Would You Ever Consider Becoming Immortal?

-The negative point of view-

Everyone dreams of living long fulfilled lives; it makes being immortal an attractive option. You wouldn’t have to worry about time. You wouldn’t have to risk dying in a freak accident. You could watch the world progress and do amazing things that were once thought impossible. However, you will also watch as horrible things happen without escape.

You will watch as countless of wars rage. You will watch as famine and disease strike countries. You will live through world events too grotesque and incomprehensible to imagine. You will watch family and friends die, but you would live on. You will outlive any friends you make in a century, which when put into perspective a century isn’t a long time to an immortal. A 100 years compared to eternity is minuscule and insignificant. Hundreds and thousands of friends and lovers that you have, you will watch parish and outlive them. It will eventually become too heavy a burden that making friends will cease. You will retreat from the world, your heart ice cold from all the loss you’ve been through. Taking comfort in your solidarity and isolation. What becomes of you next? You’ll ponder as to why you ever chose to become immortal eons ago.

You’ll sit in solitude for hours, day, months, years. You’ll no longer have a sense of time since time is irrelevant to you. Years become seconds as time flies past you, never touching your immortal body and soul. You’ll experience living without living life. Your perception of time will become insanely skewed that you won’t be able to remember important details. With thousands of years’ worth of memories, they will become too much for your human mind to store and organize. You won’t be able to differentiate between memories that happened a thousand years ago verses something that just happened today. To you, it will all be the same and while society, science and technology progress you will ultimately be left behind.

As science and technology progress at an ever increasing exponentially large rate, you will watch amazing feats be conquered and drastic change happen in humanity many times over. Throughout the years of human evolution, you will eventually be seen as an outsider. You will no longer be able to blend into society as humans change and adapt to the forever changing environment. There could emerge a new kind of race, a new kind of human. One that looks and speaks differently. You will be looked at as an alien, no longer being part of the norm. The rise for humanity such as colonizing Mars and other planets will be the downfall for you. You are limited by your antique human body and mind. You cannot change it, though you try and experiment to alter your physical form but it is useless. The moment that you decided to become immortal sealed your fate. The process of becoming immortal froze every single atom in your body in time and in its original state. Becoming immortal is a process of becoming unchanging and timeless. A being frozen in time for infinity.

The process of becoming immortal, if it transforms the very core of your essence - are you still you? Going through the procedure requires a change in chemistry and composition. Your immortal self is not the original physical you. Does that mean your original state of mind transforms as well? Will your immortal self still have the same foundations as your mortal self? Will you still have the same morals and outlook on life? What if the process of becoming immortal turned you into someone your original self never wanted to be? Turning into an immortal being not only transforms your physical state but also your state of mind. Immortality could be too big of a concept to fathom for your humanly mind to handle and eventually lead to insanity and other mental problems that only worsen with time. But there is no cure. There is no cure because immortality is forever but the human mind was made to adapt and change and be to temporary. Yours is locked in the state it was in during your transformation.

Everything you once thought was exciting and fun becomes mundane and boring. You can travel the world, and experience life in ways people could never dream of. But after the four hundred thousandth time visiting the Taj Mahal, it will become unexceptional. It will feel like looking at any other regular building that you've seen numerous times. You won’t enjoy the things you used to because of countless repetition. You can experience everything the world has to offer during your eternity but that feeling of excitement and awe will diminish and disappear. You can eat everything and see everything as much as you want but you’ll soon be searching for a new experience, but you’ll never be able to find it. And with time, you will be driven into depression and insanity when you realize that nothing in the world holds any meaning or fascination to you anymore. What would you live for then?

You will live only because you can not die. There is no end.