t. psychologist

>If I could be immortal, nothing else is relevant.
youtube.com/watch?v=e-KRw40Rwy4

Nice to see someone else agreeing with me.