I’ll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.

Edit 1:

  • Heath death of the universe, Death of the sun, etc, does not count. I feel like focusing on this is an overused point.

Edit 2:

  • Loneliness does not count. I feel like we all know immortality means you’ll miss people and lose them.
  • comfy@lemmy.ml
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    7 minutes ago

    As OP mentioned, a lot of replies focus on loss, that friends will inevitably die and objects will break… we already face that reality with regular life! That’s hardly a downside of immortality itself.

  • Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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    17 minutes ago

    Science fiction is going to age poorly. A lot of it is already hilariously dated. Look at most of Star Trek. They’re flying at FTL speeds through space with artificial gravity, teleportation, lifelike androids, and replicator technology, but their screens absolutely suck. More and more of those inconsistencies are going to add up over the centuries and make things ridiculous after a while.

    The number of new things that people enjoy dwindles with age. Just about everyone agrees that the music that was being made when they were teenagers is the epitome of the art. Are you going to be able to enjoy anything when you’re 2563 years old?

    The older you get, the faster time apparently moves. Having grown up in the 80s and 90s, on some days, even “The year 2000!!” still feels like it should be the future to me. I can’t imagine what even a few centuries would do to this phenomenon, let alone a millennium or megaannum (I had to look that word up.)

    On the upside, presuming I’m the only immortal, I’ll be the only person currently alive to see if they actually finish that performance of Organ2/ASLSP in Halberstadt.

  • PhAzE@lemmy.ca
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    1 hour ago

    If it’s just you being immortal, loss of all family, and friends, and loss of new friends, rinse repeat forever. Eventualdieyoull watch society collapse and regrow (possibly), and the planet will die. Immortality is forever after all. Then you’re left alone on a deserted dead planet. Electronics you have will eventually break and fade away to time. The sun will grow and die off, and it’ll burn because you’re immortal but still stuck on a planet that’ll get enveloped, eventually. Living forever would be terrible unless it was forever until you died of something physical, just not age and illness.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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    3 hours ago

    Btw if you were actually immortal, after a while you would just go into shock and enter a vegetative state from all the psychological stress.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Forgetfulness. Think how forgetful people get after having lived a normal lifespan, now go for a few thousand+ years and you’ve probably forgotten whole centuries of your life. This is actually the premise of a solo journaling game Thousand Year Old Vampire, you have to cross out and forget memories as you progress through the game, just forgetting whole parts of your life.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      There’s a Doctor Who episode with that idea in it too, the Doctor saves a girl in Viking times but brings her back forever, and when he meets her in mediaeval times she has a whole library of books that are just her memories that she’s written down over the years.

  • SybilVane@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    Losing all of the skills you gain. No matter how good you get at something, after a few centuries you’ll have lost your edge. You can also only practice so many things concurrently without giving something up. At some point, years down the line, you might try to ride a bike again and completely fail to do it, or try to sing and fail to hit all the notes that came easily before, or do gymnastics but the muscles you need are underused. It doesn’t matter that you spent years mastering every skill, your abilities will degrade over time. You’ll never really be able to feel sure about your own abilities except for whatever you’ve done most recently.

    • Bob@feddit.nl
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      3 hours ago

      You don’t know the expression, “it’s like riding a bike”?

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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    4 hours ago

    People are commenting ‘fates worse than death’ and ‘being made into a labrat by the 1%’, but really, if you have infinite time to just do stuff and you can’t be killed – And you don’t somehow squirrel your way into a position of power then what are you even doing with your time and immortality, oomfie?

    The loneliness part is also questionable. I know OP said it’s overly done, but I also think it’s just wrong. If you’re an adult you’ve had people in your life die before. It sucks. You miss them. But then you move on. And you meet other people. You’ll still go “:(” when you think about the person and such… But life goes on.

    And that’s just life. It doesn’t get any worse if you extend it longer – If anything it gets better. You might have lost your beloved today, but you have another dozen lifetimes to heal your wounds and meet someone else and fall in love again and (…)

    So here’s some lower-stakes, frustrating inconveniences of being immortal:

    • Your favourite fashion? It’s not just out of fashion. It’s so out of fashion it is now considered ‘historical costuming’. You can no longer find any articles like it at all. Because the only people even trying to recreate the techniques are costuming nerds and theater people who always exaggerate stuff
    • You got a song stuck in your head. It is either from before recording was invented, or any recordings of it that existed are too old to be reliably listenable. You have a song stuck in your head.
    • You used to really enjoy a job you did. That entire career path is now obsolete. As per the first paragraph of my post, if you’re immortal you have probably snuck your way into the upper echelons of society at some point during your infinite time… But like. You’re bored. You loved being a Court Jester, now there are no Court Jesters.
    • Actually tedium just in general. Sooner or later you’ll run out of new things to try, because you’ll have done everything that even remotely caught your eye already. So what the fuck will you do with your time? You’ll eventually just get depressed and not do anything.
  • Reil@beehaw.org
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    5 hours ago

    Cross the wrong people and you end up not dead, but irrecoverable. Cement shoes, buried alive kind of stuff. Cross a different set of wrong people and you become a labrat. To avoid either scenario, you’ll be in a constant state of “undocumented” or false-documented which will keep you in a pretty consistent state of poverty.

    • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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      4 hours ago

      There’s a book I heard about where the main character is immortal. Nevertheless at one point he pisses off some mafia dudes, and they nail him inside a barrel full of urine and throw him in the sea.

      • mosscap@slrpnk.net
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        2 hours ago

        Just a random thought, but it would take a lot of work (or institutional access to some portable toilets) to be able to her enough piss to fill an entire barrel

  • pH3ra@lemmy.ml
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    6 hours ago

    The disappointment of experience winning lifetime supply of something but that would eventually turn into a lie

  • Dogiedog64@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Cancer. So much goddamn cancer. It doesn’t matter what kind of immortality you have, you WILL get cancer. Repeatedly. Over and over. Forever.

      • Moah@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 hours ago

        If you’re immortal, you get to see your family expand to the points that organizing a single family meal requires 3 restaurants to house everyone.

        Since you (presumably, otherwise it’s a shitty immortality) don’t get old, you don’t get to retire

        • Macallan@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Retirement is a function of money/wealth, not age.

          If you’re immortal, you’d (not you specifically, just whoever in general) have to be a complete tool to go through hundreds/thousands of years without generating at least enough wealth to retire at some point.

      • abysmalpoptart@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        I think they’re saying this:

        Family meals would comprise of three restaurants worth of people since they’re all immortal

        Separately, you can never retire since you will never hit retirement age