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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious and yet right on the money in some way.

As you get older, you start to see that everything is the same and goes through cycles. The important stuff of my childhood (ex: having clothes that were sewhar fashionable), becomes irrelevant. Who cares if I'm wearing the same style of sandals for over 20 years now? You start to focus on what's more important to you. F** are reserved for important matters like arguing on HN about the superiority of Linux :).

When you see a child have a meltdown over not having their favorite bath towel available, you start to see how widening your scope means less care for minor problems. I have no time to worry about those things as I have bigger problems (working on marriage, work due dates, educating my kid...etc). It makes one wonder how chill an immortal being would be after milennia.

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The last thing you wrote is something I indirectly think about quite a lot. Imagine a place (call it heaven if you want) where time and death don’t exist. What could you possibly care about?

This is addressed really interestingly in The Good Place. It starts off looking like a very by-the-book sitcom though, so you do need to wait it out a bit.

It’s a philosophy class masquerading as a sitcom. I liked the show a lot. And props to them for ending the show when it needed to. They could have dragged it out but didn’t.

> They could have dragged it out but didn’t.

I've watched the show and loved it, and I've heard this compliment before, but only just now have I realized how meta this compliment is.

Glad to hear it ended. Death isn't always bad.

In the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan, people deal with this by editing their memory every once in a while so that every experience feels fresh. One guy even edits his personality so he becomes obsessed with something for a random amount of time and then abruptly loses interest.

I've deliberately cultivated this.

As I often as I remember I adopt the perspective of someone who's 14,000 years old.

I don't know why I haven't died, and at this point I don't expect to at anytime in the future.

But I don't know I won't - so I'm still careful, and grateful.

But I don't let things bother me, because I've seen it before. And all my plans are long-term, because centuries to me are the same as quarters for you.

It seems crazy, but it's really changed how I think. I got the idea after watching the incredible movie, "The Man From Earth"

This is fun. You often people say “death gives life meaning” which is absurd, as if the meat and potatoes of day-to—day obligations, chores, hobbies and friendships are influenced in any way by the fact that the chain of experiences will eventually end. I don’t imagine that I’m 14ky old, but I do make decisions as if I might never die, and if I do, I try to keep in mind the implications for my as-yet-nonexistent grandchildren.

You are practicing eastern philosophy :)

The Man From Earth is wonderful. The best ultra-low budget movie IMO.

No way, you guys really like this movie? It's a good idea, terribly executed. The worst acting I have seen in a long time, gaping plot holes that makes you shake your head in disbelief. I was very disappointed.

Agreed the movie was great.

"You think that thing you're worried about is going to matter in the long term? THINK, Mark, THINK!"

My crass response to people being finicky or indecisive about dinner plans is, “You do realize that whatever we pick is just going to be shit out by tomorrow right?”

Most of it's breathed out (unless it's fibre-heavy).

Caring doesn't need to be negative only. IMHO You can care about love even if you're immortal, and you care about losing it even though you went through it all bazillion times already, as each person is unique and the feelings you lose are still lost and the loss is still painful.

Babylon 5 had a neat episode (spoilers) where the first living being (in his corporeal form) has a conversation with one of the human commanders and says something about love being a remarkable gift/illusion for mortals that they should treasure.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0OI4kah6Rp4

I read somewhere that because people don't live that long, we don't have a collective memory of previous disasters or pandemics (anyone who was alive today during the 1918 pandemic wouldn't really remember it), so human history simply happens in cycles or waves. The underlying conflict is the same, but a new set of humans deal with it with the technological tools of the day.

Simply put, if the human lifespan were longer, we might give less fucks about natural disasters because we've seen them before.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) There was an article about Dune on DLF (sorry it‘s in German) that makes exactly this point https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/denken-ueber-tausend-generati...

> I read somewhere that because people don't live that long, we don't have a collective memory of previous disasters or pandemics (anyone who was alive today during the 1918 pandemic wouldn't really remember it)

I’m splitting hairs, but aren’t these two separate problems?

If I lived 1,000 years, I’m not sure I’d be able to remember things that happened 200 years ago super well. I can’t remember things that happened 20 years ago very well.

The assumption that I'm going under (I assume others as well) is that if we can halt aging, we might be able to do something with memory as well.

Although I kinda personally believe (more on hope than any technology being available) that we can move to a non biological medium with nearly infinite storage, speed of light processing speed, effective immortality...etc. The only needs would be entertainment and energy.

Of course, we have zero idea if that is even possible.

> Imagine a place (call it heaven if you want) where time and death don’t exist. What could you possibly care about? Mathematics!

plushpuffin (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132468) mentions Greg Egan's Permutation city, and this sort of question is one of his main themes. In Diaspora, Egan explores many other possible answers; my favourite of the possible answers there, and I suspect also his, is that eventually one would occupy oneself with mathematics in such a place.

Apologies for incorrectly including "Mathematics!" in the quote; it was meant to be the first line of my answer, but I only noticed my formatting error after the edit window had closed. The post should have read:

> Imagine a place (call it heaven if you want) where time and death don’t exist. What could you possibly care about?

Mathematics!

plushpuffin (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132468) mentions Greg Egan's Permutation City, and this sort of question is one of his main themes. In Diaspora, Egan explores many other possible answers; my favourite of the possible answers there, and I suspect also his, is that eventually one would occupy oneself with mathematics in such a place.

Mr Egan would be a little biased with that answer :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o

Recommend you experience 17776 [0][1] if you haven't, it explores this theme in a pretty hilarious way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776 [1] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

> What could you possibly care about?

Competition/drama with other immortals? Competition with past selves? Assuming no memory wipes.

Context switches could be annoying, given the ability to tangent across infinite time or space.

> F* are reserved for important matters like arguing on HN about the superiority of Linux :).

Linux has already taken over the world. Your advocacy energy is wasted on it.

Direct it toward promoting Rust instead :)

Bahaha :)

I discovered a similar thought the first time in the amazing science fiction novel Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling:

"Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically.

'It's a joke!' he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.

[...]

'It's a joke,' Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the words gushed free. 'This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no idea. How could they? They were dead before they had a chance to see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred—' "

> F* are reserved for important matters like arguing on HN about the superiority of Linux :)

I thought you said you were tired of chasing fashions. ;p

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