Asklemmy

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?