Who wants to live forever?

      A few weeks ago I did a post on how your behaviour might change if you discovered you were going to die in the very near future, so today I'm going to look at what happens if the inverse is true: what if you will never die? Of course this is impossible as, ignoring any biological issues, it breaks some fundamental physical laws, in particular the law of increasing entropy. However this doesn't mean pondering this hypothetical is pointless, as by examining how our behaviour changes by the removal of death we can examine how the knowledge that we will die affects how we live. Oh, and I got the idea for this post from Radio 4, which might explain the use of painfully middle-class language.

      First let's set the ground rules: you don't age; there might be other immortals in the world but it's far from the norm and while injuries won't kill you you are not invulnerable to harm, i.e. if you get injured you heal at the usual rate (I could discuss amputations and decapitations, but I'll just get bogged down in details and occasional shouts of "There can only be one!", so I'll leave that as an exercise for you to decide). So with these rules in place, how would I live my never-ending life? Firstly, I'd never get married. Not even to another immortal. In fact, especially not to another immortal. The reason being that a marriage is supposed to be permanent and while I have no real moral issue with divorce, I don't see why I'd go into a marriage that is mathematically guaranteed to end in it. I would also probably not get any tattoos, as they create a level of permanence I'd rather not get. A design that might not necessarily be seen as trendy, but acceptable none-the-less right now, will almost certainly be out of place in a few millennia's time. If I were to get a tattoo it would be under my own understanding that I'd almost certainly get it removed at some point. So what do we learn from these two behaviour changes? That things intended to be permanent, such as marriage and tattoos, are much more bearable when we know they aren't really permanent. A decision that's going to be with you for the rest of your life is infinitely easier to make when the rest of your life is only about 60 years, as opposed to all of eternity.
      The other main change is that I might well become more lazy. At the moment I am a barely motivated person and most of that motivation comes from the fact I'm always working against the final deadline. Take away that incentive and I don't if I'd ever feel motivated to do much at all.
      I'd probably also drink more, knowing that there's always a new liver ready to grow. Then again, I don't really like the idea of spending my perpetual years hooked up on dialysis. I might also do a few bank jobs, as 10 years in the nick isn't really much of a deterrent to an immortal such as myself, but perhaps you'd act differently, what with that pesky conscience of yours.