Question Getting old

You have my sympathy (ow) and best wishes!

--Dave

Yeah, getting old sucks.

But, as the saying goes, consider the alternative...

Bek D Corbin wrote: Yeah, getting old sucks.

But, as the saying goes, consider the alternative...

Living forever?

Kristin Darken wrote: "Who wants to live forever?"

*Raises hand excitedly.*

Domoviye wrote:

Kristin Darken wrote: "Who wants to live forever?"

*Raises hand excitedly.*

And what will you do when humanity no longer exists? The universe is dark with no stars or planets to go to? And besides playing solitaire with only a deck of 51 is kinda lonely.

Or are you going to be one of them? And you know who I'm talking about.

I like to study my own naval.

I intend to live forever, or die trying.

Well, that's essentially how Hob Gadling went at it. Of course, he had a bit of help...

Isn't it kinda like flying... you throw yourself at death and miss.

I've read the eternal youth ones also. Casca the eternal mercenary before it was franchised out to other readers and the ones about aging and so forth.

My idea of being young would have to be in the early to mid 30's not the teens or older as you are at the right age to hold various jobs, obtain degrees without looking to young and so forth.

But in all seriousness I wouldn't want to live forever. Where would you store all that knowledge or having to change identities and so forth. It makes great reading as there was one I read where the persons body died by age, accident and so forth he was resurrected on a ship hidden deep in space and would have his memories downloaded into him. Can't remember the book now but I'm sure I have it somewhere in my meager collection.

None ever really want to talk about the pitfalls and so forth. Most of those who live in their late 80's to 100's say they miss their family an friends or when their children pass on before they do. Living forever would be a long road to travel, just like in the Green Mile.

I once saw Hell described as eternity in a room with people you really, really love as it slowly, slowly all goes sour for ever and ever amen. Like one of those really long marriages, where the only thing keeping the two people together is the sadistic joy they take in ripping the other to shreds.

I remember that now. I liked Highlander. Not the followups as each movie tried to grandstand its way past the other in terms of how to entertain. I really lost it when they introduced aliens.

Of course if I can get up in the morning with sounding like a certain cereal I'm fine.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: I once saw Hell described as eternity in a room with people you really, really love as it slowly, slowly all goes sour for ever and ever amen. Like one of those really long marriages, where the only thing keeping the two people together is the sadistic joy they take in ripping the other to shreds.

That sounds sort of like Marcel Proust's ' No Exit ', where Hell is three people who are fundamentally incompatible, who are forced to wait in a room forever.

And before you accuse me of dropping names, I consider Proust as the archetype of the ineffectual neurotic European Intellectual, who spent 30 years in a basement in an exercise that was ultimately an excuse to rationalize his own self-loathing. Both Ben Franklin and Lao Tzu look at him from across the ages and say, 'Dude, get over yourself'.

I think of hell as in the Twilight Zone episode A nice place to visit. Think about it. You're given everything you want. No matter what you win, you never lose. What's the point? You don't die, you don't have no friends and so forth, except for your own personal butler who caters to your every wish (except one of course).

Now that's hell as you never progress.

I watched that one.
I could keep myself entertained for a very long time with that. It helps having a very large imagination, having read about many extreme and fascinating things, and being open to new experiences.

People who argue against immortality remind me of The Fox and the Grapes . Outliving people doesn't scare me; doesn't everybody always say that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? That has so far been the case for me, at least. While it's easy to imagine all the death you'd encounter, it's important to also remember all the life you'd get to see. As for memories, I am also unconcerned. There's already plenty of stuff I don't remember, and that hasn't driven me insane or made me suicidal. Plus, we've invented all sorts of useful tricks for dealing with forgetfulness (post-it notes, diaries, photo albums, video, etc.).

I'm also not worried about the heat death of the universe, because you can't have your heat death and experience it too. If through some magic I am able to spit on thermodynamics and exist without consuming energy, what's stopping me from using this same magic to avert heat death? Immortality doesn't exist in a vacuum, after all. There must be a mechanism for it, and that mechanism may have all sorts of implications. Yes, it's rather a large step to go from powering one human to counteracting the death of the universe, but considering we're looking at something like 10^14 years before star formation stops, that's plenty of time to figure it out and develop the appropriate force multipliers. I mean, we're talking about ten thousand times the age of the universe. Lots of time.

And of course, there's an Alice quote for everything --

"... with proper assistance, you _could_ have left off at seven."

--Dave, falling off his horse on one side

That is an awesome quote, and one reason I love Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Good ol' Lewis Carroll. Gets upset when HMS Pinafore is performed for children (because the thought of the word "Damme" afflicting their poor tender ears is too horrible for him), but includes jokes about assisted suicide (or murder) of seven-year-olds.

I never said he was sane.

That said, his comment on the subject is worth taking a gander at, just for its humor value:

Lewis Carroll, on HMS Pinafore wrote: A bevy of sweet innocent-looking girls sing, with bright and happy looks, the chorus 'He said, Damn me! He said, Damn me!' I cannot find words to convey to the reader the pain I felt in seeing those dear children taught to utter such words to amuse ears grown callous to their ghastly meaning ... How Mr. Gilbert could have stooped to write, or Sir Arthur Sullivan could have prostituted his noble art to set to music, such vile trash, it passes my skill to understand.

He did have a way with words.
His letters to friends and children are great for learning imagery and fitting nonsense into something that makes sense.

Yes, Dr. Dodgson (Carroll's real name; he was a Dean of Mathematics at Oxford and an Anglican deacon) was definitely a devotee of the Victorian 'cult' of the Innocence of the Child, a popular meme of the period. Dr Dodgson has been accused of pederasty, in that he possessed photographs of nude prepubescent girls; rather, Dodgson advocated that children were innocent and pure, and that their nudity was completely free of eroticism. The Wikipedia entry on Carroll explains it in better depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll