Would you become immortal? CORRECTION: in Altered Carbon, everyone has stacks, but only the meths can afford lots of new cloned bodies regularly. Minor detail, but still. If you want to see more of my work like this, your support on Patreon is so so important www.patreon.com/hellofutureme thank you if you already do! Stay nerdy! ~ Tim
Imagine someone who is immortal lives to see the death of everyone else on Earth & even the point where life is no longer possible yet they still can't die. That would be terrifying on multiple levels, especially since they would be able to see the death of the universe itself, but wouldn't happen for billions of years.
I would take immortality without a second thought. I think people undersell how much the progression of time across different eras factors into the discussion, given the fact that the world is constantly changing at such a rapid pace and has been for all of time I think there would be plenty to occupy yourself with. Even without a hard deadline the fact that change comes as intensely upon everything around you alone would give you plenty of incentive to keep yourself going. If anything it might give you more since you'd be further incentivised to seize each opporunity with the awareness of seeing things shift drastically so much. I think in so much as you can cope well with an ever-changing world, you can cope well with an immortal life.
I really like that sandman episode where he gives a normal person Immortality to see if it would be a curse and that person just really likes being immortal.
This reminds me of a quote from a dnd game I was in: “Wishing for a prolonged life isn’t wrong or evil. Isn’t it normal to want to extend your time so that you can enjoy the happiness, love, and experiences life can give you? If it wasn’t, why do children wish to stay awake a bit longer, or when it’s time to leave a festival, they look at your with doe eyes, asking for, ‘just a little longer?’ Where the evil lies, is in what are you willing to do in order to prolong it. That. That is what makes it evil.”
When you turn your desires into a high, then clearly, the problem lies with YOU, not the desire itself. There are problems, sure, obviously, but everything has problems.
@@typolet6883 I pulled it out of thin air really. I was the “fatherly(more like depressed dad)” cleric of the group. I was using to as a moment to rein in some pc’s that were beginning to take some actions without looking at the consequences. Another from the game I really loved was, “even the brightest lights can cast the largest shadows. And those shadows may originate even in the smallest silhouettes.” The utmost favorite though had to be, “I’m not healing you from your own stupidity.”
I think it is the same for everyone, people want to live longer because we want more time to experience things. that could be spending time with people or that could be developing new skills or hell traveling through the stars it doesn't really matter the fact is the only reason anyone wants to be here for longer is to experience more things. Honestly I don't think that there is anything wrong with that, as long as you don't spend more time worried about what your going to miss than you do enjoying what you can now
I think mine, as a 23yro guy, is more the fear of such drastic/unknowable change. You don’t return from it, you can’t (usually) decide when it happens, you don’t even know what happens after. All the unknowns and permanence just freaks me out. Fomo does play a part tho lol
Mine too its normal, I dont want to miss the colonisation of the universe or how humanity ends, Id like to die someday but when I wnat to not because I have to
Same here. I absolutely do want to die someday and I don't want an eternal afterlife to follow. I want that finality, and release, and quiet. But I also desperately want it to feel earned after I've done everything I want to do, and the thought of not being able to is really scary
Personally, from a philosophical standpoint, I believe that life is simply superior than death. I want to learn and experience everything, with the added benefit of becoming smarter and wiser. Not being alive means missing out on all the fun, interesting, amazing, and cool shit in the universe.
"I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust...I forgot to ask that they be years of youth." Ovid: Metamorphoses
Extended lifespan by definition requires slowed ageing, and therefore an extension of youthful years (if one is making the wish in their youth). The only way one can be elderly and still have extremely extended lifespans is with necromancy e.g. turning the wisher into a lich, zombie, animated skeleton/mummy, or a ghost/shade.
@@ishmamahmed9306 Pretty much. Age itself doesn't kill you, its the failings of your fragile body that does it. You could live for centuries if you had nanobots cleaning up the accumulated waste and fixing the damaged DNA from the mitosis process. Or even just flushing out the damaged DNA and repleneshing your body's supply of stem cells so that they can do that job themselves.
You know, being able to live longer and being healthy wouldn't be so bad. It's not forever, but it would allow you or anyone else to live the best life you could.
I would like to live long enough to better myself and actually make a change in the world. I think most human lifespans aren't enough to make the change and ensure that it last for a suitable amount of time. As far as bettering myself, well whether that means finding peace with the idea of death and God, perhaps even losing my religion but finding something I'd consider "more" or just being able to forgive myself for unspeakable mistakes I've made, I'd take it all as long as I can die satisfied.
"I only rage because I am unfinished with this world as too many die already unfinished with theirs." You got me good with this ending. Actual tears. I think it's so easy to moralise on death, to portray it as something good and needed and natural, when you and your loved ones are not the ones dying.
@@Dan-uf2vh Q didn't just offer immortality. He said he planned to live (as a human) forever, not to be a god forever and certainly not to be something he couldn't identify as William T. Riker anymore
So, everyone thinks the same thing? No deviation from what you've said is allowed? Edit: I don't know why you guys keep thinking you can change my mind. Speaking of: has it crossed what little could be considered of your minds that the OP you're all white knighting for hasn't contradicted me and supported you? You keep telling me YOU know what was meant, and I keep telling you what I know was meant, and he or she stays silent (probably knowing I'm right, but not sure how to word it after all your shenanigans). Just stop, because it's sad and pathetic that you keep trying at this point.
You don't want to die now. Most people have never wanted to die. It just happens. Even when you're old, you don't want to die, you just miss the people you've lost. If people didn't want to live forever, most of them wouldn't cope with the idea of death by believing in a religion that gives them an eternal afterlife. Wanting an eternal afterlife is literally no different than wanting to live forever. It's the same thing.
I love the hidden Lord of the Rings reference "butter scraped over too much bread" was how Bilbo said he felt after the One Ring had preserved his youth far longer than was natural.
I broke an old thermometer and played with the mercury without gloves… no health repercussions more than 30 years later… still, admittedly, that was absolutely stupid!
@@frankherbert3005 tbh, I think most of the danger is just breathing in the vapours (or eating it, lol), human skin can be surprisingly good at doing its job, most of the time
@@jan_harald While the vapor or ingestation are bad for elemental Mercury, the real threat is when Mercury reacts to form a salt. At that point it readily absorbs through skin and can kill you if you aren't careful with it. Chemists are trained to treat all Mercury as a salt because if it is it can be highly lethal.
I really liked the approach in The Good Place (spoilers): you go through a period of self-improvement tailored just for you, and then you reach The Good Place, an afterlife where you can see everyone, do everything, and stay as long as you like. There's a door that you can choose to walk through to end your existence (or move on to whatever is next), but you don't need to go through it until you're ready. You can choose when to walk through the door, and choose to do everything you want before that time. I'd really like an "immortality" like that, I think.
I love this concept as well but to add to it, there is a person on TikTok named sea ya later who does a series called hells belles all about a help desk in hell and it has expanded into becoming a therapeutic experience for me because she goes through some really tough things in the series with some real grace and respect
That’s a nice afterlife concept - but we live in the natural world. We have resources, and future generations to consider. Immortality is an extremely selfish concept. We come from the Earth and we return to the Earth. Without Mortality we can’t have change, it’s a necessary part of life.
@@jacobodom8401 I disagree. In the past, I believed as you do, but I don't think mortality *is* required for change; it denies the fact that people can grow and change, even (especially) later in life. The idea that a person develops a cognitive state that eventually calcifies permanently, requiring that they be physically replaced with a whole new person to make room for new ideas because their belief system is too rigid to update isn't realistic, fortunately. There are definitely people who do spiral into the cognitive abyss that swallows up all of us who fail to develop critical thinking skills, but they're a possibility, not an inevitability.
I'm a big fan of reincarnation. Coming back over and over with completely different capacities and types of consciousness, having forgotten everything that came before, but still being impacted by it.
When I was 7 I literally told my mother I didn't want to die, but I also didn't want to grow old. My subsequent childhood wasn't the best and I always feel like I'm missing out. I'm always seeking a stability I don't think I'll ever find.
My Lord provides life, where he will provide you with honor even for providing a cup of cold water for the children who belong to him, and you can love others and provide for their needs, and just trust that he will repay you when he resurrects you.
The most depressing thing is that my Grandmother passed away the very morning that this video was posted. Complications from Dementia. The section about "The Dying of the Light" left me in tears, because that's what she experienced these last couple years of her life... I couldn't bring myself to watch this video until last night, and then I finished it this morning.
My grandmother died last year or so and it didnt really hit me untill my birthday that just passed and th birthday card didnt come. the call never came in and i can still hear her voice in my mind saying hello. each loss is unique but knowing other understand how i feel makes it a bit easier
This kinda misses the point, but Frankenstein's failure wasn't his pursuit of resurrecting the dead, but the fact that he then proceeded to abandon his creation / "Child" as soon as it came to be alive.
I am losing my grandmother this week. When I began watching this video, she was still vibrant, but she had a stroke and since then it took me the whole weekend to try to get through this I’ve watched her decline in this way. I’m not sure when but she will be gone this week. I have followed this channel for very long time, and I have enjoyed every single one of these videos. But this one has made me cry thank you for giving me a distraction when I needed it when the sadness of my own thoughts was too much.
One of the things that strike me as I age is how my relationship with time changes. As a child a day was a substantial length of time. Today a week feels about the same length. I think I simply summerize common experiences and so my memories are so much more abbreviated. I believe that in the course of centuries I may view months or even years in the same way. I imagine a centuries old vampire planning to do an important, immediate thing for decades. New technologies are almost immediately replaced by the next and social trends like slang are barely learned before they are decades out of date. It's almost like a black hole where the closer you go the more things slow down.
I’ve thought the same, but I’ve never looked at it as my experiences being repeated for years. I’ve assumed it was because as I age each day, week, month, or even year, is just a smaller percentage of my life than it used to be.
After I graduated high school, I loafed around for two years. The time flew by. But then I went to college and the four years felt like it took forever. The experience of time has nothing to do with age and instead has to do with what you are doing. A child is having new experiences all the time; an adult is stuck in the monotony of their day job School is usually something new each day, at least partially so, so it feels longer. When I was a poolboy, time went faster than when I was in college because it was just the same thing every day
@@colefasan9849you don’t compare your existence to previous ages tho so this is stupid. You simply don’t do new things as you get older, which is why time flies by. If you were to return to college, or be forced into a high school like environment, I guarantee you’ll think 4 years will be a long time again. When I do a lot, time feels like it goes slower, but when I do the same thing, months can fly by
@@pyropulseIXXI I agree with your point, but the years now seem to fly by. I’m not saying that repetitiveness or new experiences dictate my perception if time (although monotony definitely impacts it), but that when I was four years old a year was a quarter of my life so it felt much longer whereas now I’ve lived enough years that any individual year now feels lessened
This video especially reminded me on Ghost in The Shell as it poses many similar questions. “All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
Thank you for not buying into this idea that immortality must be inherently bad! I get so tired of writers thinking we'll get bored, or heartbroken, or tired of life. I think the sort of person who makes a good immortal is the sort of person who can enjoy their everyday life. "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
@@bluupadooplearn every language. Learn to play every instrument. Visit every part of this planet. Watch every good tv show and movie. Read all of Wikipedia. There is so much to do and to see. Enough for a thousand lifetimes.
@bluupadoop I'd never run out of things to do and places to go! By the time you've lived in and gotten to really experience half a dozen places, the first has already changed enough to be worth revisiting, let alone seeing the whole world. There are so many things to learn how to do or how they work. Instruments to learn how to play, learn how to build a house from the ground up, how to do blacksmithing and fletching and programming and....all sorts of skills not even invented yet, and skills that are dying out I could help preserve. If you're immortal, there's no rush to do it all at once. You can have one hobby at a time, one career, one place to live, for however long it interests you. Don't get me wrong, I want to live indefinitely, not forever, but at least as long as there are people of some sort, there will be things to do, friends and loves and challenges and experiences. Only someone lacking imagination would get bored in a few centuries.
@@CritterKeeper01 it's kinda nice to hear such an optimistic view of immortality. I hope you can keep your optimism, and if I ever get offered the curse of immortality, I'll gladly point the offerer in your direction. And trust me, it's not a lack of imagination or a fear of boredom that makes me call immortality a curse, but more power to you for your optimism.
Gilgamesh is story about the mortality and it's the ancientest story we know. Upd: Apparently, i was wrong there are a few Akkadian things more ancient, but Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest Epic story we know of yet still. Very cool.
The kind of immortality achieved at the end of the TV series "The Good Place" is exactly what I would want. You live on, eternally, in the body that you want, experiencing and achieving all that you desire, and when you feel that you can achieve or experience no more, you can decide to seize your existence. It has all the upsides of immortality with none of the existential horror sides of it.
the ability to selectively forget things, a form of "little death", would better than an all-or-nothing solution. its like restoring a painting intead of making a new one and replacing it wholesale. sure, alot of the new parts are not the original, and some of the older parts have to be removed in one way or another to make room or the new, but that doesnt necessarily make the art less valuable or less worth keeping around. ones memories could be the same way. after all, if someone should have the right to choose to stop their conscious existence, they should also have the right to forget exactly what they want to forget if given the ability
@@kenpanderz Following along with "The Good Place" for something in that vein, the characters get rebooted many times, with two of them getting back all memories from across all of those experiences. The thought of being able to selectively keep one's full continuum of possible memories around, but selecting which to "toggle" on or off -- be it for the long haul, a temporary revisit, or exploring a mosaic of "first times" -- is a bit brain-melting, but fascinating to consider.
Seemingly seized your existence (hasn't been confirmed and left for interpretation) but even then horror from that version of the afterlife essentially came from the factors of 1) No God and 2) your still the same as you were as a human. I gotta agree with the critique on how the show handled the concept of death and afterlife being to humanistic.
I think too often we personalise immortality. What would I do, what would I make, what I achieve. What if YOU didn't? Isn't there joy enough in guaranteeing that you'll be there to see what we all do tomorrow? Would I be immortal if I could? Certainly. But not to write a Hamlet or climb an everest. I'd do it because tomorrow things will happen, and I'd quite like to see what they are.
As an Absurdist, I've known what to do with immortality for a long time. It's a little thing called Apotheosis. I'd spend my time learning how to bring you all back so we can make and do and be for all time - and most importantly grow. I mean, unless you don't want to be a thing, but I'd like to give you that choice, for as it stands now, my family, we best do what we can to preserve ourselves upon death and write out a testimony attempting to justify our reconstitution. I'm hoping I wake up again. It's been neat being this idiot, and I'd like to help the future.
_The Man From Earth_ was immortal only because he could heal from any injury, overcome any sickness. He remembered his origins only as a vague story from a place that doesn't exist anymore, watched people make the same mistakes over and over, from one generation to the next. And then he forges a new identity and starts again, just like he's always done.
As a young, disabled person (in my 20s, physical mobility issues, and cognitive impairments) this take on immortality and youth and the fear of disability is so interesting to me. It does kind of feel like people are uncomfortable around me or deny my experience as a young, disabled person due to their fears being reflected from my mere existence. It really does feel like I'm trapped in the body of an elderly person and I often see people my age going out to parties or going on hikes or other "normal" activities and I feel a bit jealous and mourn my own life because it feels like mine is already over. (I do want to add that in my opinion, because there's a subconscious, and sometimes conscious fear that non-disabled people have of becoming disabled themselves one day, I think there's some cognitive dissonance that leads to ableism and a rejection of accessibility resources. Being disabled sucks, but it would suck a whole lot less if we could accept that disability is often just a part of life.) I will say though, I often get lost in fiction; video games, books, anime, movies, etc. and it feels like I've lived hundreds of lifetimes by doing this and in some way it's my form of not quite immortality, but vicariously living so many lifetimes through the eyes of so many people I feel like it in a sense. Great video, as always!
This resonates with me a lot. I broke my spine in my early twenties And I'm so glad to finally be pushing 40 and getting crows feet and a receding hairline. I've actually looked several times to see if I could find a way to force my hair to go permanently gray all at once so people would stop expecting me to do young able-bodied person stuff.
Yeah, it's like I like to say. Every one of us is just one bad day from being disabled. A stroke, a car accident, a fall off a ladder. That's all it takes. Idk, I have an invisible disability so I feel kinship as well. I hope other people smarten up. 🫂
I definitly agree that this fear of becoming disabled, which i see basically as a fear of losing "power", is at the core of it. Same story with ageism. On the other hand, when i look at homophobic tendencies, i know for myself that it also goes the other way around. I was afraid of being or "becoming" gay because i was homophobic. Unlearning my homophobic socialisation also took away the fear of being or "becoming" gay. Also it helped getting knowledge in how homosexuality even works and that you can't randomly become gay because of some strange things (hence the ""). So i would say that going against ableism, lookism and ageism etc. also helps everyone.
@myboatforacar I like to say that if you live long enough, you're going to become disabled. That's not the worst thing in the world though! I'm also queer and while the bigotry did make it difficult, I don't hate that aspect of myself, it's just a part of who I am. I like to remind people that a disability is not defining, but rather a part of you, and it's not shameful or bad, just another aspect that will shape how you perceive the world and how you will be perceived. Kind of like being gay or trans! It shapes you, but it's just another piece of the puzzle that makes up who a person is. Having an invisible illness is tough! The worst (at least for me) is the way people can become very hostile or confrontational when I am using accessibility gear, but because I'm young and appear healthy, I'm often told to stop taking resources from those who need it. I wish you all the best! It's tough but I know you're killing it!
Dude, I was not expecting to cry watching this. What happened to your grandfather. While not the same as what happened to mine it is so painfully the same none the less. Seeing him slowly be unable to do more and more of the things he liked. Seeing him get stuck in a bed in a care home for the last year of his life. All because of a badly treated broken hip and a foot that got infected due to improper care. How no matter how hard he tried to walk again he couldn't. The worst of it is, I couldn't even visit a lot of the time. half a day's travel is just too much when you have so many other responsibilities. God how often grandmother cries when we were with her while she sat alone at home. The pain she felt when grandpa withered. How she went that 2 hour trip every day of every month of the whole 2 years. How tired it made her how hurt by the anger my grandpa felt that neither could do anything about it all. How often I had to console my younger sister on the phone while she was in another country for an exchange year and how she feared she would never see grandpa again in the flesh. I will never forget how she weeped when we told her that grandpa passed away 3 months before she would ome home. How strong she was giving a speech at the funeral over internet. I am not entirely sure why I wanted to share this. But I just needed to after this 49:15.
I'm surprised Gilgamesh's pursuit of immortality in the face of his friend Enkidu's death didn't make it into this video, it was a lingering illness of a very strong and active man that spurred it after all. The oldest story in the world is one of trying to avoid that slow creeping death.
Chapter 1 of the Epic of Gilgamesh provides a clear moral basis for Gilgamesh dying, that he was a cruel and evil man who raped every girl in his village, where the greatest cruelty of ancient Assyria was the failure of the men of Assyria to kill this evil man Gilgamesh, that they made him a hero instead.
@@evannibbe9375 then shit happened, he went on a few journeys, and became a wise and benevolent king having learned from his mistakes and life to rule his people fairly until his death.
Doctor who has quite a few immortal or long lived characters. The doctor The master is different by his sheer will to survive even passed timelord death, he does so many evil things to add more time to himself. Davros and the cybermen with cybernetics keeping the body or just brain going no matter the cost. Captain Jack but he still ages but comes back fully healed. Owen a walking corpse who can't eat or drink because he is dead and can't heal, he has no living cells so all injuries are permanent. And who can forget the family of blood "we wanted to live forever so the doctor made sure that we did" thrown into a black hole so time dilation from gravity to make a crushing eternity of pain, trapped in a mirror, wrapped in chains so strong death can not free you and frozen in time but fully aware dress as a scarecrow in a field
The story about your grandfather is a lot like when my grandmother began losing her autonomy to her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She was the person who got me into arts and crafts as a child, and I now have two art degrees. She was the only grandparent I was ever close with and I miss her every day.
I was so scared of the day she would finally forget me that I only visited her a few times. It’s hard. It’s so hard to not only see someone you love losing themselves but also wonder if you’re seeing a mirror into your future.
Tolkien nails it in the tale of the fall of Numenor. The more material comforts the people obtained, the more they lusted after immortality. The immortal elves, on the other hand, would eventually grow weary of the world. Great insight into human nature.
I was thinking of the fall of Numenor the entire video. The Elves didn't grow weary of the world per say, more that since their fates were tied so directly with the world, the natural decay of the world was taking them with it (which was why the Valar called the Elves to live in Valinor - the Undying Lands). The men of Numenor didn't realize this only saw "immortality == awesomesauce!", not realizing the "doom of man" (mortality) was a gift from Eru and that their fates were not tied to the world, sparing them from that decay, and thus their mortality brings vitality. Epic insight insight into human nature.
Tolkien believed in a very Christian conception of the world. There are other cultural understandings though. For example, in the Indian understanding, the more attached you become to the material world, the more you are disappointed with the impermanence of material things, so you eventually seek a higher truth and existence. Eventually you can obtain enlightenment, which is beyond life and death. But this is possible within several decades, not hundreds or thousands of years. Which is why we have had wise old enlightened folks over in India for a while now
Except the elves created the Great Rings specifically to avoid "diminishing", and when that was no longer an option, they departed to Valinor, the Undying Lands, as the Valar called them to do.
@@StinkerTheFirst Same thing in the end. The elves only had small pockets of eternity, and they knew that if they clung to them by not destroying the One Ring, then everything would be lost anyway.
I think immortality has to have a "why" associated with it. As a scientist, if I had the opportunity to live forever and dedicate my life to the pursuit of knowledge, I think I would take that opportunity. My will to live is driven heavily by wonder and curiosity. Not even for my own sake, but to inform those around me. In fact, two of the most important questions I ask myself every single day are, "What did you learn today? How have you applied something you learned today?" So with that, living forever and becoming a researcher until time's end would honestly bring me endless joy. I'd never have to ask, "what happens next?" Now, from a narrative point of view, it would be interesting to make a person age only when they have not learned something in a given time period. My grandfather once said something to me that roughly translates to, "the moment you stop learning is the moment you start aging."
@@trubleSum1 I did not miss the point. Frankly, there is not a single point to this video, but many points proposed which you can latch onto. Return to section 5: Do Not Go Gently Into That Goodnight. He talks about immortality as an opportunity to explore the endless complexity of human relationships. That extends not just to people, but other things as well. The atoms that make up every morsel of matter, the stars that lie scattered in space, and everything in between.
@@me0101001000to me the scary part of immortality is the decay/monotony of time. I could only see immortality being good if either you have the option to turn it off when you are done or some mission or goal to work towards to. I once thought a cool story would be a world where aging is done by experience rather than time. Like you don’t grow up till your mind/soul has reached a point for the body to follow. Would be cool to see if this world would become great or a dystopian story
In a similar form I think thr keys are essentially a sense of continuity, dissonance avoidance, and proccessing. It all seems tp me like you can categorize how those fit into how our brains model things to understand our fear and how we could do alternatives. Continuity is a emergently created illusion by our mind, a model of what we think the world is that may or may not align to it. That model being updated is expensive so we both trim down what we peecieve if it's similar to older experiences resulting in nostalgia and a lessened reaction to similar new experiences and resist or have pain for updating our models in the case of loss or change like with spaces falling to ruin. We get dissonance from that difference as it's expensive to alter our model, both in actually changing by accepting how many new perceptions are fully novel or in how many old changes are obsolete. And so, to my mind so long as you could add in new branches of emergent functions to maintain continuity and coincidingly add on new perspective or perceptual elements ibto that system then you could faciliate intuitive continual novelty in experience.
My existential crisis doesn't come from the fact that one day I will not be. It comes from the fact that there will be a heat death of the universe and loss of the concept of "something". And the idea that our chronological perception of time limits us from realizing that the space between our current existence and the heat death is insignificantly short compared to eternity itself. We do and no longer exist in this moment. I do take joy in the fact that I got to exist whether it was in the past, currently, and in the future
At the end, eternity is nothing when there is no time, if there is no mass time dissapears and only energy left, but if there is no time, distance doesn't matter as 50000000000 miles are equal to 1 mile, this looks like universe during big bang. Every story have it's ending, but when one story finish, another begins
When I revisit something I love I don't go in looking for the same experience, but rather to notice or feel what I didn't before. By focusing on how I've changed since the last time or discovering something I failed to notice 20x before I find a new joy in it.
Doing that with music has been really fun, listening to songs I loved as a teenager but with the knowledge of an adult. It always impresses me how much more I GET something now. And makes me excited for how much more I will come to understand years tomorrow.
"Mice share 85% of our genetics" As someone who is a bit of a genomicist I'll have you know that there's a huge leap between even 2% shared, as it's way more complicated than just similarity in regions. Though yes, mice are used as a model organism for a reason. Also, we've known the mechanisms for aging for years.
Hell, we share 60% of our genetics with bananas and look how different we are from that. I have no doubt in my mind that we will eventually find some form of immortality. Maybe even in my lifetime. But the type of immortality we seek and the cost of seeking it is atrocious. And those who are actively seeking it today are just as unworthy of it as the delirious kings/emperors of old.
@@jwilson544 I think it would be pretty ironic if we figured out how to revive people from their organs, but people in cryonics ❄ turned out to be unsaveable. 🤷
well, no. we don't understand the mechanisms of aging. we have started to understand, but it is more complex than any one explanation, and which of the different causes of age are significant and which are insignificant are things we don't understand at all.
The reason you feel existential dread or "death anxiety" the way you do IS because you're still young and full of energy, and aren't plagued by chronic pain that is severe at times. You don't have to fill your controlled pain medication every month or every week, medication which robs you of your emotional life in exchange for briefer and briefer periods of being pain free. Medication you can't live with and can't function without. You don't have the experience of most of your friends passing away, the experience of living in a world you understand less and less, among people who understand you less and less. You don't have a treatment resistant mood disorder which robs you of feeling any pleasure in doing things you would otherwise have enjoyed. For those of us who have these experiences - we don't suffer from intellectual fear of dying. We don't obsess imagining unimaginable. Most of us are perfectly resigned to ceasing to exist, and the only thing that holds us back are the few remaining friends or family whom we don't wish to upset. Every time we are about to fall asleep we sincerely hope this time will be the last time, one that liberates us from having to struggle through the next day. There is no "death anxiety" in such existence. But it's not entirely devoid of pleasant things either. I just wish they weren't so rare.
The older I get, the closer I feel I am coming to understanding the words of Cephalus from Plato's The Republic: "I will tell you, Socrates, what my own feeling [on old age] is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the complaint of my acquaintances commonly is, 'I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.' Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. "But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. "How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles. He was asked, 'How does love suit with age, Sophocles? Are you still the man you were?' "He replied, 'Peace! Most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.' "His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. "The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden."
When I am old and grey, just before I start to lose myself, I want to make a last trip into the woods and leave this world peacefully, that's how I want to go
Anyone else remember Final Fantasy X? A dead world dying constantly under rule of the dead mandating the reduction of life and promoting the ability to ignore the constant reality of imminent death. A spiral of decay.
My grandmother had Alzheimer's. I vividly remember, near the end, her looking up to me during one of my visits "you look just like my granddaughter." I had to leave the room so I could cry for about an hour. Your story with your grandfather reminded me of that, the feeling of being helpless in their fight and so you don't want to watch it, you don't want to be there. For some people, it is good to be there, for others it is better to not. You will always think to yourself about the opposite though. I tried to be there until the end, but after that day I couldn't.. I think I visited one more time, then a month or two later I got the news. I've slammed my brain into the dirt with me telling myself that I should have visited more, but there is a part of me that knows it would have been worse if I was.
I had the same experience with my granpa, but his perception of reality made us no comfort to him. In his final months he hated us, I went from being his favorite "sixteenhundrend times special" grandkid to this mockery of his dead daughter. He was vile in his final months and I felt the need to be there with him through it. It was selfish to stay with him and it's selfish now to think back and wish my most vivid memories weren't of him yelling and cursing at us. Alzheimers is such an evil disease, I wouldn't wish it on my most hated enemy.
we are not just scared of dying, we are scared of time, how it can never be stopped, and we can never go back. change is scary, and everything changes all the time
You know, we seek immortality out of a reaction to death: we witness death, and we either fight it or fly from it. Like an animal, who only responds according to its genetic programming and learned behavior and no further. There is no choice to it. So what happens when we pursue immortality as a choice, not because we fear death and thus we fight or fly from it? What if death is not this enemy we struggle against, but simply something that exists, and has nothing to do with our choice to pursue eternal life? Is it even possible to make such a pure and most importantly conscious choice? Maybe we cannot fully shake off the shackles of our instincts; but we can strive to work around them. We can still choose immortality for whatever reasons we may have, even though a part of us still quakes in absolute fear of death. That’s part of what it means to be human: to overcome our animalistic urges and impulses to choose our path forward, no matter how desperately our instincts scream at us. It’s the final sign of mastery and maturity.
When I got sober I was shocked at how much time was actually in a day. I had to find some way to fill that time or I would destroy myself. I took up various forms of art and now I wish I had eternity to continue creating beautiful things.
Congratulations on knocking down one of the strongest monsters ever set against us. Sometimes we have to fight it over and over, but now you know that you can fight and win.
Can kinda relate. One of my biggest fears is that I won't live long enough to make all I want to make, all I could and should make. There's so many ideas in my head and only one me with a single life. I'd give quite a lot for a few more lifetimes of making art.
@@Casual-Yohoho-Enjoyer those are my thoughts as well. I've finally started to take my writing more seriously and actually try to get it out there because I'm now hyper aware that I will die someday and it'd pain me greatly if all my stories died with me.
One of my favorite philosophical lines is from The Princess Bride when he says "Life is change, your Highness". Time is the rate of change, and all things experience it. I also love the line from How I Met Your Mother when Ted says that "over time we become doppelgangers of ourselves". Even if we live for an eternity, that is not a single life of a single entity, but infinite lives of infinite entities. Nothing lives forever because change comes for everything. It isn't that stories must end, it is simply that they do.
"Let's go in the garden You'll find something waiting Right there where you left it lying upside down When you finally find it, you'll see how it's faded The underside is lighter when you turn it around Everything stays right where you left it Everything stays But it still changes Ever so slightly, daily and nightly In little ways, when everything stays"
@@eyesofthecervino3366 Were a fortune to fall into my hands it would swiftly be put to use destroying the idea of fortunes in ways that would greatly reduce my chances of seeing eternity. Haha
My father also died slowly, and I had to watch. I also failed to visit nearly as much as I should have. I know what that burr on the soul feels like. You're not alone.
Thank you for this video. It has helped me immensely with my battle with grief. The weight of sorrow is heavy, but being able to view life as a gift in its minute finality.
I think this conversation is why a lot of people are gravitating to the story of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. It takes Immortality into a different way, as a way to remind people they should be allowed to slow down and apperciate things even in the ever rush to accomplish things before we can't do them anymore. It's not actually about death and decay (though it does begin with a death in some cases) it actually shows that conversaion from a being that was always long lived, 1000s even and it's her trying to understand humanity, and to grow to love it and appericate it. It's not about "What immortality will do to a person" but about how the immortal can live to appericate the smaller things and how the mortal can take appeication of that and how Empathy is important to connect to people even when you are immortal or at least close to it. It takes a conversation in a very different way. I'm not saying to read it to talk about it, but maybe read it as a way to just to see if there's more to the conversation as well and expand out.
But often we relegate immortality to these sort of unrealistic scenarios. In no world will I be the first and only immortal. I am not special in that way, if I am to be immortal, it shall be after the wealthiest and many of the others like me have already become so. I will not be alone without peers, but rather one among many. In that way, I don't think the solitude of an immortal is a particularly useful avenue to tread if we are considering seriously this prospect.
@@KleptomaniacJames But Ferne isn't the only immortal? Demons are also Immortal and there are other Elves, though not that many. And the story it's not about solitude in the way you're thinking. It's about how sometime you just ignore the simple things only to realize that you missed out on those connections and sometimes if you connect with people you have a fuller experience. A very different message than what you're talking about.
@@Merdragoon except it isn't, because those who matter to freiren are mortal. It doesn't matter that there are gods and elves and what not, her friends were not immortal, and they die of old age.
@@KleptomaniacJames I think what people miss about Frieren is that it just uses immortality as a tool to explore how mindfulness of our lives is what matters. In the end, it treats mortality and immortality the same: regardless if you live 80 or 1000+ years, if you treasure the people around you and live your life mindfully, then that is a life lived well. Himmel's life was a blip in her eyes but he is the most content person in that whole show. And similarly, instead of going "immortality actually sucks", the show imparts that as long as Frieren learns to value her time with her friends then that was a friendship worth building even if she'll all outlive them.
I really liked that Sandman quote about having a thousand "tiny deaths" before realizing that you have nothing left that's keeping you alive. Not alive in the physical sense, but spiritually. You'll get to a point when you want to die and that's ok. It's not always about losing the will to live over sadness or despair, sometimes it's just because you've reached a point of content with yourself and the world around you. There's nothing keeping you tied to the physical world any longer and you can freely leave in peace. At least that's the way I like to interpret it.
Reminds me of how the Ancient's lived in Final Fantasy 14, they were naturally immortal but could choose to willingly "disperse" their aether (soul) back into the planets life-stream to be reincarnated whenever they felt that they had fulfilled whatever purpose they had chosen to pursue during life.
Tis not the fear of death that brings the search of eternity, but the love of life and fear of unknown and becoming the unknown person, not the fear of death that drives us, but love of what we have.
I'm already there. At 38. There is a world of wonder, possibility and emotion out there I can never be a part of. I don't know who I am, who I was, without my ADHD meds I can't even think straight, but I can't get the help I need because I don't matter
A probably too naive 25 year old here. I'm not going to deny your feelings but I do hope you get help. I got help when I didn't believe I deserved it. Goodluck my friend
I have been clinically depressed since the age of 11 and have reached out for help from all quarters for 27 years. The only clinicians who've understood me or I've had a report with were through a work scheme and ultimately restricted from going into anything outside of work, the rest show incredible apathy, only throwing meds and bills at me. I'm not sure if they're simply incapable or really just don't give a shit about their patients.
While generally butchered in execution, the Fire Emblem games tend to tackle another aspect of immortality's bane, and it's one that tends to be quite common in fantasy stories with long-lived races: the loneliness of watching those you care about come and go, and the growing difficulty with becoming attached to someone new, knowing their life to you is fleeting.
One of the characters in question, Nyx from Fates, has an added layer of complexity from accidentally inflicting immortality upon herself. Trapped in the form of a child that doesn't reflect the elderly woman within and grappling with severe body dissociation, she rationalises this as karma for the many lives she ended in the accident, one that was largely caused by her own hubris. Compared to the Manaketes (Fire Emblem's dragon elves for those unfamiliar) who naturally live absurdly long and are relatively at peace with it since it's all they've ever grown to expect, Nyx's expectations were for a comparatively short run to that fatal finish line, something which many would argue makes us 'human', only to carelessly throw it away and adjusting very poorly as a result. She feared almost inevitably outliving everyone she might care about, was embittered by a constant struggle to get others to take her seriously despite her childish appearance, and believed that she was neither capable nor deserving of genuine social connections. Nyx spends most of her personal story in-game seeking a way to restore her mortality and ironically her elderly body too, never succeeding at either, and with her newfound friends' help eventually learns that the best way to 'atone' for her past atrocity isn't to continue punishing herself for eternity but instead to use her boundless wisdom and empathy to help others for however long she may live. For someone who appears at first glance to be a walking trope, Nyx is such a nuanced and interesting character and surprisingly well executed for a tertiary character (especially by Fates' standard)!
Found fire emblem with awakening and was so suprised by how good game was. Never upgraded from 2ds so was never able to experience the newer ones@finaldusk1821
I always felt like that was a pretty dumb plot point even when it makes for good shows. like I’m on dog number four or five of my life.(I had two at the same time a couple years back) still able to play with my dog without falling apart, at the thought of the ones outlived. in fact, I rarely think about them at all they’re dead now so why bother? that’s how most people are with pets. That’s how most people are with even other people who die so why would you go into stupid melodramatic angst about something so simple.(like I get it. It’s because it makes for fun story drama, but it’s stupid.)
I'm only 24 minutes in, and I just had to comment in order say this; I absolutely LOVE this video. About 10 minutes in I subscribed, and I can say I can't wait to watch more of your work. The amount of work and genuine thought you've put into this video is astounding. The parallels to countless stories, the ways that life, death, & eternity impact our views of ourselves & others, the inherent connection that death has to being human... These are all things I believe most people consider at some point in our lives, yet only in passing as eternal life or even unnaturally long life is something so far removed from our reality that it never truly grasps us for what it is. I would love to make a video about this topic, though I worry that I would reference far too much of the same material that you already have, as well as your video. Who knows? Life is short, after all. Cheers!
One of the greater philosophers of our time, Timothy Hickson. Perhaps not of the mind, but because of his humanity. Beautiful and ugly work there Tim. Even the work with your friends. Like I said, your humanity is showing. It's glorious.
As someone who's lived for 30 years now with issues with my legs that continue to progress in pain, making it harder and harder to walk and be physically active, I couldn't imagine wanting to live forever. Immorality is so nice to imagine when one is in peak physical and mental condition, but when one suffers physical or mental difficulties, sometimes a finite struggle sounds more appealing.
I've struggled with mental issues all my life, I want nothing more than to be immortal. I rather struggle indefinite to create something I can be proud of than accept a finite existence where what I accomplish is easily swept away by the sands of time shortly after I'm gone. I feel for your struggles, but not everyone struggling feels the same way and I say this while my own knee is acting up as well.
I didn't expect to hear that your experiences with your grandfather were so similar to mine with my grandma, and it really resonated with me. Decay is the great leveler.
Immortality is one of those concepts that really show how limited humans are with envisioning the future. Aging is cured, diseases eliminated, but somehow everything else stays exactly the same. Still a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, the understanding of human psychology isn't improved one bit, so everyone still has the same drives that the society of the author has. Nothing changes, just that one thing. I mean, the belief that society will change because of a huge development of medicine but remain static in every other aspect is very silly. We haven't developed immortality but just stretching a good 20 year at the end of human lives already forced us to change so much, not to mention unrelated developments that made us more equal and more capable of accessing the best society has to offer. There was a time an infection spelt death, now every poorer people in middle income countries have access to universal healthcare that can make them live to a couple years to the richest countries. But no, it's all billionaires in cloudy gardens, and genetically engineered babies like GATTACA, nothing else is possible. Do immortal billionaires live in bunkers afraid some poor guy will just make a improvised E device just for the laugh and take them out? Is it a necessity it will be unequal, it's a technology that doesn't even exist, how can we speculate on its distribution? The world is forever maculated by the flaws of the writer's society. No scientist could ever develop a pill that changes your brain chemistry to make you feel less sad or whatever. No one can pick up a new hobby, only the things immediately available to the author. What the author can consume is, what he cannot is not a thing that could possibly ever be. No one is able to move on, to love again, to meet new people. I mean, imagine you're a immortal born in the Roman republic, look at how many events that would have shaped so many people, at some point you were presented to an entire new world, there's so much you could do and you didn't even know what was possible.
Every generation feels like they're living the end of history. In a way fear of Immortality is often fear of what the future hold. People sometimes posits that the elderly often view death without as much fear and anxiety, since they are already living in a world that is not their own, that is alien to them. It always struck me as odd that so many people would describe that fate as inevitable, when it's demonstrably not the case, there are plenty of old people who do not want death at all, who have learned to connect with this changing world and find joy and meaning in it, like they did with the world of their youth. Additionnaly, this state of mind among the elderly is also a result of how our society treats them, how we glorify youth and work as the pinnacle of human experience. We could make life a lot easier and enjoyable for our elderly if we truly wanted to. Decay is many flavor of awful, but it doesn't have to be boring. To look forward to the future, one must have some appreciation of the present. At the end of the day Immortality and how people approach it is often a glass half full or half empty situation.
@@O.W.L.E. only if the proces of gaining imortality is really hard to achieve Theres lots o ways it could go, maybe youll need thouthands of computers and milliona of terrabites of just storage, for you to upload yourself Because brains usualy store THAT amount of data and cant be mapped easyly Or maybe the elixer is one of dragons heart, that cannot be aquared by a peasant, unless he slays it or he buys it
Essentially you are saying, Lucas, is that many writers lack imagination. Which is rather, um, how do I put it, alarming? Maybe that's too strong, but writing at its core is just recording down the results of imagination.
@@chillinchum No, not necessarily. Yes, it's exceedingly difficult to imagine a world so completely unlike our own that we can barely guess how it's like, even our best fantasy stories are basically just taking current problems and anxieties and sprinkling fairy dust on them. Besides, if you make something like, it becomes so experimental that it isn't marketable. Writers write what they know, readers want something that is at least passably familiar even if in novel forms.
I'm a scientist whose life is dedicated to curing aging (and all diseases). I saw the title-"The False Horror of Immortality"-and expected to hate-watch/monitor more opportunistic, ignorant, shallow transhumanism-bashing. It's actually extraordinarily thoughtful, well-researched, asks the right questions, and doesn't come to any sort of immediately debunkable idiot conclusion. THIS IS GREAT, in other words, and worth watching-and it packs an emotional punch that you won't expect if you think it' going to be anti-anti-aging. This is a complex, heartfelt masterpiece of evangelism for curing aging (almost certainly not the creator's intention, but still praiseworthy!) Those of us working to defeat aging aren't driven by some vast empty megalomaniacal all-grabbiness. It is enough to visit a cancer ward (aging is the major risk factor for cancer by far), or to see your grandfather decaying.
I like the whole concept of transhumanism a lot. I used to hate it but slowly realised that I didn't really understand it and my hate was senseless. Not anymore tho.
When I read the title, "the false horror of immortality" I knew immediatly that it was a song against the vapid discorse in pop culture about immortality. Because its never immortality that is the issue. In any such media. All the horror stories the horror is not the immortal. Its something far more terrifying. No. To live until the last star becomes a dim faint glow is in indeed a beautiful thing to behold But only if we have the means to extend and intertwine our time into an infinity. The false horror of immortiality is because the true horror comes from classist divisions and the reconition that we are not 3 dimentional beings. We exisit through time as well, every year that 4th dimention grows. Thats the horror. The creeping horror. that we would build for ourselfs a fishbowl and call it immortality and godly
I’ve often read people who struggled with the idea of ceasing to exist after death find solace from what they read in near death experiences. It’s an absolutely amazing genre of research. Fascinatingly consistent and optimistic. Such rabbit holes go even deeper when incorporating works from channeled sources on metaphysics, like the book Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity Of The Soul and the book Journey Of Souls.
It occurs to me that part of the tragedy of forgetting the things we've done with age is not just the accomplishments themselves but the JOURNEYS. The memories and moments of Experience and Community, gone. I can show myself the art I made, the awards I received, and it's all fresh and new... Fresh... New... I am not able to make that art I did, or commit myself to re-achieving that trophy. So I must only make new art and get new successes, hope they do not fade as fast, but preserve the feeling while it is there.
Decay is an extant form of life itself, recycling resources that slowly succumb to inevitable entropic decay themselves until the entirety of existence is one state, one wave, one final, unending pulse of uniform energy.
Best video yet. Brought me to tears. So much I already was contemplating that I felt alone in considering. Thanks again for your great videos and books.
I don't mind getting older, and there's even one aspect of it I'm looking forward to. What I resent is my body wearing out, my mind becoming weaker. Death doesn't scare me near so much as the idea that my body will deteriorate and I will become less and less able to so the things I enjoy.
The purpose of immortality shouldn't be to cure death, but to get rid of deterioration. Everyone should eventually die, but just not be left to rot during their Twilight years.
@@mattd5240this is what I find heartwarming about the doomed quest of the historical alchemists. They didn't find immortality, and they probably would not have wanted it if they had: any realistic immortality would mean a dependence on an ever-increasing amount of bizarre substances, culminating in a kind of undeath. And besides that, the march of history would have TERRIFIED these people. Someone who lived from 1550 to 1850 would have seen the entire world order collapse and reform around them. Our minds are not meant to deal with seeing changes on that level. But what they did find was chemistry: a way to make life better while we're here. A way to cure diseases and prevent their spread, prevent famines, help people in pain, and give people greater control over how their bodies change.
Me: I have to clean up this shelf with a bunch of nostalgic stuff from my childhood, I'll throw on a hello Future me video, that will be great. Me an hour later: 'sobbing on the bed' Great job as always, Tim.
this video is incredible the raw honest admission of being afraid of death is something so many people reject yet something i feel every day keep making content like this
Ftom a spiritual perspective,immortality sounds like reincarnation on hard mode. You dont get a wipe and reset of all your trauma, it just accumulates.
Tim back to make me cry with eloquent words of our shared experiences and joys of finding ourselves and the bittersweetness of having to say goodbye to who we were, I'm at work damnit
When I was 29 going on 30 I had a similar mid-life crisis. I am 46 now - I promise you, the feeling doesn't last forever (I only had a full on "crisis" that one time.) It's almost like the stages of grief: the last step is "acceptance."
I was unexpectedly touched by your introduction. Two of my most beloved stories, Dark Souls and Zima Blue, being summed up so beautifully concise. I also lost my grandfather back around the same time. I wish he were still here.
I've always liked the way this sort of thing is presented in Babylon 5. "To live on, as we have, is to leave behind joy, and love, and companionship. Because we know it to be transitory. Of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those who's lives are brief can imagine that love... is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion." And anyone who remembers how long summer was as a child knows the truth of those words.
Another gentlemen of excellent taste, I looked up that exact sentence to post. I would also add "You are not ready for immortality", as the Vorlon said of humanity. Was also slightly surprised Tim didn't speak on The Gift of Ilúvatar from Tolkien, the ability for Men to pass on from the Mortal realm, instead of being tied to it forever like the Elves, and that it is a gift, knowing that it will end, and as Lorien says in Babylon 5, we can keep belief in the immortality of those things.
This said a lot that I've been thinking but have been unable to articulate remotely this well. Thank you. Look forward to seeing more from you now that I've found you
My big fear with personal immortality is seeing everyone I've ever known die, then forgetting they existed over the millennia. Would that really be that much better than getting dementia in my 90s?
That's the first time I've ever heard Seath's name pronounced like that. For reference, I've always heard it pronounced like "seethe", as in to hate or be filled with hatred.
Christopher Hitchens put it well on the fear of death. He said, "I'm not afraid of being dead. There are manners of dying you have every reason to be afraid of."
I am not dead yet as my body forces me onwards. I fight it every step of the way, mocking and belittling the progress my body has made. I continue because I am pulled by forces outside my control. I do not wish to have this curse follow me, but I must live with it, as must we all.
When you were talking about your own fear of death, it reminded me of these quotes from the manga "Space Brothers." “Are you prepared to die?." Most astronauts answer with a simple “yes”, but you can say anything. It’s just a weak yes. You shouldn’t be prepared to die. Instead, you should have the resolve to live until the very end! If there’s someone who replies “no”, you can trust them.” - Jay Brian “Some things can’t be prevented. The last of which, is death. All we can do is live until the day we die. Control what we can… and fly free!” - Deniel Young
this video perfectly encapsulates everything i am. an immortal fire, raging against the dying light. im very glad i found this video, ill def be watching it a few times. spoke to me deeply
I wanted to thank you for speaking so openly and emotionally about the loss of your grandfather. The way you talk about him and about seeing him in his final moments is relatable on so many levels. I also lost my grandfather several years ago and it is truly painful to see someone you love so dearly to through this decay (and, in my grandpa's case, while the diagnosis of cancer had happened a few years prior, the time between is resurgence, which lead to him being bedridden, and his passing was only a few short weeks). I also wanted to thank you for giving me this time to process the grief of that loss, if only a little. I've lost a few family members now, and I've always struggled to actually feel the grief of those losses. I often just feel numb and simply move on with my life without properly taking the time. But when you talked about your grandfather, it reminded me so much of my own that I just started crying while thinking of the wonderful times we had together. And the times that we can't get back... And just all the things that have happened in my life since and how I'll never be able to share them with him. As I write this, I still have a lump in my throat as I continue to reminisce, and again, I wanted to just thank you for allowing me to unlock these memories and these feelings that have been lost in my mind for so many years.
The hardest thing in my life was watching my grandfather, the toughest man i ever knew, who taught me how to stand up for myself and shared stories of the old way. Laying there, tubes coming out of his body, unable to respond when i told him i loved him. Its been well over almost 20 years now and i cant help but cry as i think about it.
The degeneration of the human body when aging has always felt so unfair to me. Imagine how nice it would be if humans worked like fantasy elves like we stop physically and mentally aging at our prime around 20-30 years old. And always when we turn exactly 100 years old we die and turn to dust. With this system humans could get so much more out of life than slowly getting weaker and sicker just hoping to die to escape the pain
@@veryironicveryhistrionic It's just what I thought of when I read the comment, but it can be expanded upon to ask other questions, like yours! What if there is no retirement? Do people even work at all? Or do they work throughout their entire lives? Do these people live in paradise as centurians? Are people happy? Do they need go be happy? Who knows? I like chewing on stuff like this, so thank you for questioning that idea for me.
Me before pressing play: “I’m ready for another thoughtful, cerebral analysis from Tim.” Me when he gets to the part about his grandfather, triggering my grief over losing all my grandparents years ago: “I’m not strong enough for this. 😭”
Thank you. I didn't expect this. These are tears of gratitude. ~ Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Imagine someone who is immortal lives to see the death of everyone else on Earth & even the point where life is no longer possible yet they still can't die. That would be terrifying on multiple levels, especially since they would be able to see the death of the universe itself, but wouldn't happen for billions of years.
There's a scene in Torchwood where a character is buried alive and repeatedy chokes to death, revives, and chokes to death over and over for 200 years. That, but worse. ~ Tim
My fear is that this is what the afterlife is. Your body dies, but your being is left to observe. There are no eye sockets to close your eyes, you can't sleep, you can't turn off. You are just are there in the infinity.
@@HelloFutureMeThat is similar to how the mafia deals with immortals in the anime Baccano. They sit them in a barrel then fill it with concrete to their necks and push them off a boat at sea.
People also have flawed and finite memory. An immortal person would become like a moving average of there experiences. If it goes back one thousand years, one million years or one billion years i can't believe it would extend so far that all people encompass all experiences and would converge to the same identify.
Even within the course of a couple decades, our institutions have to grapple with the fact that human memories can incept falsehoods or vicarious experiences as faithful first-person experiences. Living 200 years wraps multiple contemporary human generations into that trend
A couple of related quotes I appreciate: “Dying is one moment. Living is every single other one. Focus on all the moments you actually live through, not the single one at the end.” “I have come to understand that those who fear death are burdened with regrets. They are ghosts haunted by what they have done, or worse, what they could not. It is not death that you should fear, but an unfulfilling life. If you reach the end of a road without looking back, then you will not waver at the finish line.”
![CWC 4th Listening Session with Speaker Prof. Dr. Ilia Delio OSF [ENGLISH]](/img/1.gif)
Would you become immortal? CORRECTION: in Altered Carbon, everyone has stacks, but only the meths can afford lots of new cloned bodies regularly. Minor detail, but still. If you want to see more of my work like this, your support on Patreon is so so important www.patreon.com/hellofutureme thank you if you already do! Stay nerdy!
~ Tim
Yep cool man!
Imagine someone who is immortal lives to see the death of everyone else on Earth & even the point where life is no longer possible yet they still can't die. That would be terrifying on multiple levels, especially since they would be able to see the death of the universe itself, but wouldn't happen for billions of years.
35:30 is that wild Joe Scott I hear?!
Please keep including RUclipsrs reading excerpts, it was something to hear TaleFoundry on this channel.
I would take immortality without a second thought. I think people undersell how much the progression of time across different eras factors into the discussion, given the fact that the world is constantly changing at such a rapid pace and has been for all of time I think there would be plenty to occupy yourself with. Even without a hard deadline the fact that change comes as intensely upon everything around you alone would give you plenty of incentive to keep yourself going. If anything it might give you more since you'd be further incentivised to seize each opporunity with the awareness of seeing things shift drastically so much. I think in so much as you can cope well with an ever-changing world, you can cope well with an immortal life.
I really like that sandman episode where he gives a normal person Immortality to see if it would be a curse and that person just really likes being immortal.
For me, the part that I liked about that was that, even at his lowest point, he never felt like he had nothing to live for.
That's rather interesting.
Yes yes I love that story.
He enjoys living so much even when he loses everything.
Let's be honest, I think this would be most of us if we retained our youth like that character did.
What is the episode called?
This reminds me of a quote from a dnd game I was in: “Wishing for a prolonged life isn’t wrong or evil. Isn’t it normal to want to extend your time so that you can enjoy the happiness, love, and experiences life can give you? If it wasn’t, why do children wish to stay awake a bit longer, or when it’s time to leave a festival, they look at your with doe eyes, asking for, ‘just a little longer?’ Where the evil lies, is in what are you willing to do in order to prolong it. That. That is what makes it evil.”
This
When you turn your desires into a high, then clearly, the problem lies with YOU, not the desire itself.
There are problems, sure, obviously, but everything has problems.
Who are you playing dnd with? That is some philosopher or writer level stuff my guy, go you!
@@typolet6883 I pulled it out of thin air really. I was the “fatherly(more like depressed dad)” cleric of the group. I was using to as a moment to rein in some pc’s that were beginning to take some actions without looking at the consequences. Another from the game I really loved was, “even the brightest lights can cast the largest shadows. And those shadows may originate even in the smallest silhouettes.”
The utmost favorite though had to be, “I’m not healing you from your own stupidity.”
That is some profound stuff right there.
I hate to admit this but, my desire for immortality stems entirely from fomo. Theres just so much i wanna see, so much I don't want to miss!
I think it is the same for everyone, people want to live longer because we want more time to experience things. that could be spending time with people or that could be developing new skills or hell traveling through the stars it doesn't really matter the fact is the only reason anyone wants to be here for longer is to experience more things. Honestly I don't think that there is anything wrong with that, as long as you don't spend more time worried about what your going to miss than you do enjoying what you can now
I think mine, as a 23yro guy, is more the fear of such drastic/unknowable change. You don’t return from it, you can’t (usually) decide when it happens, you don’t even know what happens after. All the unknowns and permanence just freaks me out. Fomo does play a part tho lol
Mine too its normal, I dont want to miss the colonisation of the universe or how humanity ends, Id like to die someday but when I wnat to not because I have to
Same here. I absolutely do want to die someday and I don't want an eternal afterlife to follow. I want that finality, and release, and quiet. But I also desperately want it to feel earned after I've done everything I want to do, and the thought of not being able to is really scary
Personally, from a philosophical standpoint, I believe that life is simply superior than death.
I want to learn and experience everything, with the added benefit of becoming smarter and wiser.
Not being alive means missing out on all the fun, interesting, amazing, and cool shit in the universe.
"I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust...I forgot to ask that they be years of youth."
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Great, now I have to go read that book again😂
Extended lifespan by definition requires slowed ageing, and therefore an extension of youthful years (if one is making the wish in their youth).
The only way one can be elderly and still have extremely extended lifespans is with necromancy e.g. turning the wisher into a lich, zombie, animated skeleton/mummy, or a ghost/shade.
@@ishmamahmed9306 Pretty much. Age itself doesn't kill you, its the failings of your fragile body that does it. You could live for centuries if you had nanobots cleaning up the accumulated waste and fixing the damaged DNA from the mitosis process. Or even just flushing out the damaged DNA and repleneshing your body's supply of stem cells so that they can do that job themselves.
The stars are the grains of sand.
You can see how many hes holding too maybe,if you try to think of all the stars in 1/1000? Of the milky way...
@@ishmamahmed9306why your immortal matters.
I don't want to live forever, but... it would be nice to live longer. That "300 years and then reconsider" vial sounds pretty damn awesome to me
dat Vulcan life span pls
You know, being able to live longer and being healthy wouldn't be so bad. It's not forever, but it would allow you or anyone else to live the best life you could.
Have you heard of Nick Bostrom’s fable of the dragon tyrant? CGP Grey has a good narration video of it.
@@kintamas4425 yes
I would like to live long enough to better myself and actually make a change in the world. I think most human lifespans aren't enough to make the change and ensure that it last for a suitable amount of time. As far as bettering myself, well whether that means finding peace with the idea of death and God, perhaps even losing my religion but finding something I'd consider "more" or just being able to forgive myself for unspeakable mistakes I've made, I'd take it all as long as I can die satisfied.
"I only rage because I am unfinished with this world as too many die already unfinished with theirs." You got me good with this ending. Actual tears. I think it's so easy to moralise on death, to portray it as something good and needed and natural, when you and your loved ones are not the ones dying.
"Speak for yourself sir, I plan to live forever." - William T. Riker
^ there’s way too many things I want to do to be able to fit it all into one lifetime, let alone a decaying one where I’ll be less capable as I age
Wasn't that Arthas from Warcraft? I remember Riker rejected Q's offer.
@@Dan-uf2vh Q didn't just offer immortality. He said he planned to live (as a human) forever, not to be a god forever and certainly not to be something he couldn't identify as William T. Riker anymore
@@Dan-uf2vhThe Riker quote is from the end of the movie Generations as he and Picard stand in the ruined Ready Room of the Enterprise.
"We may never know, Uther. I intent to live forever"
I think that ultimately people don't want to live forever, they want to choose when to go. Unforced by disease or circumstance.
So, everyone thinks the same thing? No deviation from what you've said is allowed?
Edit: I don't know why you guys keep thinking you can change my mind. Speaking of: has it crossed what little could be considered of your minds that the OP you're all white knighting for hasn't contradicted me and supported you? You keep telling me YOU know what was meant, and I keep telling you what I know was meant, and he or she stays silent (probably knowing I'm right, but not sure how to word it after all your shenanigans). Just stop, because it's sad and pathetic that you keep trying at this point.
@@marmyeater Oh, I didn't realize expressing an opinion was like declaring a universal mandate. Thanks for clarifying that for everyone.
@@CaptainRx-ss3rtOP is the one that phrased it as an absolute. If you are offended about it being called out that's your problem
You don't want to die now. Most people have never wanted to die. It just happens.
Even when you're old, you don't want to die, you just miss the people you've lost.
If people didn't want to live forever, most of them wouldn't cope with the idea of death by believing in a religion that gives them an eternal afterlife.
Wanting an eternal afterlife is literally no different than wanting to live forever. It's the same thing.
Living forever is the greatest curse of them all when you think about it. After the heat death of the universe you are still left alone... forever.
I love the hidden Lord of the Rings reference "butter scraped over too much bread" was how Bilbo said he felt after the One Ring had preserved his youth far longer than was natural.
In defense of those alchemists, mercury is extremely cool and if I didn't know better I would absolutely mess around with it 😂
_LIQUID METAL_
I broke an old thermometer and played with the mercury without gloves… no health repercussions more than 30 years later… still, admittedly, that was absolutely stupid!
@@frankherbert3005 tbh, I think most of the danger is just breathing in the vapours (or eating it, lol), human skin can be surprisingly good at doing its job, most of the time
@@jan_harald While the vapor or ingestation are bad for elemental Mercury, the real threat is when Mercury reacts to form a salt. At that point it readily absorbs through skin and can kill you if you aren't careful with it. Chemists are trained to treat all Mercury as a salt because if it is it can be highly lethal.
@@frankherbert3005 ah, that sounds like fun!!
I really liked the approach in The Good Place (spoilers): you go through a period of self-improvement tailored just for you, and then you reach The Good Place, an afterlife where you can see everyone, do everything, and stay as long as you like. There's a door that you can choose to walk through to end your existence (or move on to whatever is next), but you don't need to go through it until you're ready. You can choose when to walk through the door, and choose to do everything you want before that time. I'd really like an "immortality" like that, I think.
And even more-so, the fact that heaven was HELL before that door. That the difference comes down to having the choice. Damn I loved that show!
I love this concept as well but to add to it, there is a person on TikTok named sea ya later who does a series called hells belles all about a help desk in hell and it has expanded into becoming a therapeutic experience for me because she goes through some really tough things in the series with some real grace and respect
That’s a nice afterlife concept - but we live in the natural world. We have resources, and future generations to consider. Immortality is an extremely selfish concept. We come from the Earth and we return to the Earth. Without Mortality we can’t have change, it’s a necessary part of life.
@@jacobodom8401 I disagree. In the past, I believed as you do, but I don't think mortality *is* required for change; it denies the fact that people can grow and change, even (especially) later in life. The idea that a person develops a cognitive state that eventually calcifies permanently, requiring that they be physically replaced with a whole new person to make room for new ideas because their belief system is too rigid to update isn't realistic, fortunately. There are definitely people who do spiral into the cognitive abyss that swallows up all of us who fail to develop critical thinking skills, but they're a possibility, not an inevitability.
I'm a big fan of reincarnation. Coming back over and over with completely different capacities and types of consciousness, having forgotten everything that came before, but still being impacted by it.
When I was 7 I literally told my mother I didn't want to die, but I also didn't want to grow old. My subsequent childhood wasn't the best and I always feel like I'm missing out. I'm always seeking a stability I don't think I'll ever find.
My Lord provides life, where he will provide you with honor even for providing a cup of cold water for the children who belong to him, and you can love others and provide for their needs, and just trust that he will repay you when he resurrects you.
@@evannibbe9375 You're a cultist and the religion you serve exists only to acquire power, assert its dominance and suppress humanity.
The most depressing thing is that my Grandmother passed away the very morning that this video was posted. Complications from Dementia. The section about "The Dying of the Light" left me in tears, because that's what she experienced these last couple years of her life... I couldn't bring myself to watch this video until last night, and then I finished it this morning.
My condolences on your loss
I've lost my gramma too! It happened years ago but I still miss her. So sorry for you loss.
Condolences 🙏
My grandmother died last year or so and it didnt really hit me untill my birthday that just passed and th birthday card didnt come. the call never came in and i can still hear her voice in my mind saying hello. each loss is unique but knowing other understand how i feel makes it a bit easier
feel you bro.... I feel you so so much....
This kinda misses the point, but Frankenstein's failure wasn't his pursuit of resurrecting the dead, but the fact that he then proceeded to abandon his creation / "Child" as soon as it came to be alive.
Also how the Monster was so brutally unnatural, Frankenstein cursed it to be an outcast forever.
@@Hypogean7 That's a fair point.
Victor and his creation are both monsters.
@@lorierush6561difference being that one didn't have a choice
@@AmaryInkawult true that
I am losing my grandmother this week. When I began watching this video, she was still vibrant, but she had a stroke and since then it took me the whole weekend to try to get through this I’ve watched her decline in this way. I’m not sure when but she will be gone this week. I have followed this channel for very long time, and I have enjoyed every single one of these videos. But this one has made me cry thank you for giving me a distraction when I needed it when the sadness of my own thoughts was too much.
He would probably say "you're welcome"
One of the things that strike me as I age is how my relationship with time changes. As a child a day was a substantial length of time. Today a week feels about the same length. I think I simply summerize common experiences and so my memories are so much more abbreviated. I believe that in the course of centuries I may view months or even years in the same way. I imagine a centuries old vampire planning to do an important, immediate thing for decades. New technologies are almost immediately replaced by the next and social trends like slang are barely learned before they are decades out of date. It's almost like a black hole where the closer you go the more things slow down.
I’ve thought the same, but I’ve never looked at it as my experiences being repeated for years. I’ve assumed it was because as I age each day, week, month, or even year, is just a smaller percentage of my life than it used to be.
@@colefasan9849damn I’m high and that is depressing as fuck. Damn.
After I graduated high school, I loafed around for two years. The time flew by.
But then I went to college and the four years felt like it took forever.
The experience of time has nothing to do with age and instead has to do with what you are doing.
A child is having new experiences all the time; an adult is stuck in the monotony of their day job
School is usually something new each day, at least partially so, so it feels longer.
When I was a poolboy, time went faster than when I was in college because it was just the same thing every day
@@colefasan9849you don’t compare your existence to previous ages tho so this is stupid.
You simply don’t do new things as you get older, which is why time flies by.
If you were to return to college, or be forced into a high school like environment, I guarantee you’ll think 4 years will be a long time again.
When I do a lot, time feels like it goes slower, but when I do the same thing, months can fly by
@@pyropulseIXXI I agree with your point, but the years now seem to fly by. I’m not saying that repetitiveness or new experiences dictate my perception if time (although monotony definitely impacts it), but that when I was four years old a year was a quarter of my life so it felt much longer whereas now I’ve lived enough years that any individual year now feels lessened
I’m here for the background goat ambiance
man, the number of times I had to stop recording because they decided to start talking
~ Tim
Lol
@@HelloFutureMe i don't know why , but the intro felt like watching the intro to The Ancient Aliens
This video especially reminded me on Ghost in The Shell as it poses many similar questions. “All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
Thank you for not buying into this idea that immortality must be inherently bad! I get so tired of writers thinking we'll get bored, or heartbroken, or tired of life.
I think the sort of person who makes a good immortal is the sort of person who can enjoy their everyday life. "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
I'm curious what you would do with your potential immortality? I personally would absolutely abhor an immortal existence.
@@bluupadooplearn every language. Learn to play every instrument. Visit every part of this planet. Watch every good tv show and movie. Read all of Wikipedia. There is so much to do and to see. Enough for a thousand lifetimes.
@bluupadoop I'd never run out of things to do and places to go! By the time you've lived in and gotten to really experience half a dozen places, the first has already changed enough to be worth revisiting, let alone seeing the whole world.
There are so many things to learn how to do or how they work. Instruments to learn how to play, learn how to build a house from the ground up, how to do blacksmithing and fletching and programming and....all sorts of skills not even invented yet, and skills that are dying out I could help preserve.
If you're immortal, there's no rush to do it all at once. You can have one hobby at a time, one career, one place to live, for however long it interests you.
Don't get me wrong, I want to live indefinitely, not forever, but at least as long as there are people of some sort, there will be things to do, friends and loves and challenges and experiences. Only someone lacking imagination would get bored in a few centuries.
@@CritterKeeper01 it's kinda nice to hear such an optimistic view of immortality. I hope you can keep your optimism, and if I ever get offered the curse of immortality, I'll gladly point the offerer in your direction. And trust me, it's not a lack of imagination or a fear of boredom that makes me call immortality a curse, but more power to you for your optimism.
@@bluupadoop Thank you! I honestly think it's not for everyone.
Gilgamesh is story about the mortality and it's the ancientest story we know.
Upd: Apparently, i was wrong there are a few Akkadian things more ancient, but Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest Epic story we know of yet still.
Very cool.
There are no ancienter stories than that?
It was originally in the script but sadly didn't make the final cut! :(
~ Tim
@@parisulki729 There's no written one older. At least which we found.
@@HelloFutureMe sadge
@@parisulki729None that still survive
This is fascinating....but I regret watching this before I go to sleep because now I'm having an existential crisis
Ditto
The kind of immortality achieved at the end of the TV series "The Good Place" is exactly what I would want. You live on, eternally, in the body that you want, experiencing and achieving all that you desire, and when you feel that you can achieve or experience no more, you can decide to seize your existence.
It has all the upsides of immortality with none of the existential horror sides of it.
the ability to selectively forget things, a form of "little death", would better than an all-or-nothing solution. its like restoring a painting intead of making a new one and replacing it wholesale. sure, alot of the new parts are not the original, and some of the older parts have to be removed in one way or another to make room or the new, but that doesnt necessarily make the art less valuable or less worth keeping around. ones memories could be the same way. after all, if someone should have the right to choose to stop their conscious existence, they should also have the right to forget exactly what they want to forget if given the ability
@@kenpanderz Following along with "The Good Place" for something in that vein, the characters get rebooted many times, with two of them getting back all memories from across all of those experiences. The thought of being able to selectively keep one's full continuum of possible memories around, but selecting which to "toggle" on or off -- be it for the long haul, a temporary revisit, or exploring a mosaic of "first times" -- is a bit brain-melting, but fascinating to consider.
@@kenpanderzI’d love that even without immortality I can replay games I loved blind over again
(small correction, you probably meant to write "cease" instead of "seize")
Seemingly seized your existence (hasn't been confirmed and left for interpretation) but even then horror from that version of the afterlife essentially came from the factors of 1) No God and 2) your still the same as you were as a human. I gotta agree with the critique on how the show handled the concept of death and afterlife being to humanistic.
I think too often we personalise immortality. What would I do, what would I make, what I achieve.
What if YOU didn't?
Isn't there joy enough in guaranteeing that you'll be there to see what we all do tomorrow?
Would I be immortal if I could? Certainly. But not to write a Hamlet or climb an everest. I'd do it because tomorrow things will happen, and I'd quite like to see what they are.
Sounds a lot like a Terry Pratchett sort of line :) I'm right there with you - life remains interesting because there's always something new to see!
Unfortunately many people don't find joy in small things like that, and small things in general.
This right here. No one should need an excuse to live for as long as they please.
Same. Most of my fear of death comes from the knowledge that time will pass infinitely after my own nonexistence.
this! absolutely, this!
As an Absurdist, I've known what to do with immortality for a long time. It's a little thing called Apotheosis. I'd spend my time learning how to bring you all back so we can make and do and be for all time - and most importantly grow. I mean, unless you don't want to be a thing, but I'd like to give you that choice, for as it stands now, my family, we best do what we can to preserve ourselves upon death and write out a testimony attempting to justify our reconstitution. I'm hoping I wake up again. It's been neat being this idiot, and I'd like to help the future.
_The Man From Earth_ was immortal only because he could heal from any injury, overcome any sickness. He remembered his origins only as a vague story from a place that doesn't exist anymore, watched people make the same mistakes over and over, from one generation to the next. And then he forges a new identity and starts again, just like he's always done.
and what an amazing story it was, too
I love that movie
At a certain point you'll have changed so much as to be effectively a completely different person. We change within our own lives quite fast.
As a young, disabled person (in my 20s, physical mobility issues, and cognitive impairments) this take on immortality and youth and the fear of disability is so interesting to me. It does kind of feel like people are uncomfortable around me or deny my experience as a young, disabled person due to their fears being reflected from my mere existence. It really does feel like I'm trapped in the body of an elderly person and I often see people my age going out to parties or going on hikes or other "normal" activities and I feel a bit jealous and mourn my own life because it feels like mine is already over. (I do want to add that in my opinion, because there's a subconscious, and sometimes conscious fear that non-disabled people have of becoming disabled themselves one day, I think there's some cognitive dissonance that leads to ableism and a rejection of accessibility resources. Being disabled sucks, but it would suck a whole lot less if we could accept that disability is often just a part of life.)
I will say though, I often get lost in fiction; video games, books, anime, movies, etc. and it feels like I've lived hundreds of lifetimes by doing this and in some way it's my form of not quite immortality, but vicariously living so many lifetimes through the eyes of so many people I feel like it in a sense.
Great video, as always!
I feel kinship with you and your experiences.
This resonates with me a lot. I broke my spine in my early twenties And I'm so glad to finally be pushing 40 and getting crows feet and a receding hairline. I've actually looked several times to see if I could find a way to force my hair to go permanently gray all at once so people would stop expecting me to do young able-bodied person stuff.
Yeah, it's like I like to say. Every one of us is just one bad day from being disabled. A stroke, a car accident, a fall off a ladder. That's all it takes.
Idk, I have an invisible disability so I feel kinship as well. I hope other people smarten up. 🫂
I definitly agree that this fear of becoming disabled, which i see basically as a fear of losing "power", is at the core of it. Same story with ageism.
On the other hand, when i look at homophobic tendencies, i know for myself that it also goes the other way around. I was afraid of being or "becoming" gay because i was homophobic. Unlearning my homophobic socialisation also took away the fear of being or "becoming" gay. Also it helped getting knowledge in how homosexuality even works and that you can't randomly become gay because of some strange things (hence the "").
So i would say that going against ableism, lookism and ageism etc. also helps everyone.
@myboatforacar I like to say that if you live long enough, you're going to become disabled. That's not the worst thing in the world though! I'm also queer and while the bigotry did make it difficult, I don't hate that aspect of myself, it's just a part of who I am. I like to remind people that a disability is not defining, but rather a part of you, and it's not shameful or bad, just another aspect that will shape how you perceive the world and how you will be perceived. Kind of like being gay or trans! It shapes you, but it's just another piece of the puzzle that makes up who a person is.
Having an invisible illness is tough! The worst (at least for me) is the way people can become very hostile or confrontational when I am using accessibility gear, but because I'm young and appear healthy, I'm often told to stop taking resources from those who need it.
I wish you all the best! It's tough but I know you're killing it!
Dude, I was not expecting to cry watching this. What happened to your grandfather. While not the same as what happened to mine it is so painfully the same none the less. Seeing him slowly be unable to do more and more of the things he liked. Seeing him get stuck in a bed in a care home for the last year of his life. All because of a badly treated broken hip and a foot that got infected due to improper care. How no matter how hard he tried to walk again he couldn't. The worst of it is, I couldn't even visit a lot of the time. half a day's travel is just too much when you have so many other responsibilities. God how often grandmother cries when we were with her while she sat alone at home. The pain she felt when grandpa withered. How she went that 2 hour trip every day of every month of the whole 2 years. How tired it made her how hurt by the anger my grandpa felt that neither could do anything about it all.
How often I had to console my younger sister on the phone while she was in another country for an exchange year and how she feared she would never see grandpa again in the flesh. I will never forget how she weeped when we told her that grandpa passed away 3 months before she would ome home. How strong she was giving a speech at the funeral over internet.
I am not entirely sure why I wanted to share this. But I just needed to after this 49:15.
I'm surprised Gilgamesh's pursuit of immortality in the face of his friend Enkidu's death didn't make it into this video, it was a lingering illness of a very strong and active man that spurred it after all. The oldest story in the world is one of trying to avoid that slow creeping death.
Cut
I was thinking about that too
In the end he was unable to obtain it, laughed about his arrogance, and went back to rule as a wiser king and died like any other man.
Chapter 1 of the Epic of Gilgamesh provides a clear moral basis for Gilgamesh dying, that he was a cruel and evil man who raped every girl in his village, where the greatest cruelty of ancient Assyria was the failure of the men of Assyria to kill this evil man Gilgamesh, that they made him a hero instead.
@@evannibbe9375 then shit happened, he went on a few journeys, and became a wise and benevolent king having learned from his mistakes and life to rule his people fairly until his death.
Doctor Who and Frieren are two of my favorite shows because of their dealing with the consequences of beeing somewhat Immortal.
Wait for another video later this year 😉
~ Tim
Frieren has been on my backlog for a while now. Should get to it.
Favorite immortal story for me is prbly Dark Souls tho.
@Broockle started frieren today and It is living up to the hype so well for me
Doctor who has quite a few immortal or long lived characters.
The doctor
The master is different by his sheer will to survive even passed timelord death, he does so many evil things to add more time to himself.
Davros and the cybermen with cybernetics keeping the body or just brain going no matter the cost.
Captain Jack but he still ages but comes back fully healed.
Owen a walking corpse who can't eat or drink because he is dead and can't heal, he has no living cells so all injuries are permanent.
And who can forget the family of blood "we wanted to live forever so the doctor made sure that we did" thrown into a black hole so time dilation from gravity to make a crushing eternity of pain, trapped in a mirror, wrapped in chains so strong death can not free you and frozen in time but fully aware dress as a scarecrow in a field
@@Broockle Frieren is worth it. I would put it at the top of the log and finish it within a week or two. It's only 28 or 29 episodes right now
The story about your grandfather is a lot like when my grandmother began losing her autonomy to her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She was the person who got me into arts and crafts as a child, and I now have two art degrees. She was the only grandparent I was ever close with and I miss her every day.
I was so scared of the day she would finally forget me that I only visited her a few times. It’s hard. It’s so hard to not only see someone you love losing themselves but also wonder if you’re seeing a mirror into your future.
Tolkien nails it in the tale of the fall of Numenor. The more material comforts the people obtained, the more they lusted after immortality. The immortal elves, on the other hand, would eventually grow weary of the world. Great insight into human nature.
I was thinking of the fall of Numenor the entire video. The Elves didn't grow weary of the world per say, more that since their fates were tied so directly with the world, the natural decay of the world was taking them with it (which was why the Valar called the Elves to live in Valinor - the Undying Lands). The men of Numenor didn't realize this only saw "immortality == awesomesauce!", not realizing the "doom of man" (mortality) was a gift from Eru and that their fates were not tied to the world, sparing them from that decay, and thus their mortality brings vitality. Epic insight insight into human nature.
@@FunkyAbigail Good points! And so obvious in our world today.
Tolkien believed in a very Christian conception of the world. There are other cultural understandings though. For example, in the Indian understanding, the more attached you become to the material world, the more you are disappointed with the impermanence of material things, so you eventually seek a higher truth and existence. Eventually you can obtain enlightenment, which is beyond life and death. But this is possible within several decades, not hundreds or thousands of years. Which is why we have had wise old enlightened folks over in India for a while now
Except the elves created the Great Rings specifically to avoid "diminishing", and when that was no longer an option, they departed to Valinor, the Undying Lands, as the Valar called them to do.
@@StinkerTheFirst Same thing in the end. The elves only had small pockets of eternity, and they knew that if they clung to them by not destroying the One Ring, then everything would be lost anyway.
I think immortality has to have a "why" associated with it. As a scientist, if I had the opportunity to live forever and dedicate my life to the pursuit of knowledge, I think I would take that opportunity. My will to live is driven heavily by wonder and curiosity. Not even for my own sake, but to inform those around me. In fact, two of the most important questions I ask myself every single day are, "What did you learn today? How have you applied something you learned today?" So with that, living forever and becoming a researcher until time's end would honestly bring me endless joy. I'd never have to ask, "what happens next?"
Now, from a narrative point of view, it would be interesting to make a person age only when they have not learned something in a given time period. My grandfather once said something to me that roughly translates to, "the moment you stop learning is the moment you start aging."
No, sorry. I think you've missed the point entirely.
Pretty cool idea
@@trubleSum1 I did not miss the point. Frankly, there is not a single point to this video, but many points proposed which you can latch onto. Return to section 5: Do Not Go Gently Into That Goodnight. He talks about immortality as an opportunity to explore the endless complexity of human relationships. That extends not just to people, but other things as well. The atoms that make up every morsel of matter, the stars that lie scattered in space, and everything in between.
@@me0101001000to me the scary part of immortality is the decay/monotony of time.
I could only see immortality being good if either you have the option to turn it off when you are done or some mission or goal to work towards to.
I once thought a cool story would be a world where aging is done by experience rather than time. Like you don’t grow up till your mind/soul has reached a point for the body to follow. Would be cool to see if this world would become great or a dystopian story
In a similar form I think thr keys are essentially a sense of continuity, dissonance avoidance, and proccessing. It all seems tp me like you can categorize how those fit into how our brains model things to understand our fear and how we could do alternatives. Continuity is a emergently created illusion by our mind, a model of what we think the world is that may or may not align to it. That model being updated is expensive so we both trim down what we peecieve if it's similar to older experiences resulting in nostalgia and a lessened reaction to similar new experiences and resist or have pain for updating our models in the case of loss or change like with spaces falling to ruin. We get dissonance from that difference as it's expensive to alter our model, both in actually changing by accepting how many new perceptions are fully novel or in how many old changes are obsolete.
And so, to my mind so long as you could add in new branches of emergent functions to maintain continuity and coincidingly add on new perspective or perceptual elements ibto that system then you could faciliate intuitive continual novelty in experience.
My existential crisis doesn't come from the fact that one day I will not be. It comes from the fact that there will be a heat death of the universe and loss of the concept of "something". And the idea that our chronological perception of time limits us from realizing that the space between our current existence and the heat death is insignificantly short compared to eternity itself. We do and no longer exist in this moment. I do take joy in the fact that I got to exist whether it was in the past, currently, and in the future
At the end, eternity is nothing when there is no time, if there is no mass time dissapears and only energy left, but if there is no time, distance doesn't matter as 50000000000 miles are equal to 1 mile, this looks like universe during big bang. Every story have it's ending, but when one story finish, another begins
When I revisit something I love I don't go in looking for the same experience, but rather to notice or feel what I didn't before. By focusing on how I've changed since the last time or discovering something I failed to notice 20x before I find a new joy in it.
Like rereading a book after more experience and new perspectives.
This!
Doing that with music has been really fun, listening to songs I loved as a teenager but with the knowledge of an adult. It always impresses me how much more I GET something now. And makes me excited for how much more I will come to understand years tomorrow.
"Mice share 85% of our genetics"
As someone who is a bit of a genomicist I'll have you know that there's a huge leap between even 2% shared, as it's way more complicated than just similarity in regions. Though yes, mice are used as a model organism for a reason. Also, we've known the mechanisms for aging for years.
Hell, we share 60% of our genetics with bananas and look how different we are from that.
I have no doubt in my mind that we will eventually find some form of immortality. Maybe even in my lifetime. But the type of immortality we seek and the cost of seeking it is atrocious. And those who are actively seeking it today are just as unworthy of it as the delirious kings/emperors of old.
"bro the mice utopia experiment is the perfect representation of human societal collapse"
We are pretty similar on a cellular level.
@@jwilson544 I think it would be pretty ironic if we figured out how to revive people from their organs, but people in cryonics ❄ turned out to be unsaveable. 🤷
well, no. we don't understand the mechanisms of aging. we have started to understand, but it is more complex than any one explanation, and which of the different causes of age are significant and which are insignificant are things we don't understand at all.
The reason you feel existential dread or "death anxiety" the way you do IS because you're still young and full of energy, and aren't plagued by chronic pain that is severe at times. You don't have to fill your controlled pain medication every month or every week, medication which robs you of your emotional life in exchange for briefer and briefer periods of being pain free. Medication you can't live with and can't function without. You don't have the experience of most of your friends passing away, the experience of living in a world you understand less and less, among people who understand you less and less. You don't have a treatment resistant mood disorder which robs you of feeling any pleasure in doing things you would otherwise have enjoyed. For those of us who have these experiences - we don't suffer from intellectual fear of dying. We don't obsess imagining unimaginable. Most of us are perfectly resigned to ceasing to exist, and the only thing that holds us back are the few remaining friends or family whom we don't wish to upset. Every time we are about to fall asleep we sincerely hope this time will be the last time, one that liberates us from having to struggle through the next day. There is no "death anxiety" in such existence. But it's not entirely devoid of pleasant things either. I just wish they weren't so rare.
The older I get, the closer I feel I am coming to understanding the words of Cephalus from Plato's The Republic:
"I will tell you, Socrates, what my own feeling [on old age] is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the complaint of my acquaintances commonly is, 'I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.' Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause.
"But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known.
"How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles. He was asked, 'How does love suit with age, Sophocles? Are you still the man you were?'
"He replied, 'Peace! Most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.'
"His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.
"The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden."
Go to therapy
When I am old and grey, just before I start to lose myself, I want to make a last trip into the woods and leave this world peacefully, that's how I want to go
That sounds cool .
I would too if my life insurance policy didn't go to my dependents.
That is a good way to say goodbye
Funnily, my dad technically went into the woods and died peacefully, he died on his morning walk, seemingly while taking a break
Won't be any woods left by then
Anyone else remember Final Fantasy X? A dead world dying constantly under rule of the dead mandating the reduction of life and promoting the ability to ignore the constant reality of imminent death. A spiral of decay.
“People die, and Yuna dances.”
What was with games around this era having a huge theme around water
@@moosesues8887 I think they were developing the technology to make it look good
Re: Spiral of Decay. The world was called "Spira" for a reason.
I see some parallels to that in FFXIV.
This video goes HARD! Theres so much content worth contemplating here, and a lot of the writing is in pros.
Beautifully done. Thank you.
My grandmother had Alzheimer's.
I vividly remember, near the end, her looking up to me during one of my visits "you look just like my granddaughter."
I had to leave the room so I could cry for about an hour. Your story with your grandfather reminded me of that, the feeling of being helpless in their fight and so you don't want to watch it, you don't want to be there.
For some people, it is good to be there, for others it is better to not. You will always think to yourself about the opposite though. I tried to be there until the end, but after that day I couldn't.. I think I visited one more time, then a month or two later I got the news.
I've slammed my brain into the dirt with me telling myself that I should have visited more, but there is a part of me that knows it would have been worse if I was.
I had the same experience with my granpa, but his perception of reality made us no comfort to him. In his final months he hated us, I went from being his favorite "sixteenhundrend times special" grandkid to this mockery of his dead daughter. He was vile in his final months and I felt the need to be there with him through it. It was selfish to stay with him and it's selfish now to think back and wish my most vivid memories weren't of him yelling and cursing at us.
Alzheimers is such an evil disease, I wouldn't wish it on my most hated enemy.
we are not just scared of dying, we are scared of time, how it can never be stopped, and we can never go back.
change is scary, and everything changes all the time
You know, we seek immortality out of a reaction to death: we witness death, and we either fight it or fly from it. Like an animal, who only responds according to its genetic programming and learned behavior and no further. There is no choice to it.
So what happens when we pursue immortality as a choice, not because we fear death and thus we fight or fly from it? What if death is not this enemy we struggle against, but simply something that exists, and has nothing to do with our choice to pursue eternal life? Is it even possible to make such a pure and most importantly conscious choice?
Maybe we cannot fully shake off the shackles of our instincts; but we can strive to work around them. We can still choose immortality for whatever reasons we may have, even though a part of us still quakes in absolute fear of death. That’s part of what it means to be human: to overcome our animalistic urges and impulses to choose our path forward, no matter how desperately our instincts scream at us.
It’s the final sign of mastery and maturity.
When I got sober I was shocked at how much time was actually in a day. I had to find some way to fill that time or I would destroy myself. I took up various forms of art and now I wish I had eternity to continue creating beautiful things.
Congratulations on knocking down one of the strongest monsters ever set against us. Sometimes we have to fight it over and over, but now you know that you can fight and win.
I doubt your obsession with your own creations would last for an eternity, but you're in luck not ever to experience that
Can kinda relate. One of my biggest fears is that I won't live long enough to make all I want to make, all I could and should make. There's so many ideas in my head and only one me with a single life. I'd give quite a lot for a few more lifetimes of making art.
@@Casual-Yohoho-Enjoyer those are my thoughts as well. I've finally started to take my writing more seriously and actually try to get it out there because I'm now hyper aware that I will die someday and it'd pain me greatly if all my stories died with me.
Congratulations!
One of my favorite philosophical lines is from The Princess Bride when he says "Life is change, your Highness".
Time is the rate of change, and all things experience it.
I also love the line from How I Met Your Mother when Ted says that "over time we become doppelgangers of ourselves".
Even if we live for an eternity, that is not a single life of a single entity, but infinite lives of infinite entities.
Nothing lives forever because change comes for everything.
It isn't that stories must end, it is simply that they do.
Isn't the line from Princess Bride "Life is pain, Highness"?
"change is nature Dad. And it starts when we decide." -remi ratatouille
Blud got the quote wrong
@@juliegolick Oh you're right, I don't know why I remembered it that way. 😂
"Let's go in the garden
You'll find something waiting
Right there where you left it lying upside down
When you finally find it, you'll see how it's faded
The underside is lighter when you turn it around
Everything stays right where you left it
Everything stays
But it still changes
Ever so slightly, daily and nightly
In little ways, when everything stays"
Torchwood Miracle Day made me realise at 11 years old that I don't infact want to live forever.
The key I have found is to always be ready to die, but still trying not to.
Yeah. I don't expect to be wealthy, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at a fortune if one came my way, kinda thing.
@@eyesofthecervino3366 Were a fortune to fall into my hands it would swiftly be put to use destroying the idea of fortunes in ways that would greatly reduce my chances of seeing eternity. Haha
I like that idea. Thanks for sharing it.
My father also died slowly, and I had to watch. I also failed to visit nearly as much as I should have. I know what that burr on the soul feels like. You're not alone.
Lost mine to cancer when I was in middle school. The best way to make their day is to not care about their defects or what they lost due to disease
Thank you for this video. It has helped me immensely with my battle with grief. The weight of sorrow is heavy, but being able to view life as a gift in its minute finality.
I think this conversation is why a lot of people are gravitating to the story of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. It takes Immortality into a different way, as a way to remind people they should be allowed to slow down and apperciate things even in the ever rush to accomplish things before we can't do them anymore. It's not actually about death and decay (though it does begin with a death in some cases) it actually shows that conversaion from a being that was always long lived, 1000s even and it's her trying to understand humanity, and to grow to love it and appericate it. It's not about "What immortality will do to a person" but about how the immortal can live to appericate the smaller things and how the mortal can take appeication of that and how Empathy is important to connect to people even when you are immortal or at least close to it. It takes a conversation in a very different way. I'm not saying to read it to talk about it, but maybe read it as a way to just to see if there's more to the conversation as well and expand out.
100% and I love to see it :)
But often we relegate immortality to these sort of unrealistic scenarios. In no world will I be the first and only immortal. I am not special in that way, if I am to be immortal, it shall be after the wealthiest and many of the others like me have already become so. I will not be alone without peers, but rather one among many. In that way, I don't think the solitude of an immortal is a particularly useful avenue to tread if we are considering seriously this prospect.
@@KleptomaniacJames But Ferne isn't the only immortal? Demons are also Immortal and there are other Elves, though not that many. And the story it's not about solitude in the way you're thinking. It's about how sometime you just ignore the simple things only to realize that you missed out on those connections and sometimes if you connect with people you have a fuller experience. A very different message than what you're talking about.
@@Merdragoon except it isn't, because those who matter to freiren are mortal. It doesn't matter that there are gods and elves and what not, her friends were not immortal, and they die of old age.
@@KleptomaniacJames I think what people miss about Frieren is that it just uses immortality as a tool to explore how mindfulness of our lives is what matters. In the end, it treats mortality and immortality the same: regardless if you live 80 or 1000+ years, if you treasure the people around you and live your life mindfully, then that is a life lived well.
Himmel's life was a blip in her eyes but he is the most content person in that whole show. And similarly, instead of going "immortality actually sucks", the show imparts that as long as Frieren learns to value her time with her friends then that was a friendship worth building even if she'll all outlive them.
I really liked that Sandman quote about having a thousand "tiny deaths" before realizing that you have nothing left that's keeping you alive. Not alive in the physical sense, but spiritually. You'll get to a point when you want to die and that's ok. It's not always about losing the will to live over sadness or despair, sometimes it's just because you've reached a point of content with yourself and the world around you. There's nothing keeping you tied to the physical world any longer and you can freely leave in peace. At least that's the way I like to interpret it.
Reminds me of how the Ancient's lived in Final Fantasy 14, they were naturally immortal but could choose to willingly "disperse" their aether (soul) back into the planets life-stream to be reincarnated whenever they felt that they had fulfilled whatever purpose they had chosen to pursue during life.
@@kadeosborne3937 sounds great!
This is the most thought provoking video I've ever seen on RUclips. Immortality is such a fascinating concept
Tis not the fear of death that brings the search of eternity, but the love of life and fear of unknown and becoming the unknown person, not the fear of death that drives us, but love of what we have.
I'm already there. At 38. There is a world of wonder, possibility and emotion out there I can never be a part of. I don't know who I am, who I was, without my ADHD meds I can't even think straight, but I can't get the help I need because I don't matter
A probably too naive 25 year old here. I'm not going to deny your feelings but I do hope you get help. I got help when I didn't believe I deserved it. Goodluck my friend
Sometimes the hardest thing we ever do is Redefine ourselves.
You matter.
You absolutely matter. If you can't get the help you need right now, it's because our modern society fucking sucks. You deserve help
I have been clinically depressed since the age of 11 and have reached out for help from all quarters for 27 years. The only clinicians who've understood me or I've had a report with were through a work scheme and ultimately restricted from going into anything outside of work, the rest show incredible apathy, only throwing meds and bills at me. I'm not sure if they're simply incapable or really just don't give a shit about their patients.
Absolutely moving and beautiful. I thank you dearly for this experience.
“In 17776, humans immune to aging play football forever”
Me, squinting at the picture: “Wait a second…”
Yeah, I think he used the wrong football.
@@iblitz95 There is a wrong football? The picture just looks like normal football to me.
😂 i do want to clarify it was intentional
~ Tim
In 17776, the meaning of football gets very confused
While generally butchered in execution, the Fire Emblem games tend to tackle another aspect of immortality's bane, and it's one that tends to be quite common in fantasy stories with long-lived races: the loneliness of watching those you care about come and go, and the growing difficulty with becoming attached to someone new, knowing their life to you is fleeting.
One of the characters in question, Nyx from Fates, has an added layer of complexity from accidentally inflicting immortality upon herself.
Trapped in the form of a child that doesn't reflect the elderly woman within and grappling with severe body dissociation, she rationalises this as karma for the many lives she ended in the accident, one that was largely caused by her own hubris.
Compared to the Manaketes (Fire Emblem's dragon elves for those unfamiliar) who naturally live absurdly long and are relatively at peace with it since it's all they've ever grown to expect, Nyx's expectations were for a comparatively short run to that fatal finish line, something which many would argue makes us 'human', only to carelessly throw it away and adjusting very poorly as a result.
She feared almost inevitably outliving everyone she might care about, was embittered by a constant struggle to get others to take her seriously despite her childish appearance, and believed that she was neither capable nor deserving of genuine social connections.
Nyx spends most of her personal story in-game seeking a way to restore her mortality and ironically her elderly body too, never succeeding at either, and with her newfound friends' help eventually learns that the best way to 'atone' for her past atrocity isn't to continue punishing herself for eternity but instead to use her boundless wisdom and empathy to help others for however long she may live.
For someone who appears at first glance to be a walking trope, Nyx is such a nuanced and interesting character and surprisingly well executed for a tertiary character (especially by Fates' standard)!
Doctor Who amd Frieren did the same
Found fire emblem with awakening and was so suprised by how good game was. Never upgraded from 2ds so was never able to experience the newer ones@finaldusk1821
I always felt like that was a pretty dumb plot point even when it makes for good shows. like I’m on dog number four or five of my life.(I had two at the same time a couple years back) still able to play with my dog without falling apart, at the thought of the ones outlived. in fact, I rarely think about them at all they’re dead now so why bother? that’s how most people are with pets. That’s how most people are with even other people who die so why would you go into stupid melodramatic angst about something so simple.(like I get it. It’s because it makes for fun story drama, but it’s stupid.)
It's handleable--humans know that dogs have shorter lives than theirs, and adopt them into their families anyway, and can deal with replacing them.
I'm only 24 minutes in, and I just had to comment in order say this; I absolutely LOVE this video. About 10 minutes in I subscribed, and I can say I can't wait to watch more of your work. The amount of work and genuine thought you've put into this video is astounding. The parallels to countless stories, the ways that life, death, & eternity impact our views of ourselves & others, the inherent connection that death has to being human... These are all things I believe most people consider at some point in our lives, yet only in passing as eternal life or even unnaturally long life is something so far removed from our reality that it never truly grasps us for what it is. I would love to make a video about this topic, though I worry that I would reference far too much of the same material that you already have, as well as your video. Who knows? Life is short, after all. Cheers!
One of the greater philosophers of our time, Timothy Hickson. Perhaps not of the mind, but because of his humanity.
Beautiful and ugly work there Tim. Even the work with your friends. Like I said, your humanity is showing. It's glorious.
Always a good day when a new Hello Future Me video drops
I really don't wanna be here forever. Life on Earth isn't good enough to want an unlimited amount. Beyond is where I look to.
I think "Frieren beyond journeys end" depicts almost immortality really good.
As someone who's lived for 30 years now with issues with my legs that continue to progress in pain, making it harder and harder to walk and be physically active, I couldn't imagine wanting to live forever. Immorality is so nice to imagine when one is in peak physical and mental condition, but when one suffers physical or mental difficulties, sometimes a finite struggle sounds more appealing.
I've struggled with mental issues all my life, I want nothing more than to be immortal. I rather struggle indefinite to create something I can be proud of than accept a finite existence where what I accomplish is easily swept away by the sands of time shortly after I'm gone.
I feel for your struggles, but not everyone struggling feels the same way and I say this while my own knee is acting up as well.
If the technology to make you ageless exists then fixing your legs wouldnt be far behind
I didn't expect to hear that your experiences with your grandfather were so similar to mine with my grandma, and it really resonated with me. Decay is the great leveler.
Immortality is one of those concepts that really show how limited humans are with envisioning the future. Aging is cured, diseases eliminated, but somehow everything else stays exactly the same. Still a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, the understanding of human psychology isn't improved one bit, so everyone still has the same drives that the society of the author has. Nothing changes, just that one thing.
I mean, the belief that society will change because of a huge development of medicine but remain static in every other aspect is very silly. We haven't developed immortality but just stretching a good 20 year at the end of human lives already forced us to change so much, not to mention unrelated developments that made us more equal and more capable of accessing the best society has to offer. There was a time an infection spelt death, now every poorer people in middle income countries have access to universal healthcare that can make them live to a couple years to the richest countries. But no, it's all billionaires in cloudy gardens, and genetically engineered babies like GATTACA, nothing else is possible.
Do immortal billionaires live in bunkers afraid some poor guy will just make a improvised E device just for the laugh and take them out? Is it a necessity it will be unequal, it's a technology that doesn't even exist, how can we speculate on its distribution? The world is forever maculated by the flaws of the writer's society. No scientist could ever develop a pill that changes your brain chemistry to make you feel less sad or whatever. No one can pick up a new hobby, only the things immediately available to the author. What the author can consume is, what he cannot is not a thing that could possibly ever be. No one is able to move on, to love again, to meet new people. I mean, imagine you're a immortal born in the Roman republic, look at how many events that would have shaped so many people, at some point you were presented to an entire new world, there's so much you could do and you didn't even know what was possible.
Every generation feels like they're living the end of history. In a way fear of Immortality is often fear of what the future hold.
People sometimes posits that the elderly often view death without as much fear and anxiety, since they are already living in a world that is not their own, that is alien to them. It always struck me as odd that so many people would describe that fate as inevitable, when it's demonstrably not the case, there are plenty of old people who do not want death at all, who have learned to connect with this changing world and find joy and meaning in it, like they did with the world of their youth. Additionnaly, this state of mind among the elderly is also a result of how our society treats them, how we glorify youth and work as the pinnacle of human experience. We could make life a lot easier and enjoyable for our elderly if we truly wanted to. Decay is many flavor of awful, but it doesn't have to be boring.
To look forward to the future, one must have some appreciation of the present. At the end of the day Immortality and how people approach it is often a glass half full or half empty situation.
Amazing
@@O.W.L.E. only if the proces of gaining imortality is really hard to achieve
Theres lots o ways it could go, maybe youll need thouthands of computers and milliona of terrabites of just storage, for you to upload yourself
Because brains usualy store THAT amount of data and cant be mapped easyly
Or maybe the elixer is one of dragons heart, that cannot be aquared by a peasant, unless he slays it or he buys it
Essentially you are saying, Lucas, is that many writers lack imagination.
Which is rather, um, how do I put it, alarming?
Maybe that's too strong, but writing at its core is just recording down the results of imagination.
@@chillinchum No, not necessarily. Yes, it's exceedingly difficult to imagine a world so completely unlike our own that we can barely guess how it's like, even our best fantasy stories are basically just taking current problems and anxieties and sprinkling fairy dust on them. Besides, if you make something like, it becomes so experimental that it isn't marketable. Writers write what they know, readers want something that is at least passably familiar even if in novel forms.
I'm a scientist whose life is dedicated to curing aging (and all diseases). I saw the title-"The False Horror of Immortality"-and expected to hate-watch/monitor more opportunistic, ignorant, shallow transhumanism-bashing.
It's actually extraordinarily thoughtful, well-researched, asks the right questions, and doesn't come to any sort of immediately debunkable idiot conclusion.
THIS IS GREAT, in other words, and worth watching-and it packs an emotional punch that you won't expect if you think it' going to be anti-anti-aging.
This is a complex, heartfelt masterpiece of evangelism for curing aging (almost certainly not the creator's intention, but still praiseworthy!)
Those of us working to defeat aging aren't driven by some vast empty megalomaniacal all-grabbiness. It is enough to visit a cancer ward (aging is the major risk factor for cancer by far), or to see your grandfather decaying.
I like the whole concept of transhumanism a lot. I used to hate it but slowly realised that I didn't really understand it and my hate was senseless. Not anymore tho.
When I read the title, "the false horror of immortality" I knew immediatly that it was a song against the vapid discorse in pop culture about immortality.
Because its never immortality that is the issue. In any such media.
All the horror stories the horror is not the immortal. Its something far more terrifying.
No. To live until the last star becomes a dim faint glow is in indeed a beautiful thing to behold
But only if we have the means to extend and intertwine our time into an infinity.
The false horror of immortiality is because the true horror comes from classist divisions and the reconition that we are not 3 dimentional beings. We exisit through time as well, every year that 4th dimention grows. Thats the horror.
The creeping horror.
that we would build for ourselfs a fishbowl and call it immortality and godly
No you're not, you're just ortified of death and loss, especially the loss of ego
Nothing praiseworthy about that
Daniil dankovsky much? :P
@@edwardblake8575 how goes your surgery to convert yourself into a doormat, sir
I’ve often read people who struggled with the idea of ceasing to exist after death find solace from what they read in near death experiences. It’s an absolutely amazing genre of research. Fascinatingly consistent and optimistic.
Such rabbit holes go even deeper when incorporating works from channeled sources on metaphysics, like the book Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity Of The Soul and the book Journey Of Souls.
It occurs to me that part of the tragedy of forgetting the things we've done with age is not just the accomplishments themselves but the JOURNEYS. The memories and moments of Experience and Community, gone. I can show myself the art I made, the awards I received, and it's all fresh and new... Fresh... New... I am not able to make that art I did, or commit myself to re-achieving that trophy. So I must only make new art and get new successes, hope they do not fade as fast, but preserve the feeling while it is there.
Decay is an extant form of life itself, recycling resources that slowly succumb to inevitable entropic decay themselves until the entirety of existence is one state, one wave, one final, unending pulse of uniform energy.
A linear Universe.
Life is beautiful, so long as you remember to stop and look
Thanks for the existential crisis at 4am in Aotearoa!
But thank you for the great work you do, Kia Kaha Tim
same
If I was offered immortality, I would take it
Ohhh. Are you rich
Same
@@lavenderflowersfall280 if you're immortal getting rich is easy.
Make sure you get perpetual youth and invulnerability. Last time some one took eternal life without those, it didn’t turn out very well.
Hard agree. Seems overhated. We can find ways to pass the time.
Best video yet. Brought me to tears. So much I already was contemplating that I felt alone in considering. Thanks again for your great videos and books.
I don't mind getting older, and there's even one aspect of it I'm looking forward to. What I resent is my body wearing out, my mind becoming weaker. Death doesn't scare me near so much as the idea that my body will deteriorate and I will become less and less able to so the things I enjoy.
The purpose of immortality shouldn't be to cure death, but to get rid of deterioration. Everyone should eventually die, but just not be left to rot during their Twilight years.
@@mattd5240this is what I find heartwarming about the doomed quest of the historical alchemists. They didn't find immortality, and they probably would not have wanted it if they had: any realistic immortality would mean a dependence on an ever-increasing amount of bizarre substances, culminating in a kind of undeath. And besides that, the march of history would have TERRIFIED these people. Someone who lived from 1550 to 1850 would have seen the entire world order collapse and reform around them. Our minds are not meant to deal with seeing changes on that level. But what they did find was chemistry: a way to make life better while we're here. A way to cure diseases and prevent their spread, prevent famines, help people in pain, and give people greater control over how their bodies change.
Tale Foundry reading the Zima Blue excerpt was spot on
Me: I have to clean up this shelf with a bunch of nostalgic stuff from my childhood, I'll throw on a hello Future me video, that will be great.
Me an hour later: 'sobbing on the bed'
Great job as always, Tim.
this video is incredible
the raw honest admission of being afraid of death is something so many people reject yet something i feel every day
keep making content like this
I think the vast majority of people are afraid of death. Admitting it is different, of course.
This was like a long-form poem. Beautiful, but also quietly devastating.
Ftom a spiritual perspective,immortality sounds like reincarnation on hard mode. You dont get a wipe and reset of all your trauma, it just accumulates.
Tim back to make me cry with eloquent words of our shared experiences and joys of finding ourselves and the bittersweetness of having to say goodbye to who we were, I'm at work damnit
When I was 29 going on 30 I had a similar mid-life crisis. I am 46 now - I promise you, the feeling doesn't last forever (I only had a full on "crisis" that one time.) It's almost like the stages of grief: the last step is "acceptance."
Thank you for writing this 🥲
I was unexpectedly touched by your introduction. Two of my most beloved stories, Dark Souls and Zima Blue, being summed up so beautifully concise. I also lost my grandfather back around the same time. I wish he were still here.
I've always liked the way this sort of thing is presented in Babylon 5. "To live on, as we have, is to leave behind joy, and love, and companionship. Because we know it to be transitory. Of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those who's lives are brief can imagine that love... is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion."
And anyone who remembers how long summer was as a child knows the truth of those words.
Another gentlemen of excellent taste, I looked up that exact sentence to post. I would also add "You are not ready for immortality", as the Vorlon said of humanity.
Was also slightly surprised Tim didn't speak on The Gift of Ilúvatar from Tolkien, the ability for Men to pass on from the Mortal realm, instead of being tied to it forever like the Elves, and that it is a gift, knowing that it will end, and as Lorien says in Babylon 5, we can keep belief in the immortality of those things.
I am so so sorry for your grandpa 😔 I couldn't hold my tears by the end of his story. He still lives in you, obviously as a gentle soul ❤
This said a lot that I've been thinking but have been unable to articulate remotely this well. Thank you. Look forward to seeing more from you now that I've found you
My big fear with personal immortality is seeing everyone I've ever known die, then forgetting they existed over the millennia.
Would that really be that much better than getting dementia in my 90s?
Dementia is worse than just forgetting people.
That's the first time I've ever heard Seath's name pronounced like that. For reference, I've always heard it pronounced like "seethe", as in to hate or be filled with hatred.
Nah it's my bad. Haven't played it in years. You end up writing and reading but never hearing it.
~ Tim
If it was "seeth" they would have spelled it that way.
@@Nebukanezzerin the intro cutscene for the game they pronounce it more similarly to “seeth”
@@Nebukanezzer cute but that's not my experience
@@Nebukanezzer Steel - Steal
Christopher Hitchens put it well on the fear of death. He said, "I'm not afraid of being dead. There are manners of dying you have every reason to be afraid of."
I am not dead yet as my body forces me onwards. I fight it every step of the way, mocking and belittling the progress my body has made. I continue because I am pulled by forces outside my control. I do not wish to have this curse follow me, but I must live with it, as must we all.
When you were talking about your own fear of death, it reminded me of these quotes from the manga "Space Brothers."
“Are you prepared to die?." Most astronauts answer with a simple “yes”, but you can say anything. It’s just a weak yes. You shouldn’t be prepared to die. Instead, you should have the resolve to live until the very end! If there’s someone who replies “no”, you can trust them.” - Jay Brian
“Some things can’t be prevented. The last of which, is death. All we can do is live until the day we die. Control what we can… and fly free!” - Deniel Young
this video perfectly encapsulates everything i am. an immortal fire, raging against the dying light. im very glad i found this video, ill def be watching it a few times. spoke to me deeply
I wanted to thank you for speaking so openly and emotionally about the loss of your grandfather. The way you talk about him and about seeing him in his final moments is relatable on so many levels. I also lost my grandfather several years ago and it is truly painful to see someone you love so dearly to through this decay (and, in my grandpa's case, while the diagnosis of cancer had happened a few years prior, the time between is resurgence, which lead to him being bedridden, and his passing was only a few short weeks).
I also wanted to thank you for giving me this time to process the grief of that loss, if only a little. I've lost a few family members now, and I've always struggled to actually feel the grief of those losses. I often just feel numb and simply move on with my life without properly taking the time. But when you talked about your grandfather, it reminded me so much of my own that I just started crying while thinking of the wonderful times we had together. And the times that we can't get back... And just all the things that have happened in my life since and how I'll never be able to share them with him. As I write this, I still have a lump in my throat as I continue to reminisce, and again, I wanted to just thank you for allowing me to unlock these memories and these feelings that have been lost in my mind for so many years.
The hardest thing in my life was watching my grandfather, the toughest man i ever knew, who taught me how to stand up for myself and shared stories of the old way. Laying there, tubes coming out of his body, unable to respond when i told him i loved him. Its been well over almost 20 years now and i cant help but cry as i think about it.
The degeneration of the human body when aging has always felt so unfair to me. Imagine how nice it would be if humans worked like fantasy elves like we stop physically and mentally aging at our prime around 20-30 years old. And always when we turn exactly 100 years old we die and turn to dust. With this system humans could get so much more out of life than slowly getting weaker and sicker just hoping to die to escape the pain
you know what else is unfair? The mass consumption of sentient animals to sustain our worthless lives
This made me think of the retirement age--how do you think we would determine that?
@@missseaweed2462narrow thinking. Why do you need retirement age if you don't need retirement
@@veryironicveryhistrionic It's just what I thought of when I read the comment, but it can be expanded upon to ask other questions, like yours! What if there is no retirement? Do people even work at all? Or do they work throughout their entire lives? Do these people live in paradise as centurians? Are people happy? Do they need go be happy? Who knows?
I like chewing on stuff like this, so thank you for questioning that idea for me.
@@missseaweed2462 why not just eliminate the need for working for someone else, automate everything
Me before pressing play: “I’m ready for another thoughtful, cerebral analysis from Tim.”
Me when he gets to the part about his grandfather, triggering my grief over losing all my grandparents years ago: “I’m not strong enough for this. 😭”
Thank you. I didn't expect this. These are tears of gratitude.
~ Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Imagine someone who is immortal lives to see the death of everyone else on Earth & even the point where life is no longer possible yet they still can't die. That would be terrifying on multiple levels, especially since they would be able to see the death of the universe itself, but wouldn't happen for billions of years.
There's a scene in Torchwood where a character is buried alive and repeatedy chokes to death, revives, and chokes to death over and over for 200 years. That, but worse.
~ Tim
My fear is that this is what the afterlife is. Your body dies, but your being is left to observe. There are no eye sockets to close your eyes, you can't sleep, you can't turn off. You are just are there in the infinity.
@@HelloFutureMeThat is similar to how the mafia deals with immortals in the anime Baccano. They sit them in a barrel then fill it with concrete to their necks and push them off a boat at sea.
@@namelessspook7987that reminds me of a scene in the book Everlost
Realistically your own immortality could be used as an infinite power source in order to sustain all of human civilization indefinitely.
People also have flawed and finite memory. An immortal person would become like a moving average of there experiences. If it goes back one thousand years, one million years or one billion years i can't believe it would extend so far that all people encompass all experiences and would converge to the same identify.
Even within the course of a couple decades, our institutions have to grapple with the fact that human memories can incept falsehoods or vicarious experiences as faithful first-person experiences. Living 200 years wraps multiple contemporary human generations into that trend
Tim, my good man... you are not allowed to go this hard, brother.
Holy Heck. ❤
A couple of related quotes I appreciate: “Dying is one moment. Living is every single other one. Focus on all the moments you actually live through, not the single one at the end.”
“I have come to understand that those who fear death are burdened with regrets. They are ghosts haunted by what they have done, or worse, what they could not. It is not death that you should fear, but an unfulfilling life. If you reach the end of a road without looking back, then you will not waver at the finish line.”