THE CONCEPT OF IMMORTALITY
Let’s mess around with the idea of immortality and imagine a world where the concept of death doesn’t exist; a world where death and dying is impossible, and where ageing ceases after a particular time, allowing the rest of your life to be spent in immortality.
I know, I know this IS crazy but indulge me. Let’s allow our imagination to run amok for a while, and let’s see what we come up with
Let’s switch it up even more and imagine a world where death doesn’t exist, but birth does.
There is a room for addition of new life, but never the elimination of a life.
Let’s paint a world where a child is born, and the physical body grows to a certain level and ceases all form of physical growth. Afterwards, the person just keeps on living. Thousands of years after, the person would still be walking on the surface of the earth. I imagine a fully grown man taking a scroll in the evening, in the company of his ancestors, each of them cozying up to one another.
Technically, I believe that there would be an elimination of notions like ancestors, generations, myths and legends, because we would all be the same generation, all walking on the surface of the earth. The idea of elder and younger too would be defeated because there would be no importance to being born before another, if there would be nothing distinct to separate us from the other.
If we are all going to be walking together on the earth for all of infinity, I imagine that we would become so familiar with seeing ourselves around that we would probably just get sick of it. And then who would have the time to keep in touch with what a person’s age is, when there is no form of relevance that would be attached to it?
Would there still be need for job descriptions involving qualification by age?
I mean if there is no possibility of death, then it means there is no ageing, and hence no advancement or deterioration of intellect and maturity or body performance at all.
What I’m still trying to process is if the absence of death would automatically come with the elimination of ill health.
Come to think of it, the whole essence of being healthy, and avoiding sickness is to keep your body in a state that distances you from the experience of death for as long as possible. Would there be an absence of death, but the presence of health?
If we are applying the same thwarted logic that we have been using since we started this ridiculous journey down this path, then it would be safe to say that the absence of death, dying and ageing would automatically mean the absence of every form of ailment.
Immortality has to come with a package that would totally get rid of mortality and every package that comes with it, including sickness.
If this is the case, it means that one can indulge in all form of health hazardous activities of their choosing and would be immune from the possibility of death and sickness because they have an imperishable body.
Wow
A lot of things that we know now would no longer be in existence too, a lot of businesses and ventures.
Medicine would be as irrelevant as a coffin is to a living person
All the medical theories revolving around life, living and death would simply be useless. What about life insurances and wills?
What about religion, considering that almost all religion derives its legitimacy because of the human awareness and investment in death and dying
The core of all religion has always been about man making the best of his life on earth in light of the fact that he will someday die. Different religions preach the ultimate message of the existence of an after-life each having a different version of what after-life would be like. Those who don’t preach after-life preach reincarnation or whatever the case may be, but what all of them have in common is the fact that one has to die first of all, in order to access this.
What then becomes of religion when death is no longer in existence?
What about purpose? Would there be any need for that when there is no purpose to life itself? Can you find purpose in a life where everybody is just living, moving from one day to another without the prompting of a possible end of time to spur people into trying to make the best out of their life before the end of time? There won’t be the urgency to struggle to achieve anything because well, you have till infinity to get it done, and if you know infinity means you would know that it is one heck of a long time.
What about leaving a legacy behind? Would there be any need for that when you would always be in the picture, when you are the legacy to your existence?
What becomes of all the historical classes and lessons bordering around figures of time past, and how they affect the present and the future? What would we even be able to make out of the concept of past, present and future in a world of this sort?
The very idea of time itself would be defeated, because nobody would be conscious of the passing of time, since nothing changes with its passage, and the movement of time would no longer be of significance to anybody. Unless you can prove to me otherwise, I think time is only significant because our very existence hovers around it.
Time waits for no man? What happens when man is no longer interested in trying to catch up with time, because time no longer has a destination it is heading to?
Can you see this now? That life itself is built on the foundation of death and dying, and everything we know and do all points us to one thing: death.
Death is what keeps the world moving, not life itself
It makes me wonder then, why we are so afraid of death
Okay, let’s push this madness a little bit further.
Remember, that there is no death clause, but there is a birth clause.
This means we are talking about an ever growing population in a planet that cannot expand to accommodate its growing population. Over the space of years there would be rapid reproduction which would even be facilitated by the fact that there is nothing to do other than to while away time, so much free sex time
If this is the case, can you imagine the level of overpopulation that the earth would be faced with?
Let’s imagine what the earth would be like in the next ten thousand years when offspring are produced in millions daily, and nobody is dying.
I would have said that there would be starvation and poverty, but I just realized that hunger is a part of the mortality package and with immortality we would have no need for feeding. Maybe there would be poverty considering that all of earth’s resources would be diminished, but of what value is poverty when it can’t affect mortality rate?
What I imagine is a pile of human beings on top one another, because eventually every ground space would crammed with human beings.
It would be a tower of human beings reaching towards the skies, one on top of another, unable to even move from one place to another because of the extreme congestion.
Would the earth eventually implode under the overpopulation of humans in it? And if the earth implodes, what would happen to the human beings that cannot die or be destroyed? Or would the earth also have its own indestructible clause?
Okay this madness is too much. We need to recover a little bit of sanity at this point. This is where my imagination would take me today, so I’m dropping the pen at this juncture. I don’t even know what the purpose of this article is, if not for sheer madness.
Thank you so much for reading a piece even as illogical and irrational as this one, another sincere reason to love you for loving me even in my point of stupidity!
As usual, here is the totally random message for today: I think the biggest flex ever in the history of music videos is Jay Z and Beyoncé renting out the louvre museum in Paris to shoot a music video. A single music video! All that art, all that power, and two mortals in the middle of such transgenerational glory, basking in it for six straight minutes. Aaaaargh. Sometimes I don’t even feel rich or powerful enough to be watching such masterpiece with my very two naked eyes.
Okay, enough of the whining.
Have a beautiful day!
This article was written by Peniel Okwuchukwu for Truth Zombie Blog
You can connect with the author via mail: penielokwuchukwu@gmail.com
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