I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.

Edit 1:

  • Heath death of the universe, Death of the sun, etc, does not count. I feel like focusing on this is an overused point.

Edit 2:

  • Loneliness does not count. I feel like we all know immortality means you’ll miss people and lose them.
  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    All the comments assume everybody else isn’t also immortal. I forget the title and author but there’s an old sci fi story (or novel?) about a future where everybody lives for centuries, and they’ve found that the brain only retains a certain amount of experience. They have long careers, get tired of doing whatever, re-educate and do something else, or even have multiple families they eventually forget about. A couple of the characters are surprised to find out they used to be married like a century earlier. To me that seems vaguely like reincarnation, and I kind of don’t hate the idea. I really don’t see any downside to that scenario, or even just going on forever.

    People are focused on having regrets and negatives that last forever. But buck up li’l camper, you can learn to move on from stuff. And I say this as a dad whose daughter had cancer at age 10 (she survived). It was hell and I wouldn’t want to live through that whole period again, but I don’t consider it a reason not to want to live forever. The trick is to learn how to cope with these things and not let them outweigh the good experiences you have.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        That could be it - many elements are familiar, although the title isn’t at all, but I have read a lot of Fredrik Pohl. The plot synopsis also doesn’t mention the characters finding out they had been married before. Maybe that’s a small detail that just stands out more in my mind.

    • No1@aussie.zone
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      6 days ago

      A scifi short story I read was set in a somewhat idyllic future.

      Robots did everything. Everyone was given housing, food etc. Health was covered and people lived virtually forever. Nobody worked, and you could travel and do anything you wanted.

      The most prized thing, that everyone was desperate for, was having an original thought.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Reminds me another story about an idyllic world where almost nobody worked and everything was provided. At one point a crew showed up to repair a house, and everybody gathered around to watch, marveling at their work clothes and tools. One guy yearned to use tools so he started making little craft items at home, and trading them to people for worthless little tiddly wink tokens they used for friendly bets on sports. Then his neighbors started doing the same thing and they got a little economy going, using the tokens as currency, until the government got wind of it and squashed the whole thing because commerce was illegal.

  • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    The rest of humanity will eventually evolve into something you don’t recognize and can never be part of.

  • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    Having to keep creating fake identities to prevent people and governments from finding out that you’re immortal. That would be a massive pain in the butt, especially in a world where mass surveillance of the population is common.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 days ago

      Unless you have a lot of money to rely on I don’t even know if it’s reliably possible right now. You’re basically in the same situation as an undocumented immigrant.

      • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        And the more times you do it, it’s like playing a Russian roulette over and over again, you’ll eventually be caught.

    • el_abuelo@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      This would just be an occasional nuisance I reckon. You’d get pretty good at it. Just like all the other mundane things we have to do in our mortal lives.

      • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        What I meant is that it would get more and more difficult with more mass surveillance. Think about it, in 1950 it would take relatively little effort to fake an identity by inserting fake documents into a few physical cabinets. In 2000, cyber security was so weak that hacking to some government agency to modify their databases would be relatively simple. Now it would require advanced social engineering, and is extremely risky, and on top of that, they have a lot of mass surveillance.

        If we assume everything will have a biometric database, you’ll have to find ways to change your fingerprints and face every few decades.

        Over a long enough duration, you are guaranteed to be caught.

        (Edit: grammar)

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    6 days ago

    If it’s the realistic kind where you just don’t age, the statistical certainty that you’ll eventually die in an accident, or to war or murder. Your odds of getting to the heat death of the universe without making backups is pretty slim.

    If it’s the kind where you’re indestructible, you’re highly likely to encounter someone who tries to bury you alive in a subduction zone eventually, because humans are like that, and then you get to spend eternity slowly moving into the scorching mantle.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 days ago

        It would be an obsession of mine, if I was cursed with the inability to die under any level of duress.

        I’m not saying it’s common, but punishment by live burial is a thing, and billions of years is an awful lot of human history.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      The death of the sun will then eventually set you free into the gravity well of the sun where you’ll live burning hot untill heat death of the universe. What to do after that is anyone’s guess

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        6 days ago

        Well, depends. The Earth is actually right near the edge of where the sun will expand to, so there’s a chance the scorched glob that used to be Earth will stay in orbit. Either way, it will still be hot for a while, and you’re ultimately stuck in something solid - be it a dead planet or a white dwarf.

        There is such a thing as merciful death; it would not be good to be cut off from it.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.

    • Clocks [They/Them]@lemmy.mlOP
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      6 days ago

      The longer, the worse it is, not because of how bored you’d be, but the knowledge that you’d be more and more out of touch if ever found.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 days ago

      Yeah, they always gloss over how you’d have a very noticeable accent within a couple hundred years, and would straight up be using a second language within a thousand.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          5 days ago

          Accents are at least somewhat fixed. Haven’t you noticed old people sound a certain way? Ditto for grammar - hedging with “like” isn’t something I’d ever hear an elder do where I live, and the “because noun” shortening sounds straight up incorrect to them, rather than just cute.

          Vocabulary can grow, though. Sometimes it doesn’t, but that seems to be mostly down to old people not wanting to learn. Unfortunately new vocabulary is relatively minor in the evolution of most languages - a Russian word and an English word will often descend directly from the same 3000BC proto-Indo-European root, although they might now have drifted to mean different things.

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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    6 days ago

    People are commenting ‘fates worse than death’ and ‘being made into a labrat by the 1%’, but really, if you have infinite time to just do stuff and you can’t be killed – And you don’t somehow squirrel your way into a position of power then what are you even doing with your time and immortality, oomfie?

    The loneliness part is also questionable. I know OP said it’s overly done, but I also think it’s just wrong. If you’re an adult you’ve had people in your life die before. It sucks. You miss them. But then you move on. And you meet other people. You’ll still go “:(” when you think about the person and such… But life goes on.

    And that’s just life. It doesn’t get any worse if you extend it longer – If anything it gets better. You might have lost your beloved today, but you have another dozen lifetimes to heal your wounds and meet someone else and fall in love again and (…)

    So here’s some lower-stakes, frustrating inconveniences of being immortal:

    • Your favourite fashion? It’s not just out of fashion. It’s so out of fashion it is now considered ‘historical costuming’. You can no longer find any articles like it at all. Because the only people even trying to recreate the techniques are costuming nerds and theater people who always exaggerate stuff
    • You got a song stuck in your head. It is either from before recording was invented, or any recordings of it that existed are too old to be reliably listenable. You have a song stuck in your head.
    • You used to really enjoy a job you did. That entire career path is now obsolete. As per the first paragraph of my post, if you’re immortal you have probably snuck your way into the upper echelons of society at some point during your infinite time… But like. You’re bored. You loved being a Court Jester, now there are no Court Jesters.
    • Actually tedium just in general. Sooner or later you’ll run out of new things to try, because you’ll have done everything that even remotely caught your eye already. So what the fuck will you do with your time? You’ll eventually just get depressed and not do anything.
  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Either “Boredom: After some time you have seen basically everything.” or “Can’t keep up: The world changes so fast, and I’m, stuck in a mindset I acquired in 1543”.

    And: Bureaucratic nightmare. “We have you on file as being born in 1924, but you don’t really look like a centennial. Can I see your passport instead of that of your great-grandfather, please?”

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      I cannot connect to the boredom one at all. Are there books, video games, stone tablets, cool rocks to look at? Outta here with that boredom nonsense.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Basically all of the time you’re alive will be after the heat death of the universe, where you will be floating in space, with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to experience. Complete darkness, complete silence, in a complete vacuum, for eternity. Every other particle in the universe is forever out of your reach. You know that you will have nothing forever. You will never see, hear, or touch anything again, for all of time, which will never end. The trillions of years that preceded your float through the void fade into a distant memory as you outlive twice as much time, four times as much, a trillion-trillion times as much, and infinitely more.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    Life will pound you into an uncaring jaded disinterested unloveable husk of a being after too many emotional scars from losing loved ones, too much of seeing humanity make the same mistakes, and too much watching the knowledge you gained turned irrelevant.

    Or, life will beat into you an uncanny ability to converse and relate to others, even if fleetingly.

    Watch The Man from Earth.

    • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      I’ve watched the Man From Earth a couple times. Can only recommend.

      However it doesn’t fit your description. Oldman says that his memory is basically limited. Just like any mortal’s. Only the brightest, most impactful memories are retained and the rest is a blur. If you are forty plus, you barely have memories of your childhood today, unless you have recorded them as soon as you could and rehashed them frequently. Same for him. As such, he is constantly evolving with the world mentally (and physically apparently).

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        The first paragraph is how I imagine he was during the first few centuries of his life, when all the scars were fresh and he had no idea how to deal with it. From the sounds of it he has been in ruling positions, and may have even enjoyed it briefly, before he adopted the humble mindset that he has now and tries to inspire humanity with small acts of compassion.

        (I write “adopted” but I like to think that his actions actually reflect the hazy consciousness of humanity at the time, and so maybe he was molded into this persona over the years, as humanity grew somewhat kinder? Or he learned that the highest value one can have is not through wealth or power, but through compassion, i.e. something that all humans would eventually learn, a.k.a humanity does have value if given a chance).

        I do wonder how his skills have decayed. Can he juggle? Can he do a backflip, or it’s been too long and he no longer remembers how? How elastic is his brain exactly, and what precisely is there left of him in there that just isn’t a hazy imprint of his circumstances over the last few centuries.

        Imagine a neural net with limited nodes that has been subject to more training data than it can handle. Eventually it just learns to approximate all the data it has seen (overtrained) and isn’t elastic enough to predict or react to new stimulus, and becomes set in its ways. Is this the case with John? Or does he summarize old historical data and leaves himself with enough elasticity to learn new things from the last X decades?

        • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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          6 days ago

          Juggling might be in the same vein as bicycling, or swimming. Learn it and it’s really hard to unlearn it. Or maybe like tying your necktie or shoe laces. You learn it once with more focus and then periodically if recalled you retain it.

          Anecdotal, but I’ve learned how to flip the balisong over a couple days in my late teens at the cost of lots of cuts on my hand and fingers (more dramatic than it sounds really) without a guide. I haven’t had one in three decades, but I got my hands on one a year or two back and I was able to recall the motion and technique in only a couple tries without any cuts. Even today when I think about it, I can do the flick motion and my hand and wrist instinctively yearns for the weight of the cool steel.

          • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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            5 days ago

            Yeah I figure that he has some skills that he can just “snap” back into, and clearly he still has some good reflexes when it comes to aggressive situations. In that sense, I guess he can choose to retain the skills that he still finds valuable (e.g. hunting, teaching, kindness, child-rearing(?))

  • SybilVane@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Losing all of the skills you gain. No matter how good you get at something, after a few centuries you’ll have lost your edge. You can also only practice so many things concurrently without giving something up. At some point, years down the line, you might try to ride a bike again and completely fail to do it, or try to sing and fail to hit all the notes that came easily before, or do gymnastics but the muscles you need are underused. It doesn’t matter that you spent years mastering every skill, your abilities will degrade over time. You’ll never really be able to feel sure about your own abilities except for whatever you’ve done most recently.

    • Bob@feddit.nl
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      6 days ago

      You don’t know the expression, “it’s like riding a bike”?

        • Bob@feddit.nl
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          5 days ago

          But the famous thing about learning to ride a bike is that you don’t forget, even after decades. I’ve just looked it up to double-check and all I got was articles about why you never forget. It’s like saying you’ll forget how to walk up stairs or something.

  • Speiser0@feddit.org
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    6 days ago

    People, corporations, and other entities would over time gather more data about you. There’s always some kind of information footprint that you leave behind. And you’d stand out from other humans by the way you talk (i.e. using slang from 200 years ago, and speaking about historic stuff with details that the general public is not aware of) and other traits, which makes you traceable.