Would I Choose To Live Forever?

After Tony Self liked one of my blog posts – Hi, Tony Self – I visited his site and poked around, clicking on several articles. This was one. I liked it and noticed the Reblog button. I clicked it, and it spawned this page with this article embedded. So, here we are.

Would I choose to live forever? Undoubtedly, no. For those who’ve been around and have kept up with my posts, know that I already died. I would have been fine remaining dead, as my girlfriend did. Although I won’t rejoin her in the spiritual sense, I will join her in death in the metaphorical sense of Lakoff and Johnson.

Longevity is a luxury of the affluent. I don’t want it. Tony mentions vampires. In fiction (where else would they be?), these beings are routinely unemployed – at the very least, having no day jobs – but with vast riches or connected to one with said same. Their torment is to have outlived past loves and the need to feed on the living, mostly the fear of getting caught, as this is illegal and more generally immoral in this world as we know it – not a good look.

In any case, this live forever thought experiment forgets much, or at least imposes much. If I could just be, like a stone, is that forever? As I discuss in The Architecture of Encounter, even stones aren’t forever, regardless of their state of living; not even mountains, planets, suns, or universes. So, what’s forever anyway?

Spoiler alert: Forever is a myth.

Rather than answer generally or hypothetically, would I choose to live forever? No. Take me now if you must?

I’ve got no problems with living. It’s the conditions that bother me: the eating, the sleeping, the maintenance; entropy.

So, the ones who have this wish ignore these and presume that this version of forever comes with good health and abundance.

I recall a Greek myth in which forever is granted, and he lives on as a disembodied wisp that can’t die.

In this myth, Tithonus – a Trojan prince whom Eos, goddess of the dawn, loved and asked Zeus to grant immortality – got this wish, and it wasn’t even his; immortality without consent. Eos forgot to ask for eternal youth alongside it, so he aged indefinitely, eventually shrinking into a desiccated, babbling husk – a wisp.

Imagine: you live forever, outliving all humans, all life. The sun extinguishes, and yet you remain – all the while sentient.

Thanks, but no thanks. You can keep your forever. I’ll keep my timeline.