TheFeniX wrote:How does one amass wealth while living in poverty? They can't skip basic needs like food and health-care. If anything, the staggering amount of shit poor people have to deal with will be compounded for them. Poor health, low food quality, likely living in high-crime and high-pollution areas. It's fucking expensive to be poor in places like America. I don't know about other countries, I'm sure it varies. But there's nothing stopping mortals from eschewing pleasure for long-term gains, except humans are fucking terrible at it. Further, an immortal thinking he has "all the time in the world" would be even less likely to aim for the long-term, at least until they are so old their skill-set is next to useless.
On the other hand he actually does have all the time in the world. After a century of being lazy he or she can still invest a century or two of being smart. Loosing a number of years is no problem when you are not on a time limit.
How? They aren't omniscient. Take a guy from the civil war area and put him
You did not finish the sentence there.
Not everyone feels the same way you do. In fact, the idea of living long enough to see everyone you can relate to die off is a pretty shitty concept to a lot of people. Especially when you factor in that, at some point, you're going to forget enough about your past self, you could make the argument you aren't even the same person, even with continuity of consciousness.
So? Seriously, why is that an issue? As long as I am alive I am alive. As I said, I would gladly accept a state of being where I live, even if my senses and even consciousness are gone. Hell, I'd gladly sign up for an eternity of torture and suffering just as long as I know it truly is eternal.
Either way, it's going to end up with life either dragging on as you notice every day or years start just kind of floating by. Boring if you're well-off, excruciating if you lack the money for leisure time. For every person who hits it big and lives it up, there's probably 100 who will slog through a menial job for the rest of their never ending lives.
But that's what we all do anyway. It's called life. You make it sound as if that sort of thing is something bad, unpleasant or undesirable. It really isn't. It's the way the world is. If you can't ever have any better, why feel bad about what you do have?
At some point, your "past self" is going to be nothing but flashbulb memories (like how I will always remember where I was when I heard about the first plane hitting the twin towers on 9/11 or how my mom remembers exactly where she was when JFK was shot). But as you care less and less about the goings-on of the short-lived little people zipping through their lives, even those are going to lose their impact.
So? You say this as if it has relevance.
I bring up JFK's assassination because I could see the disconnect between my mother and grand-mother. To my mother, JFK getting shot was a huge deal. My grandmother wasn't pleased about it, but her first child was born while her husband was still overseas at the end of WW2, she lived through multiple wars with propaganda video being played all the time, the cold war, and loads of other shit. So, JFK didn't mean as much to her. 9/11 barely registered. To her, it was just another group of assholes we were about to bomb into oblivion. And this was 2 years before she started her actual slide into "no fucks to give." Meanwhile, my mother doesn't rate 9/11 and the Afgan/Iraq wars all that much because she also lived through numerous wars and drills in school. Meanwhile, to my generation, 9/11 was the worst thing ever™ because many of us were in elementary school when the Berlin Wall fell.
That's strange. Interesting but newer the less strange. From my perspective all historical wars, past or present are like that. It's just the machine of politics turning its wheels as usual. That's why I am so anti interventionist, anti sanctions and anti war in general. I feel that it's all just a pointless waste of life for the sake of furthering national pride and political carriers.
That's just the way it works, aside from something affecting you personally (such as losing someone in the 9/11 attacks): we just stop giving a shit because we've seen it all before.
Yea, but again so what? You make this sound as if it were a big deal.
The immortals will not be a cohesive block according to the OP: it's available to anyone. "They" won't have power. If the wealthy decide to take this option more than the poor, your system will come into play, except that will have less to do with the immortality and more to do with who forces it on their kids. I will grant that the wealthy will have access to more loop-holes to violate their children's right to accomplish this.
People in a similar predicament tend to think the same way and band together for common good. Any immortals not screwed over by life or murdered by crowds are likely to band together if nothing else than out of a feeling of self preservation.
The "good" isn't set in stone for me. I can think of more than enough negatives to give me pause and I'm old enough to actually consider the consequences.
And those are really all I care to discuss.
It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
