Who of us hasn't dreamed of immortality? Ability to live forever until the end of world. On first glance it does seem attractive - to see the future, to have time for everything, to be never afraid of death, to be forever young. This is exactly I thought at first - the best superpower one could have. Although, after familiarized myself with Wilde's idea of immortality in his "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and giving it some thought myself, I've started to doubt. Would immortality make us happy?
In my earlier post Path of happiness I claimed that one would need infinite amount of time to be happy. That is theoretically correct, although not applicable in practice, even in case of immortality. It is because many of our needs are periodic and maintaining each of them would be impossible. Also, the number of unsatisfied needs tends to grow exponentially as we satisfy them. That is exactly what happens - you want more and more until you don't have enough time to hold all your needs satisfied, but having those makes you unable to be happy.
Say we could hold the number of our needs under control, could we then live happily forever? No, because our needs are not object specific and the joy we get using one tool devalues over time. It means that a joke is only funny once or twice it's being heard even though the need for joy and laughter remains the same. This is exactly what happened to Dorian - he ran out of tools.
There is another, quite trivial aspect to being immortal. It is the losing of everyone you love and hold dear. They haven't been granted the ability to live forever and are therefore bound to die sooner or later. Neither can you linger around for too long or else they get suspicious and threaten to blow your cover of being 'normal'. This constant change of evironment can get quite depressing.
People are meant not to live forever. We should just eat, have kids and die. The world cannot offer limitless ways to make yourself happy.
Being immortal is a burden I hope we are never made to carry.
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