[Kiki]

If you had to pick between one or the other would you rather live one more year or live forever?

[Guest]

Difficult question.

If I lived for one more year, I would have a difficult time managing to fit all the things I want to do into that year, as well as having the means to do them. And I have a feeling, knowing me, I would be immobilized by the fact I was going to die in a year, and wouldn't even get around to living life to the fullest.

Living forever...It depends on if my body would adapt. Say, I tried to drown myself. Surely to prevent myself from dying I would have to then grow gills? Thus no matter how fucked up the earth gets I would be able to live. Would I still feel the pain? For instance, if I could go without eating and not starve, would I still get the hunger pains? I could potentially do anything I want, I think I'd have a fun game of reinventing my personality.
I could answer most questions of life over time, and I could experience great expanses of history...but...it'd be lonely...That's the big draw of that. I'd be like The Doctor. Hmm, that doesn't sound too bad, do I get a TARDIS or its equivalent? XD Oh, another thing, would I age?

Living forever seems to win, but just barely.

[SquishypuffDave]

I don't mind solitude, so ending up alone with my thoughts and memories doesn't sound so bad to me.

Question: since I'm immortal, does that mean I always heal, or do I accumulate ailments until I'm just a convulsing bag of disease?

[rayword45]

The whole "how exactly would I live forever" part is important. Because if I chop my head off and feel all the pain while still remaining completely alive somehow, I don't like that prospect.

Either way, I'd go with the one year. I knew I was only living for one year, right? Because I'd be dropping the hell out of high school and doing what I can.

[Guest]

Oh God, it's not even a contest for me. I'd pick one more year. I'm pretty fond of the thought of dying as is, so getting to know a year in advance that it was coming and then being able to spend that year doing literally only the things that make me happiest sounds like the best imaginable outcome for me. And I wouldn't exactly have to worry about loose ends because I'd have an entire year to get in touch with everyone.

Eternal life, on the other hand...Well, let's just say I'd rather spend a full year in Jonathan Edward's hell than have eternal life. Hell, I'd spend a million years in Jonathan Edward's hell if it meant I didn't have to deal with the nightmare of living for an eternity.

EDIT: To clarify, I was speaking of the nightmare of living and having to do it for an eternity. I realize now as I reread it that that may be ambiguous, but the nightmare is not living for an eternity but rather the living itself. Doing so for eternity is like a super-nightmare.

[Defago]

Death is a precious gift. Eternal life, even if it's with the exact body I have at the moment, would one day lose its appeal, even if it's not bound to happen in a million years. One day I'll wish to die, and I won't be able to, ever. Something which would change my mind is the ability to draw a blank mind slate: forget everything you want to forget and keep on living - you could start fresh, read books, listen to music, watch movies, have experiences. Otherwise, however, there'll come a day when you've seen everything and done everything, and there's nothing left to do and everyone else is dead, and that's just a minuscule (literally, a nothingness) of the time you'd have ahead.

[SquishypuffDave]

Is novelty the only important experience in life? Can one not find joy in the mere fact of existence?

I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

- GK Chesterton

[Norman Bates]

520 pages on my wishlist.

How am I supposed to listen to all this in just a lifetime? And I'm 40 already.

"Live forever".

[JollyPames]

The "Free" vid's point is terribly simplistic and didactic.
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[SuedeSwede]