Death is what makes life worth living - livelimitless.net
While rounding up my last article titled if I were a god, I mentioned I will have a problem with being an immortal and it got me thinking; why will I not want to be an immortal?
Image credit: Background vector created by iconicbestiary - www.freepik.com
Being an immortal means you get to live forever, you will probably stop aging in your 20s so you can retain a youthful body. Sure it will be fun at first, living life without any care and having enough time to do everything you want to do, but it will get boring over time.
Do you know what will make it worse? It's If you're the only immortal around. You get to watch everyone you know and love die of old age (or something worse). There's a high possibility that you will end up really depressed and stay away from humans, but it gets worse again; you can't even kill yourself!
(Lucifer spoiler alert!)
If you have watched the Netflix series called Lucifer, there is a season where Cain came around (yep, as in Cain and Abel in the bible) and he was looking for ways to kill himself. God made him an immortal as a punishment for killing his brother, and he has been on earth for thousands of years.
He was really desperate and kept looking for ways to end his life, he got tired of witnessing several civilizations and seeing everyone he loves die. Now I'm thinking; wouldn't that be what I will do also if I have traveled the earth for thousands of years?
I agree with the quote at the beginning of this article; "Death is what makes life worth living". It's what makes us want to achieve things, it's what pushes us to go beyond our limit, it's what makes every minute so valuable to us, it's what makes us strive every day to get to the top.
I mean, if you were immortal, do you think you will be worried about improving your life right now? Who cares if you get married today or 40 years later? Does it matter if you become a billionaire now or later? You got all the time in the world, right?
You can go to college today and study medicine, after graduating and working for a few years you get bored of it so you go back to school and study engineering. After being an engineer for a few years, you get bored again and return to school and become a lawyer, and the cycle continues.
You will realize after so many years that nothing interests you anymore and life has lost all meaning; you have seen all there is to see, you have sampled foods from all over the world, music now sounds all the same to you, you have mastered all languages of the world and even know some that have gone extinct.
You will probably have to move around different countries after some decades so people won't label you a witch or something. It's typical human behavior, anything we can't explain we usually call it magic. That was what happened when electricity was invented and when man flew for the first time.
To really put it in perspective; imagine you finally completed a video game you have been playing for months and you're free to do anything you want to do, after a while of exploring the game and seeing things you have seen before, won't you get tired of it?
It happened to me after playing several games, especially those games that simulate the real world (The Sims, GTA, spiderman). For example is grand theft auto, if you know this game you will know you get the chance to explore the world after you have completed the game.
There are no more missions, no more goals for you to accomplish, you have all the cars in the game and you have millions of dollars that you don't even need because you can take anything you want. After a few hours, it all gets boring because there are no goals, and that's also what makes life fun; achieving your goals.
But what if everything gets to live forever, wouldn't it be better? I mean humans, animals, and plants living forever, wouldn't that be preferable? I think I will like that too, but the world might not be peaceful because there are some problems in this world that death helps us to solve.
What do I mean by this? In most countries in the past, power was seized by tyrants who brought hardship upon people but they were killed in a coup and a new government takes over, now imagine if such tyrants were immortal. Those in Nigeria, just imagine if Abacha was still alive and is still the president.
On second thought, are we even going to be having things like prime ministers, governors, presidents? The world will be very much different and most things won't be in existence, I'm thinking it will be kinda boring, but will we ever know if something is boring if we all started off as immortals? I guess we will have fun in other ways that are different from what we have right now
Closing thoughts
My thoughts are over the place right now and I'm beginning to have headaches from thinking too deeply about life 😆
There are lots of things that came to my mind while writing this article but I couldn't even write them down because it felt like an incomplete puzzle and different pieces kept popping up as I tried to complete it.
After all said and done, I think I will prefer having a very long life to being an immortal. Now it's time for the red pill and blue pill question; two pills are given to you with immortality written on the red pill and extra 100 years written on the blue one, which do you pick?
I will be ending this article with a song by Mr. Hudson and Jay Z titled Forever young. Do you really want to live forever?
Thanks for reading 💗💗💗
October 9, 2021
Extra 100 years. Death is a gift we don't value. No matter how we try to paint immortality as something good, nothing can change the fact that it is a curse. Ah! Living forever! That's unimaginable.