Against immortality

For some reason, certain classes of people revolt at the idea of being an immortal. It may be interesting to look into the reasons behind that.

On the low end, they may say everybody I know is gone. Of which they really mean they are defined solely by the people around them. Without anybody around to solidify their identity, being alone will render them a nobody. Even if that is legitimately horrifying (something I will have to take too long to dispell), they conveniently forget that everybody else also gets to be immortal.

On the high end, they may say death give life meaning. Which is true. But the way I see it, permanent death can always be on the table as a user-chosen option. If true death is not being denied, then meaning isn't being robbed either.

Deep down a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves. Having to imagine a radical lifespan is like a multi-decade convict released into the wild, they can't operate without the comfort of forced confinement.

This point is rather ironic. Boredom is a now a solved problem, so they can't say I'll be so bored by 130. Which to be fair, is actually possible even in the era of infinite-content (I'll address this later). But as a speculation this is rather improbable given the current technological trajectory.

I think the term they're looking for is meaning deficit. Perhaps in their head there's an amount of fungible meaning to be distributed across a lifetime, and it is fixed and finite.

This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.

Gaming as life

Consider this story.

The greatest records of Tetris took decades to beat. But once some kid broke it, everybody else would magically break it too on a routine basis. Before long, every contender elevate themselves to compete on a new height in a new era, in search of a new record to break.

This is true across every sport, be it the extreme kind, traditional track & field or electronic. Even in the realm of competitive eating.

So why do games tend to elevate itself to a new height, in ways that surpass domains like art, medicine, mathematics or science?

Players die, a lot. Death (aka losing) comes cheap in games. When that is so, self-evolution is the evitable outcome, like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow.

Even without a Wolverine-like setup, we don't have to experience genuine death in order accelerate self-evolution. We only need a long enough lifespan and healthspan to open up a new set of possibilities for experimentations.

Mastery takes time. What takes 40 years to master would sounds like unappealing now, but completely feasible in a long lifespan.

It's conceivable that some scientific breakthrough requires a person to devour 70 years worth of pre-requisite knowledge in order to come up with an insight by the time he is 90.

Life phases

I have a running question which I don't expect to be answerable until we're there: would phases of life be divided equally no matter a person's lifespan, or would there be new undiscovered phases beyond certain years.

Personally I'm more excited for undiscovered phases. If they exists, then it's practically a form of Singularity where we don't know what drives a psyche. So beyond this point I can't say infinite-content is capable of sustaining a spirit.

However

I painted an overly rosy picture of how people would pursue life when given more time. I conveniently ignore that given infinite time, there could be infinite debt as well.

Some people's life simply come out like a badly designed game. Some of these are their doing, some are not. Regardless, escaping it is easier said than done. Being asked to play a bad game indefinitely would be cruel, the recoil is understandable.

Only I wonder how many actually know if they are in a badly-made game, or if they are playing a good game badly.