Living forever is impossible, period. On a long enough timescale, any nonzero probability accident will kill you. But actually the heat death of the Universe will happen even earlier than that.
> After awhile, you think of your spouses like dogs, knowing each time you take a new one that one day they will be gone.
I still love my dogs with all my heart, treasure the time I have with them, mourn them when they're gone, and still find happiness in my life. And still choose to adopt new ones on occasion.
Plus, I'm not sure why you think, in this scenario, that the immortality technology is only available to me and not any of my loved ones.
Since this is not possible, the best we can hope for is living for a long, but finite amount of time. Which is infinitely short compared to true immortality.
To put it another way, with true immortality you will never be one minute from dying. Without immortality, you 100% will, sooner or later. This is the qualitative difference between the two.
Words mean what we mean them to mean. When most people talk about trying to find a way to achieve mortality themselves, they are talking about biological immortality. Which means what I said - freedom from aging.
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - Read by Leonard Nimoy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOtx4sa9k4&t=544s&ab_channe...
In the book consciousness does not have to be chronological in time or on any specific biological or synthetic hardware. It just has to be encoded in a physical state somewhere, and the next state can be anywhere else in time or space.
One example is a person who deliberately set their consciousness on a loop, doing his favorite activity, climbing a skyscraper too tall to see the bottom or the top. Permanent flow state, not quite sure how long he has been climbing, feeling an adrenaline high.
It may seem like a boring life, but for that person it's indistinguishable from a normal life that happens to be doing that action in the moment.