Who wants to live forever?

Would you want to live forever? Does your answer change depending on whether or not everyone else gets to live forever as well?

Forever is a long time. Love is supposed to be forever, but it usually isn't. Memory is forever, but gets caught behind spun strands of aluminum or congested arteries or simply inaccessible due to lack of use. Vampires, at least in literature, are seldom forever, unless you consider 3000 years forever. Nothing lasts forever. Everything dies. Academically, I don't think there is anything that is forever, not even the universe, which will spin out to a point and then collapse back on itself creating a new Big Bang and begin the whole process all over again.

So, that being said, and forever off the table, would I like to live for a very long time? Yes.

Took a long time to get to the yes, didn't I? I'd like to be able to get around comfortably with a minimum of pain and not have to fight my weight during the whole time; however, living for a few hundred or few thousand years, regardless of who gets to live that long with me, would be interesting. I would outlast my critics, enemies and frenemies. I would be a part of history and, as a writer, I doubt agents and publishers would hesitate to publish my work, even if I had to use a new pseudonym every few decades, recreating myself from my own ashes, a living phoenix without the inevitable dying. The petty worries of a short life span, like having relationships with younger men wouldn't be an issue because everyone would be younger than I, and the upside is not being a slave to procreation, although it might be nice to experience the whole childbirth, raising of the children and letting them move on to their own lives and choices fascinating.

I remember reading about a woman who was 140 years old. She lived in an isolated Chinese village high in the mountains. She had a daughter 70 years old. Consider the possibilities? No, better not. I might change my mind and want to live my allotted 150 years and leave it at that, even without the added pressures of a fertile womb.

Living forever? Not really an option. Living for a time long enough to watch the unfolding of history and the falling away of petty worries and hangups? Definitely yes.

That is all. Disperse.