Just found out I’m a god. There’s a blood test for it. Still processing the news.

Seriously though, I have been watching a documentary called The Immortalists, about the recent advances in understanding how and why we age and what we can do about it, and it has gotten me thinking about all the big questions concerning immortality.

First of all, do I want to live forever? Do I want to be forever young?

The answer is, of course, hell yes. More specifically, I don’t want to die before I’m ready. I would like the possibility of death to remain open should I decide I am done and want to put that final period on my life’s sentence, but other than that, I want to become young again and stay that way.

If I had to pick an age, I think I would go with 25.

If it was just a matter of nostalgia, it would be 20, because that was the best time of my life. I was in college, taking courses, with a circle of friends, and everything seemed pretty wonderful. My life had a plan, my friends were a hoot. All I had to do was get good marks and have fun.

But I am a cautious type, so I would go for 25, because by then I would have completely my final stage of brain growth, and honestly, who wants to face eternity with an incomplete brain?

Maybe 26, just to be safe.

Leaving the personal, let’s move on to the bigger issues of immortality, such as : what about aging? After all, to be immortal only means to take death out of the equation. Technically, it says nothing about youth.

What if someone invented this kind of just-past-the-post immortality? Would people choose it, knowing that it inevitably meant aging to the point of being little more than a pile of pain and imbecility?

I think some would. Certainly, if it was the sort of thing you did once and that was it, like taking a pill and then boom, no death, a lot of people would go for it. After all, nobody wants to die.

Which would lead to another of immortality’s issues, population. Eventually, all those young people who took that fateful pill would reach the drooling imbecile stage, and society would begin to accumulate them. They would be expensive to maintain for people who are not even there any more, and pressure would build to “pull the plug” on them.

But of course, that would not kill them. It would only increase the suffering of whatever was left of them.

That leads us to the quality of life issue. Sometimes, death is the only way out of intense suffering. What if someone suffers some profound injury, like getting torn in two, and yet continues to live? Would it be humane to deny them death however it might come to them at out hands? Euthanasia becomes a vital issue when it is literally the only way to die, period.

Another vital issue : brain death. At one point is the person, despite being physically alive, effectively dead?

But say we have the aging thing licked as well as the dying, which seems likely. What then? What would true immortality be like?

Well, for one thing, while an end to aging might keep our brains from becoming old, it does not keep them from becoming full. We act as though our memories are infinite and we can just keep on learning and remembering forever, but that is only because our lives, like our brains, are finite.

When life becomes infinite, we are on a collision course with brain capacity. No matter how efficient and capacious our minds are, they are still finite, and no matter how much our brain compresses the memories (which we experiences as a fading of memory), eventually we would hit the hard limit.

So what when? Hopefully, we would simply forget most of our previous life. Our brains would develop a form of helpful and limited amnesia, and we would carry on more or less the same.

That’s biographical memory, though. What about knowledge? If we lived forever, those two forms of memory would begin to compete, and it could be that for some people, biographical memory would have the higher priority, and they would lose knowledge in order to make room for it.

Not the basic things, of course, like speech and toilet behaviour and basic social rules. But a lot of non-essential knowledge could go. I find it hard to even imagine what that would be like.

Of course, for us cerebral types, the opposite might be true. We might find that we still remember all the trivia we love, but sincerely have no memory of the first fifty years of our lives.

As far as we know, we came into existence on our 50th birthday.

Another thing to consider in an immortal world is the stages of life. It used to be that puberty and adulthood were the same thing. This was necessary because people didn’t live that long and they couldn’t waste any years of reproductive potential.

But then we developed agriculture and civilization, and people started living longer, and so childhood could, in most senses, be continued past puberty. This let us invest more in each child, and that advanced the level of society far faster than ever before. Suddenly, we had a new category : teenager.

But what happens when everyone lives forever? Theoretically, childhood could last forever. Or it could end at puberty like before, and people could be teens forever, or whatever they wanted.

The phases of life would be, essentially, voluntary.

Of course, that assumes that we are all aging to adulthood before the immortality “kicks in”, so to speak. A truly horrifying possibility : the treatment that makes us immortal can be done at any age, and so some people are literally children forever.

Imagine if parents could keep their child all sweet and dear and innocent…. forever….

With that happy thought, I hereby finish the day’s speculation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

Yup, it’s that topic’s turn in the barrel.

I am struggling really hard to see my uniqueness (or rarity, I suppose) as a good thing. I realized only today that I have viewed my uniqueness as almost exclusively a negative for a very long time.

Pretty much, ever since my social world fell apart in the second half of first grade.

For the first half, I was no pariah. The details are understandably fuzzy and so it’s hard to summon up more than a vague and blurry emotional impression of the time, but I recall being somewhat popular and I definitely remember making people laugh (on purpose), and being quite happy with my teacher as well, who was a very sweet and kind woman of gentle and caring demeanor.

A lot like my mother, come to think of it.

But then a little red haired kid named Trevor told everyone I was fat, and made fun of me for that, presumably out of some form of jealousy, and that was that as far as my social status was concerned. I fell all the way down.

Part of me will always hate his guts for that. That can’t be changed. But my more adult side doesn’t really hate him. After all, he was a kid too, and had no more idea what he was doing than I did.

Life just works out that way sometimes.

After that came the realization of how little in common I had with the other kiddies, and the social gulf was sealed. To them, I was weird, gross, and full of myself. To me, the world went cold and I felt truly abandoned and on my own.

And to be frank, I was.

Every since then, I have felt cursed. I had these two things, being fat and being crazy smart, that meant I was alone all the time. I couldn’t get along with kids my age. And I didn’t have a lot in common with my siblings either, who after all were all 4+ years older than me.

Age stratification is very harsh when you are young,.

And my two best friends from my preschool world, Trish from next door and Janet from across the street, were a year older then me, so they went into school a year before me (the year I spent in Not Kindergarten), plus I was socially embarrassing, so they wanted nothing to do with me.

They didn’t know what they were doing either.

The obvious conclusion, from a child’s point of view, was that there was something very wrong with me that made it so I had no friends and no support from anyone. Whatever that thing was, even if it was something that the outside world told me was supposed to be good like being really good at schoolwork, had to be something terrible as well.

Essentially, I was cursed. And I felt that curse as a heavy weight every single day. I was always trying to do the right thing, but in my life that meant do what you’re told and stay where you’re put.

And to be honest, I was never told or put much.

I think every kid wants to be good. Kids want their parent’s approval more than anything in the world. But what that means is up to the parents. Whatever it is, that’s what will form a very deep level of their child’s personality.

Mine wanted me to be a low maintenance as possible. So I was.

So I have spent most of my life feeling like my role was to wait patiently for someone to tell me what to do. Whatever I did other than that was up to me.

Sadly for me, that is still the case. Perhaps that is why I am so afraid to take initiative on anything. What if I am doing something else when my instructions finally come in?

Anyhow, I have not experienced any positive effects from my uniqueness. Not consciously. School was too easy for me to take seriously. Getting an A on something was par for the course. It was so easy for me, and I received so little positive feedback from the world about it, that it never felt like an achievement at all.

It was just… what I did, I suppose.

Even today, when I know I have a lot of intelligence and talent, it is hard to take any comfort at all from it. I’ve always had a lot of potential. I was told that over and over again as a child. But nothing ever came of it, so I can’t take it seriously, even though I totally should.

Not everyone has the gifts that I have. I should be grateful. They told me that over and over again too.

But I wasn’t. And that hasn’t changed.

I wish I could be grateful for my gifts. That gratitude might motivate me. Go out there and show the world how awesome I am, and all that. But I just don’t have enough motivation to overcome my fear, ennui, and inertia.

In a sense, I suppose I am waiting for the world to make the first move. Waiting for someone to hold out their hand to me and say “I believe in you, and I will help you get through the rough terrain between you and success. ”

Obviously, that’s not how reality works. Even if such a person existed (which is unlikely), I would at least need to put my works somewhere they can see them and decide to help me. Nobody is going to break down the doors of my tiny little world and rescue me from the custom dungeon I have locked myself into for twenty years.

So obviously, whatever keeps me from putting myself out there has to go. Around, through, or over, it doesn’t matter, but it has to be taken out of the picture before I can truly grow.

And I want to grow. I need to grow. I am so tired of being so small on the inside.

I’m a sad little Peter Pan, who desperately wants to grow up.

But I might need a little help.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.