this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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No one has ever had to deal with this so we have no idea of knowing what psychological effects would occur. “It’s been explored in literature” does not have the same meaning as “it’s been the subject of a double-blind study”.
I think most “ooh it would be bad to be immortal actually” is just copeium - people convincing themselves they don’t want something because they can’t have it anyways, so it’s less of a blow when they can’t get it.
To the detriment of hard science, there are experiments that shoul not, can not and will not ever be more than thought experiments.
It's not very difficult to gauge how external change affects us. Unless we have a very special "wiring" in our minds, it breaks us in an over elaborate death by a thousand cuts.
Many people who lived long and fruitful and well lived lives left behind tellings, especially in the form of diaries, on how they missed that person, or pet, or place or something else. And this is something any human being can easily relate to.
Eternal youth would turn cruel to those having it.
We lose people we care about all the time during life and most of the time we don’t want our lives to end because we lost our friends, family or even lovers. If anything, it gets easier to accept loss as you get older. There’s no reason to think that trend would reverse.
Are you trying to convey we grow indifferent to loss or just accept it more easily or just develop better ways to keep our feelings to ourselves?
Over an average life span of 75 years we may lose, let's average, around 35 meaningful persons.
Now lets scale that figure twice, three, four times. Or even more, because who knows what other nefarious effects the sense of immortality would have on our psyche?
At some point it would grow enough on any sane person having to cope with losing one loved one after the other.
How are we losing these loved ones? Are you assuming you're the only person getting these pills?
Acts of violence, fortuit events, acts of god, etc.
Death comes for us in many fashions.
So why do you suppose we would be losing so many more people over some reasonable span of time if it's only the unusual that is killing them?
Your opinion on this isn't very coherent. I suspect it is more tied to an emotional reaction more than some objective reason. You may want to explore why.
I'd risk deaths by fortuitous reason would rise, pumped by the sense of near immortality provided by the magic fairy dust pills. People tend to take unnecessary risks when they feel invincible. Think of yearly twenty years old.
Thank you for your kind consideration.
Neither - we learn to accept that loss is sad, but ultimately something we can’t prevent, and therefore we become more accepting of it. We learn that everything is temporary, so we learn to appreciate the things and people we enjoy while we have them, but we also learn to let those things go when we lose them.
You’re right that we don’t know what effect immortality would have, but given how, on average, the elderly react to the loss of their friends compared to how the young react to the loss of their friends, we should surmise that it would be easier to deal with the losses, rather than harder.
Exactly because we are aware of our finitude. Remove that and it's an entire new horizon.
The way this experiment is proposed, the magic pill would deliver eternal youth, thus, immortality, which would erase that mental coping mechanism we develop throughout our lives as we diminish one day after the other.
I'd risk such pill would create a conflicting notion of wanting always something new but without the possibility of losing anyone or anything relevant to the individual. One loss, any loss, would be much more detrimental.
As a species, we are a living paradox. We have huge brains capable of abstraction and inovation but we crave the confort of familiarity and stability, of routine, as change brings uncertainty and fear.
If at some point we are able to extend our life expectancy to the hundreds of years, it will be an entire evolutionary step to take, created by ourselves. The strain on our minds will be immense.
Now you’re being internally inconsistent. You explained that it would be bad because we’d live together but would be sad because we’d lose our loved ones, but now you’re saying that it would be bad because we wouldn’t lose our loved ones. Why wouldn’t we learn that the things in our life are temporary just because we wouldn’t die of old age? We’d still lose pets, we’d have fleeting moments, etc. exactly the same way, the fact that our lives would last forever wouldn’t change the fact that we would learn that nothing else is temporary.
Kids deal with their first experience of true loss all the time, and even with their underdeveloped brains and lack of emotional understanding, they’re capable of dealing with the loss and moving on. Your claims have no basis in reality and are pure conjecture. You’re absolutely welcome to your opinions and free to express what you think would happen in any way you like. My problem is that you seem to think that your opinions are somehow more based in reality than the opinions of others. None of us know what the impacts would be, it’s as simple as that.
My basic proposition is that it would be hard for us has we would lose our loved ones over time. I then followed by saying that it would be an additional layer of hardship living on the predicate that we would never lose anyone.
I'm having a dialogue here, not trying to write a thesis. Errors are a given.
Going back to the premise of this thought experiment, on which we both are speculating, the magic fairy dust pill would concede biological immortality by stopping the aging process. But it would not remove actual death by other means, often much more traumatic than natural causes, like acts of violence, fortuit events, acts of god, etc.
What I am trying to convey is that such artificial sense of permanence would be much more violently disturbed each and every time that, inevitably, someone or something very dear was to be lost.
And lets not be disingenuous to the point of stating that losing a pet or have a hearbreak equates to losing someone that shared an existence for decades or even entire lives. Using your own logical inference, for those there would be a notion of finitude; the coping mechanism would be instilled from the start while for other humans there wouldn't be such a notion or, at best, a very fleeting one: death wouldn't be a given but a very slight probability/possibility.
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It's good for people to engage in this kind of thought experiments and I truly enjoyed this exchange, regardless if I passed a sense of pontification from my side. These are occasions where we only have our own experiences and thoughts to build upon.
Fair enough, and no harm done, at least from my perspective. I agree that it is interesting topic worthy of consideration and I think your view absolutely has merit, it just felt more to me that you thought your view was more “valid” because it was backed up by works of speculative fiction, but now I understand that I have misinterpreted your comment, so I apologise for my part in that :)
I’m much happier to discuss the ideas on a level playing field.
I agree that the loss of a pet isn’t generally as devastating as, say, losing a parent while young, or losing a partner. I was thinking about kids - usually their first experience of loss is for a pet, and it’s often really difficult for them, because the experience is so new and kids already have such sensitivity to emotions.
I agree that in a world where people live forever, each loss would be more impactful. I’m sure the first loss would be as difficult (or more so) than a child dealing with the loss of a beloved grandparent - very hard and painful, but there’s little reason to think that it would uniquely break our brains, and I think there’s also little reason to think that something being rarer makes it harder to deal with.
I spent all of my life being able to walk and taking that for granted, with no reason to think I would ever have to deal with the loss of that ability - until something happened and I ended up with a disability that left me unable to walk. It was hard to come to terms with but I managed absolutely fine. And that’s a relatively minor thing compared to what some humans have had to deal with. We are an extremely resilient and adaptable species!
For all those reasons I really don’t think immortality would be particularly difficult for our brains to deal with. I think the significantly bigger problem would be more social and geographic - how would we avoid overpopulation, and would our society/culture continue to progress as it used to? We know very well about how elderly people are “set in their ways”, for example, would that trend mean that if we had immortality in the 17th century that we would still be having arguments about whether or not slavery was ethical today?
Now we are getting into the finer details. I was only focusing on the individual level while taking into consideration what is already known regarding handling accrued trauma.
You mention a valid point when stating we are remarkably resilient. We are. Yet the truly resilient ones, like yourself, are comparatively few when considered how many break under duress.
Have you ever read this book?
It is obviously very outdated but when I first read it allowed me expand on the notion that our mind and body are more intimately connected and, by extension, infer that every single experience makes up a part of what we are, thus I defend that such a long life span would pose such a burden to handle.
I’m no more resilient than average, heck I’m definitely less resilient than average, I think you’re just underestimating just how strong humans are and how capable we are to just get on with our lives.
I haven’t read that book, sorry!
I did a quick bit of searching online and found out some interesting stuff about how people tend to report positive outcomes from trauma more often than negative outcomes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8827649/