I don't want to die anytime soon, but I like knowing that one day I will no longer be alive.
For some reason, I feel like I am the only person in the world who does not want to be immortal. Everyone else seems to love the idea of living forever, but for me, the concept is just tiring. Also, a logistical nightmare.
An eternal life as a human on earth has so many practical issues associated with it. You'd need to find some way to just be rich otherwise you'd constantly be stressing about having a home and feeding yourself, and retirement sounds daunting enough to plan for let alone the rest of time. I think everyone just assumes that if they lived forever they'd be some sort of super-cool, super-sexy, super-smart, super-rich vampire or something, but that is not necessarily the case. You would just be you, but still alive after everyone you loved died.
Which leads me to another thing: everyone you love would die, over and over. Every time you love someone, you would lose them! This might seem like an opportunity to be this sort of rogue loner who wanders in and out of situations as they please, but I think it's really an opportunity to feel more and more isolated and turn into a bitter person with no connection to humanity. That's what makes supervillains.
Also, what is happening in terms of physical ageing? This is very important, both for getting by in the world and how much you're able to enjoy yourself. I don't think it's ageism to say that a thousand-year-old body might be hard to live in. If you're some sort of immortal vampire or whatever, then maybe you will be healthy forever, but at the cost of drinking blood and killing people, which is only fun to imagine from a very emotionally-removed, dark-humour-type place.
An eternal life in heaven or any afterlife is a bit more chill, depending on what you believe happens there, but still. After 5,000,000 years all the harp could really start to grate on you, and even the most exciting activity gets boring eventually. The one comfort about the afterlife is that perhaps you start to perceive time differently and forever doesn't feel like forever anymore.
I think the main problem is that people don't think about how long eternity actually is. They imagine living forever to be like adding a hundred years to do some more cool things. They imagine a really extended vacation in heaven. IT'S SO MUCH LONGER THAN THAT!!! I mean, come on people! We have a hard enough time picking people to marry or careers to pursue because we don't want to be stuck forever having made a bad decision! And in this case "forever" means 30-50 years!!! That's not really forever!!!
In conclusion, if you read ANY vampire stories (or Harry Potter) you will know that a super-long life is just boring and hard and usually turns you into a monster because you get so bored and hardened. If that's what you really want for yourself, well, I guess I am afraid of you now?
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