I have always been an existential person. At one point I was 8. It was midnight and I was sat on my poor mother’s lap crying over the fact I was going to die despite not really going through any life-ending scenarios before or since which could’ve provoked this outburst
I’m no longer 8 years old (thank God). I’ve grown quite comfortable with the concept of my own mortality, yet at the same time I’ve become incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of immortality
As far back as I can remember, I’ve never had a particular desire to live forever. ‘Forever’ (at least to me) is a rather nebulous, incomprehensible word. If I look at the word in relation to my own mortality, ‘forever’ only goes to the heat death of the universe.
(The heat death of the universe is, in of itself, incredibly nebulous and complex, and can also be debated to not be an actual thing; what I gathered from a glance at Wikipedia is that if it’s going to happen, it will take place after either 10^100 or 10^106 years have elapsed since the big bang. The number changes depending on how long the supermassive black holes take to decay and for all entropy to stop. All that physics to say I’d rather not be there if or when it happens)
As a kid I remember that I had this overwhelming fear of my consciousness being uploaded into a computer or a computer game and just being left to rot in there for eternity. Maybe that fear was because I played too much Minecraft on my Kindle Fire HD while consuming Creepypastas. But imagine that: you’re stuck inside some code, becoming a bunch of 1s and 0s and not being able to get out but being aware that you once were. Does your brain get shut off when the computer is shut down, or is your consciousness still active in these periods of downtime? What if you’re one with the code of an online game and the servers get shut down? Are you still aware of your being there or is like you’ve been killed? Do you live in a barren wasteland all on your own?
If we’re considering this on a more practical level, what would happen to my physical body?
Again, horrifying and existential! I got reminded of these feelings when I read ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’. Considering AM can outlive the heat death of the universe just torturing Ted (and the others before they were killed); Ted killing the others was, to me, the ultimate act of mercy
The game Last Seen Online is very good at depicting the actual horror of being stuck inside a game all on your own, and very much reignited that years old fear in the form of a pretty intuitive and fun puzzle game!
Also, I’d rather not live forever because I already get disgustingly bored; just imagine having to fill up thousands of years with random shit rather than just 70-100. Immortality would only be slightly more appealing to me if there was an ‘out’; like, if I was a vampire I’d like to have the option to burn to a crisp in the sun and put myself out of my own misery
Realistically, I’m probably thinking about this too much. I don’t think much good can come from taking the indecipherable concept of immortality and running wild with it. My brain just works a little strangely