"Reastically", what psychological changes would be caused by living several centuries, assuming no forms of dementia?

"Reastically", what psychological changes would be caused by living several centuries, assuming no forms of dementia?
Pic somewhat related, I'm not specifically talking about intelligent undead.

"Realistically", that is an impossible question to know the answer to because the only examples we have of lifeforms living that long have very different brains and bodies from ourselves, like certain varieties of turtle.

Probably nothing. The human mind already has a defense mechanism against gaining too much information or experience. It's called "forgetting". Consider that most people can't even remember what they were doing last Tuesday unless it was significant. Why should it be any different if instead it's Tuesday from 500 years ago?

Likewise, while losing loved ones would theoretically be hard, most people can "get over it". A man who marries at 20 but then loses his spouse at 21 isn't necessarily going to be perpetually consumed by grief. Yes, it does happen to some people, but plenty of others do move on. That doesn't necessarily mean that the love they felt was less "real", it just means that the human heart is made of stern stuff and can open itself to love again.

Basically, I'd hazard a guess that a significant number of people would be just fine. Look at Highlander, or Baccano!, for how immortals would act. Some would be crazy. Some would be perfectly well-adjusted. But that's not any different from how it is among mortals. So why draw a distinction?

I'd expect them to be less tolerant of boredom outside their routine, driving them to seek new forms of entretainment as they get burnt by them, possibly going back in a cyclic fashion. (e.g. gamble because it's unpredicatability is exciting, then chess because they want to be more in control of what's going on, then theatre because they want to relax before going back to gambling to scratch the itch, etc)
If their memory is humanlike, they will forget things with time, so they won't have "too much information" problems, but that prevents them from being age-old fountains of wisdom. How they would handle having photographic or otherwise oustanding memory is up to you. It could cause madness or merely accelerate the speed at which they get bored. Or they might just not mind at all.
Going back to entretainment, they would have so much time to experiment that they might find entretainment in outlandish things, whether it's something as mundane as birdspotting or excessively elaborate proceedings.

As we age, we slowly lose interest in the things that used to entertain us. Our wisdom and experience makes that which we've enjoyed become mundane.

Over time, monotony would set in. The immortal would likely become withdrawn, bored of the outside world and tired of it's ignorant youth. It'd have no one to socialize with because no one truly could understand it's depths.

To be completely honest, your general apathy filled lich who sits around at home all day isn't far off from what any immortal would become.

I highly recommend The Portrait of Dorian Grey, it's an extreme example due to the guy forcing his way through all of life's pleasures in like a decade then wondering why it doesn't do it for him any more, but it's true irregardless of what'd happen to any mindset that lives too long.

We can forget, it's our mechanism, but it was never intended for such long lived periods.

We'd never forget enough that we'd be able to enjoy things as we used to.

I suppose that depends entirely on the individual and the society they grew up in. Is it normal to love this long? Do they have friends and family that lives this long? If so then there's unlikely to be any major change. Maybe a significantly lower birth rate and a different view on marriage (if you live 500 years you probably won't stay with the one person that whole time)

If it's just one person living that long, then I'd expect isolationism, nihilism etc. Ie they would be disenfranchised with normal humans and probably very independent since everyone they get to know ages and dieso much sooner than them. It might even treat humans or other mortals like we treat pets - a member of the family that dies long before us, then we just get a new one after a bit if grieving. If you get sick we put you down etc.

Hard to really say how it would affect a single human though since everyone would develop very differently over such a long time.

>"Reastically", what psychological changes would be caused by living several centuries, assuming no forms of dementia?

Their time frame or perception thereof of time would be completely askewed by their incredibly long lifespan: just like how 30 minutes is an eternity for a child, 30 years or even 100 years would mean very little to an individual who had lived for centuries. That isn't to say they'd be absent minded or massive procrastinators; they wouldn't just arbitrarily forget that other people think in terms of days, weeks, months, etc.. They'd just be way more patient and long-term driven.

I'd also imagine they would be more judgmental or a shrewder judge of character if only because they've lived the nightmare of living long enough to see how people consistently make the same mistakes over and over again. Anyone who studies history is doomed to see it repeated by the majority who are ignorant, well he would get to personally experience it and I can only imagine how hard that would strain his patience.
The plus side to this, though, is I'd imagine they would greatly treasure individuals whom defer from predictable routes or possess self-awareness.

They would never really be "ontop" of the latest memes or cultural trends: either because they move too fast and change too quickly or it would simply fly under their radar; ESPECIALLY because realistically they would never experience any of these trends or happenings as adolescents and wouldn't develop that nostalgia or cultural niche. They could never be a 90's kid as their only image of nostalgia would be for their original century/decade they imprinted upon... That isn't to say they wouldn't be able to appreciate upcoming plays, popular television series, or even keep up with interesting novels- it's just that they'd usually be maybe 3-10 years off from when it was "happening", they'd never catch it as it was starting or developing unless they were lucky or happenstance intervened.

But on the other hand, there's always new things to enjoy. Like, say you start in Spain and do everything there is to do in Spain, including learning all the languages there, getting involved in all the festivals, eat at all the best restaurants, whatever. Then you move to France and repeat the process, then Belgium, etc. Say it takes you ten years per major country to do everything significant there.

By the time you loop around the entire world and end up on the Iberian peninsula again, a century or two later, Spain will have changed so much that it'll have a completely new experience.

What do you remember of all that time?

Not too much. It would depend on the maintained or changing physiology of the person more than anything else. Humans go through some chances, which impact the brain at different stages for fairly logical reasons. If someone lives at age of 60 for the next 500 years it's likely they will adapt worse and relate people and situations to when they were still young to middle aged.
On the other hand if you freeze someone at age of 18 they will continue risky behavior but never really develop deeper reasoning. Instead they will remain more influenced by people and environment that is prominent in their lives.
If you assume that they go through a slower mental aging process then they would exhibit mostly normal behavior but their influences will be from different centuries.

That's pretty much true, but I'd just like to point out that Veeky Forums really doesn't have any idea what our current understanding of aging is— which is understandable, because other boards like Veeky Forums don't understand it either.

The broader issue is that we have at least three sources of psychological change related to human longevity: the process of the accumulation of experience, the typical social changes we go through as we age, and aging itself. It's very hard to separate these from each other. People get married, have children, and retire, and these events affect they way they think; for example, the elderly don't get much in the way of social contact and are often lonely. Aging also affects the way we think, most obviously in the form of age-related disorders like dementia or Alzheimer's, but also in subtler ways. With a time-independent marker for senescence, you could examine the accumulation of experience independently from senescence; from there, you could examine people who have abnormal life trajectories to differentiate accumulation of experience from social changes. But we don't quite have a time-independent marker for senescence, although I think we're getting there. (No, the answer is not telomere length.)

I'm highly skeptical of answers like because I think they're strongly conditioned on human senescence. If you could hang around for several centuries in the biological state of someone in their 20s, apathy might not set in at all.

You tell me.

Well that depends on what kind of life they live.

(cont'd)

Posting a review article in the vain hope that someone will read it. C'mon, it's not that hard!

Personally, I've long wondered whether living for a very long period of time produces a higher incidence of mental disorders. Some disorders, like depression or (obviously) PTSD, have external triggers. Say that you have an instantaneous probability P of developing some disorder D as a result of effectively random life stuff; if that's the case, then your cumulative odds of coming down with D depend on how long you live, and if you live a really long time, you're really likely to develop D.

>They would never really be "ontop" of the latest memes or cultural trends: either because they move too fast and change too quickly or it would simply fly under their radar; ESPECIALLY because realistically they would never experience any of these trends or happenings as adolescents and wouldn't develop that nostalgia or cultural niche. They could never be a 90's kid as their only image of nostalgia would be for their original century/decade they imprinted upon... That isn't to say they wouldn't be able to appreciate upcoming plays, popular television series, or even keep up with interesting novels- it's just that they'd usually be maybe 3-10 years off from when it was "happening", they'd never catch it as it was starting or developing unless they were lucky or happenstance intervened.
There's no way to know for sure, of course, but this is what I'd bet on. Life is different while your brain is maturing, so you'd always remember your childhood and adolescence differently from your adulthood, no matter how long you lived. Unless you periodically knock your brain back into behaving in a child-like way... which would be really interesting, wouldn't it? You might be able to do it without completely unraveling your developmental psychology and forgetting how to walk.

Man I just wanted to come here and say this one of the best threads on Veeky Forums currently. Top notch contributions guys.

(cont'd, again)

I worry that immortals would get stuck with ossified political and social views. If we had immortals around right now, a significant chunk of them would probably want to bring back slavery and others would probably hold a deep hatred of the Irish. They'd miss the good old days where we had public executions and nobody cared about marital rape.

Then again, we have /pol/, so I guess those views are still around anyway.

The boredom aspect is why I like when my immortals go into centuries long slumbers. So they can awaken to a world where there are many new things for them to try, and to enjoy. They'll try everything they can after they wake up, just everything new. Catch up on what they've missed. Then as they begin to grow more and more tired of things again, they decide to go back into slumber.

Your perception of time getting completely fucked up to where twenty or thirty years is nothing to you. Remember when recess felt like a long time in school?

Dammit. cannot remember what it was called. But i usually copied Ring Runner in this aspect.
I cannot remember exactly what it was called or how it worked, but i usually run it like this in my futuristic campaigns:

People might not age bodily, but as old memories are forgotten or hoarded in external-memory units everybody sooner or later gets the "Longing".
With memories in such huge amounts they loose meaning, same if all memories slowly drift further and further apart as old unused memories get overwritten.
The longing isn't a type of insanity, its merely the result of when you loose your past through vastness or large unbridgeable paths: you will seek a way out.
This is usually manifested in the same way: reckless behaviors boosted by whatever the person thinks is important.

Like sex and money? Pirate life it is for you!
Politics pulling you down? Suicide mission to kill the big bad president!
Scientist? Why waste time on test-subjects when you can just shove that thing into your own head?!
Think information is important? Purge your personality and install a new one with all your knowledge!

Enjoy some of my handrawn top notch quality art from one of those campaigns.

Also makes a great plothook.
I came up with an almost identical anchor drive system except where the "aether" not only moves in circles before i played the game. Made me so salty that they had almost the same thing.

AHA Actually found it: Its called Wanderlust:
"If someone gets old enough they get a condition called wanderlust, when their soul becomes bored with the universe. If they don't do increasingly "interesting" things, their soul will eventually leave their body while their body drops dead. Everyone we meet who has wanderlust therefore engages in activities that would be more appropriate for a Death Seeker, because that's what keeps souls interested."

Have some more shitty art. Really miss that campaign, really wish there was more groups here in Linköping Sweden wink wink.

Well, for one thing, you would become a lot more patient.