Would living forever add meaning to life?
We have such spectacularly short time on this earth- a statement of fact, and a statement that arguably creates our entire agenda in this life: the idea that it soon will end. To know that any second we could die, and that any moment could be our last- that each bit of potential could be snuffed out indomitably around any corner- isn’t that what gives life its traits, and causes us to act the way we do? We may no longer notice it, but upon being forced to recognize the alternative, it becomes apparent that it is our limited window of time that makes us live and love as passionately as we do. Attempt to imagine a world that would never end for you. Everyone around will die, and those we love will soon come to dust, and feed the trees that we will also watch grow, only to die again, crumbling back into the very earth, that we had just begun to flourish on. Imagine putting every last effort into a time, a people, and a setting, that you will only come to watch fall, and die, just as hundreds before them have. In reality people have loved, lived and prospered before us, but they have fallen, and someday, we will after them. This is no real true concern as, products of our time; we will die with our people, and pass on united into a different world. To be unable to do so however would render a person alone, without any true community to live and die by, and for that reason entirely without a purpose. After all, what are a person’s efforts, if they do not have an individual in mind to crusade them for? It is entirely possible in fact that these efforts would not even begin to exist in the first place, as a person would feel no love and passion for the cause, knowing it and its benefits, and the people affected by them would one day slip away. If we had no limit, one might argue that we would reach as far as possible to accomplish the incredible, but in reality, over time, even the most spectacular of feats with fall useless, or may even stand to be discovered by someone else, and benefit a civilization that will also fall. And who can muster the dedication in the first place to help a people who cannot possibly remain to help themselves? After time, it seems that all love and passion would pass with the people they were meant for. Perhaps the human race itself will in fact die out, and a person would be left alone, to dance with the descendants of man, or perhaps even just the cockroaches left after the effect of mans crusade of war. But even then, those men die together, and one who lives forever, must watch them, forced to question why, and live with that misery in not knowing, or maybe even knowing, and not being able to prevent it. Faced with this knowledge, it seems that even from the beginning of forever, one capable of living through it would recognize the inevitable despair and pointlessness their efforts would fall to.
