As you might have guessed, I find immortality to be a fun theme for fiction. After all, I did make a game called Immortals Should Try Harder.
Today I want to talk about the “bored immortal”, a classic fantasy and sci-fi trope. He or she has lived for hundreds or thousands of years and has already seen everything there is to see and done everything there is to do and now they are just plain bored with life.
But would that really happen?
The basic idea seems to be that doing the same thing again and again eventually gets boring. Since immortals live forever they would eventually do everything often enough to get bored with everything.
But this skips over an important point: Boring activities become fun again if you just wait long enough.
Have you even eaten so much of a favorite food that you’ve gotten sick of the taste, only to suddenly start craving it again a few months later?
Do you have a favorite holiday that you enjoy year after year?
Have you ever had a sudden urge to reread a book, rewatch a movie or replay a game that you haven’t touched in years?
Do you sometimes find yourself wishing you had the free time to restart a hobby you gave up in the past?
My personal non-immortal life experiences show that:
- Doing an activity too often causes a sort of boredom fatigue, but that fatigue heals with time
- The brain doesn’t remember the fine details of books and movies for more than a few years, making them fun to reread
- Actively having a good experience is superior to mere memories of that experience
All of which suggests that an immortal could keep themselves amused for pretty much forever by just switching between a few dozen lifestyles and having a really big collection of favorite books, movies, games and hobbies.
Spend a few years doing research at a big library. Then spend some time touring Europe and practicing cooking all their regional specialties. Then hunker down and run a small farm in the Alaskan frontier. Then switch to being an auto mechanic and learning how machines really work.
And eventually the immortal starts to miss some of their earlier lifestyle. They head back to the library or the kitchen or the farm and find that after a hundred years the activity they were once bored with has become fresh and entertaining once again. They reread the book they have forgotten. They rediscover favorite recipes. They find that the “boring old farm life” is actually a nice change of pace every once and a while.
And they repeat this cycle, happily, forever.
Now of course an immortal would still probably have their ups and downs and slumps. But I think breaking out of a period of depressing boredom would be as easy as finding something they used to enjoy decades ago and forcing themselves to give it another try.
So if you plan to live forever you had better start collecting books and movies now. You’re going to need a few thousand.
Discussion Prompt:
- How often can you rewatch a movie or reread a book? How many would you need to fight off immortal boredom?
- How many years worth of different activities and lifestyles do you think an immortal would need to keep the non-boredom cycle going? Or do you think the cycle would eventually degrade no matter how many different lifestyles they switched between?
- Would an immortal with perfect memory be harder to entertain than a more human immortal whose memories tend to fade after a few decades or centuries?
- Are there any activities that you never seem to get bored of, like getting a good night’s rest? Could just a few of these always good activities sustain an immortals mental health forever, even if they had perfect memory?