LogFAQs > #931427868

darkknight109 posted...

I've always thought the, "You'll outlive anyone you care about!" argument is a weak one against immortality. Sure you will... and then you can go make new ones. It's not like you only ever get one set of friends in life and that's it. Nothing's stopping you from just getting out there and meeting new people.

It's less about the outliving, and more about the constant outliving.

In the average person's life, you eventually have to deal with your parents dying, but may also have kids of your own who will outlive you. You grow apart from some friends, but make new ones. Relationships bloom and fade, but ideally you wind up with one special person in the end, and grow old together. But there's always a limit to how much pain you have to go through, an end to the constant cycle.

For an immortal, there's never an end. You're constantly burying friends. If you can still have kids, you'll outlive every single one of them, forever. If you find that one special someone, they'll die, and you'll go through that pain over and over and over and over again (which is why, in the Highlander franchise, it's kind of established that most immortals stop having serious relationships with mortals after the third or so time of having to go through with it - they eventually decide the pain isn't worth the love).

It's not so much the individual act as much as the constant accumulation of regrets and sorrow. Eventually you theoretically reach a point where you just sort of shut down and decide making new friends or finding new lovers isn't really worth it. Why should I care about you at all, when you're just going to die like everyone else? On some level, you'll always be more aware of the impermanence of life far more than the average person is, because they live in the moment, but you live in forever.



darkknight109 posted...

Why would you feel pain if you're invulnerable?

Pain is the body's sensory response to the destruction of cells. If those cells aren't being destroyed (because invulnerability), what would trigger the pain response?

Who says that your invulnerability makes your individual cells immune to all damage? You asked for invulnerability, not cellular indestructibility.

The word "invulnerable" simply means you can't be permanently wounded. But that can be achieved on the functional level if you simply regenerate faster than you can be wounded. Plenty of stories have presented characters who can't be killed because you stab them and the wound heals, or where you can lop off a limb and they just pick it up and stick it back on. But being able to survive and repair damage isn't the same as being completely immune to damage, and it's entirely possible that in those sorts of scenarios you still feel pain (Wolverine does, for instance).

And Winter explicitly mentioned being able to regrow limbs or pop his head back on, which is the healing factor version of invulnerability, which is what I was replying to in that instance.

Presumably if you literally cannot be damaged in any way, with weapons simply bouncing off and not a single cell in your body can be harmed in any way, you wouldn't feel damage... but that might also create other problems, depending on how it's achieved. Cellular stasis would screw with you in other ways (like never being able to change how you look after the moment you're given the power, right down to not being able to shave or cut your hair, having problems with sex, etc).
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