[LMB] Immortality for some?

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Rowena wrote:

> Kalina Varbanova wrote:
> >> I do not understand people who are bored.
> >
> > Neither do I. There is so much to do, read, learn, see, live... what's
> > to be bored with?
>
> I've known a form of absolute boredom. Siting still and all
> life and activities drained off al meaning, all people drained
> of love. The nearest hapenings are thoughts of pain, of loss
> and sadness and of death.

That's depression, not boredom.  And it is the one illness that
causes a desire for death, which fades when it is alleviated.
It's because of depression, lifelong and chronic, that I don't
keep a gun in my house even though I know how to use it and
support the right to keep and bear arms.  It's because of
depression that I don't and never will have any papers asking for
the plug to be pulled, no matter what, because I never have ever
regretted surviving and I have found during serious illness and
injury that at the very moment when my survival looked least
likely and permanent impairment seemed inevitable (it didn't
happen) was the moment I most wanted to live.

> I would not dare take upon me the task of going trough life without at
> least the possibillity that I can end it. An eternal depression I
> couldn't bare.

Nobody could, but depression is not eternal.  It responds to many
different forms of treatment, and a depressed person is the one
person who should not be allowed to have at any times the means
to end their life, because the chances of their using it when
they really don't need to is much too high.

> And beside, I think, I hazard a guess that we would all get
> bore. Maybe not after 1000 years, or 10000 or 100000 or a
> miljon or hunderd miljon but after that, surely, some pangs of
> boredom must crop up?

I know you're wrong about me.  There are always new things going
on to get interested in.  The fallacy behind this argument is the
idea that the world won't change very much, but it will, and
there will always be new information.  I understand why this
argument was once presented and how eternal life could look
boring to people during the era when there was no real hope of
ever getting life extension and most people lived in one place,
communicated only with those who lived near them and were moored
in one social setting, with limited access to books and
information.  That world doesn't exist any more and I often wish
the time-turner necklace I got was real, just so that I could get
everything I want to do read and responded to in the space of any
given day.

~malfoy :)
****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Morley