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Coping with immortality

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
In my WIP channelling the Aether (doing magic) has a rejuvenating effect on the physical body of the channeler. A side effect of this is that the physical body of the channeller does not age. As long as a channeller keeps channelling regularly they will go on living forever.
However, mortal minds aren't fit to cope with immortality and the channellers will eventually go insane. Some of them kill themselves while others have to be killed. It's also not uncommon for old channellers to disappear. Usually they're assumed to have disintegrated themselves in some way but occasionally there's no reasonable explanation for the disappearance.
I decided on putting the highest recorded age for a channeling human at somewhere between 400 and 500 years. This is a totally arbitrary decision with no other reasoning behind it than that I feel like it.
 
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Graylorne

Archmage
I think that this 'channeling prolongs life-principle' perfectly satisfactory. Especially as they go mad or disappear after living so long.
To my mind there's a big differende between a mortal human, who suddenly becomes immortal, and a being that has immortality as his birthright. The first is psychologically nor physically adjusted to living forever, the second one sees it as normal and must have developed ways to cope with it (external memory storage?).
 
Hi Zero Angel,

Why would it be really radical? I've always thought that a lot of the inspiration for Vulcans in Star Trek comes from elves. (Pointed ears, wise, non-violent (ish), long life spans) And they have sex every seven years.

...I was being sarcastic. I didn't think it was radical either, but rather perfectly logical. Apologies
 
I personally don't buy the idea that immortality would be something depressing that wears you down the longer you go on. It seems to me like something we mortals tell ourselves to feel a little bit better about the prospect of dying.

I have seen no evidence that simply living a long life makes you cynical or bitter - even people who are very old usually come in all types of personalities, and then you need to factor in that growing old kinda sucks. One can argue humans were not meant to live forever, but there's a lot of things humans were not meant for that we take for granted today. As a species, we are incredibly adaptable.

As for becoming bored and "having experienced everything"... have you guys seen the last hundred years alone? We are actually inventing new things to experience on a constant basis. And it's not like your average person requires a constant stimuli of ever new experiences, anyway. Most people spend the majority of their lives repeating their firmly established routines over and over and over every single day, only seeking out something different on the odd occasion. We are typically pretty good at dealing with monotonous and uneventful lifestyles.

Show of hands, how many here think they are ever going to get bored of writing, simply by doing it a lot? How many stories do you think you need to write before you've written literally every single story you can possibly produce? And how many here have some other profession or hobby you've considered pursuing but decided you didn't have the time and talent to spend on at the expense of your current craft? See, most people have to pick only a couple things to focus on because a hundred years tops simply isn't enough.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
I personally don't buy the idea that immortality would be something depressing that wears you down the longer you go on. It seems to me like something we mortals tell ourselves to feel a little bit better about the prospect of dying.

I think you have a point, but it would require immortality to be quite common - or apply to everyone. Humans are (generally), social creatures and we like to have other humans around us. If everyone was immortal this wouldn't be much of an issue, but when immortality is rare it starts to become significant.
I'm not talking about how your friends and family grow old and die, even though that may be an issue of sorts. What I'm thinking about is how it starts the become an issue to find friends you can relate to. Those among the mortals that would have the most in common with you would be the oldest ones. They're the ones who are the most likely to share memories of the past with you. However, not being immortal they'd be old, frail and tired. They wouldn't have the time or energy to engage in any of the activites you enjoy.
You could of course hang out with younger and healthier humans and do the silly things they do. That could probably be fun once in a while. But as time passes you'll probably have a hard time feeling like you fit in.

The only place you'd fit in would be among other imortals, this would probably be the option most people would go for? I think that in the long run this would lead to the immortals isolating and distancing themselves more and more from the rest of the world. If on top of that the immortals are powerful magic users there's a potential for all kinds of bad stuff to happen.
 

Akahige

Dreamer
I think immortality would produce considerably reflective people who valued tradition. They would also likely value simple things such as the change of seasons and would have put off any hints of pettiness. Also since they'd have likely established a culture well capable of meeting everyday needs, they'd focus more on the creative aspects of life which would remain fresh to them.
 

Shockley

Maester
If you were born into immortality, then I don't think you would get bored at all. It would be the only thing you'd ever known, so it wouldn't seem particularly long or important.
 

FatCat

Maester
Personally I think immortality is a tough issue to tackle, as some others have said before if a character was born mortal and achieved immortality there are some serious consequences psychologically speaking, the character would eventually lose interest in the world, that seems only logical. Hibernation, endless study/experimentation, ect. would to only sustain the mind for a matter of time (which of course is meaningless, in their specific case). Svrtnsse makes a good point, after awhile the only people you could ever relate to would be other immortals, and even if they had their own immortal culture, how long could that last? The point of a story is the development of characters, but how does an immortal develop? after so long, could they even learn more, or do they become static and one-dimensional i.e. the "evil" guy who is obsessed with world domination or whatever. I'm contemplating having an immortal race in my WIP, but there is no chance in hell I am going to attempt to write how they think or what motivates them for these reasons. If I do include them, I'm damn sure that they will be extinct by the time the story takes place haha, take the easy way out and let the artifacts do the talking!
 
Well the Gods of my world live forever but with worship and praise their power waxes and thrives. So being Gods and having supreme sovereignty, they only desire one thing: More power. So they wage war against each other and use humanity as instruments and weapons.

There is also a character in that same story who made pacts with demons. He realizes that selling his soul was a grave mistake and now wishes to renounce his oaths to the dark forces. Obviously they will in no way accept his plea and so he takes power from the dark forces (steals it) and has to constantly flee from them as they try and hunt him. He can't allow himself to die because then his soul will be sent to their domain, so he searches for unholy artifacts of legend and absorbs their power to lengthen his lifespan. He can also drain life force from other living things. So he has to constantly drain and siphon life from other beings to stay immortal and keep his soul from being damned forever.
 

mbartelsm

Troubadour
The problem with immortality is the human mind, when you are a kid 5 minutes seem like half an hour, as you grow this changes, after a while 5 minutes become 4, then 3, then 2, the time that passes seems shorter and shorter, you look to your past an realize everything has gone so quick even though time remains the same. Someone with immortality would suffer from this, at certain point they will only enjoy thing that actually take a long time since they have a lot of time to offer, suddenly they are thinking to the future in terms of decades, this may be good or bad, however whats actually pretty bad is that memories start to fill the person's mind and either start to push away other memories or are left without space to be stored, this is why old people tend to forget things that happened to them 5 minutes ago yet they remember things from when they were kids.

I'm sorry if it's a bit confusing, I didn't really knew how to express it.
 
The problem with immortality is the human mind,

Note know that they don't have to be human. Or whatever thing that would cause the immortality could change the way they perceive time also.

There are arguments to be made that most life-forms would have this acceleration of time, but there are arguments any way that you want to take it.
 

squishybug87

Minstrel
I don't know if anyone mentioned this (I'm feeling lazy :D) but I found that Anne Rice's 'Vampire Chronicles' dealt with the pressures of immortality very convincingly. It's worth checking out.
 
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