Text-based artwork concerning eternal life.

Text questioning the desirability of eternal life.

Most religions have a position on eternal life. In fact it’s at the core of most religions. It’s basically seen as a good thing.

Religions often promise to send their adherents off onto a higher plane of existence after death where they would spend eternity in a state of bliss, but that sounds like a bit of a long shot to me. Why would you be rewarded with an eternity of bliss simply for having endured a mere seventy or eighty years on earth?

For now let’s dispense with the religious concept of eternal life on some sort of celestial plane and think about eternal life conducted in a more practical level down here on Earth – basically living forever. It hardly bears thinking about. Forever is a very long time indeed, and apart from anything else things would start to get really boring before you were even half way through. You’d be bored to death in fact, except that you wouldn’t die. On top of that, during eternity you would experience every possible misfortune that you could possibly have the misfortune of experiencing, and not only that, you’d experience them all an infinite number of times because infinity can hold within itself an infinite number of things and still have an infinite amount of time left to do it all over again, infinitely.

If you lived forever you’d have no incentive to get up in the morning in order to get things done. You can always leave everything until tomorrow.

If no one ever died there’d be no need to create replacement people, otherwise known as children. In fact, the concept of children would be a big problem. For one thing, the planet would soon become grossly overpopulated. If there were children, at what age would they stop getting older in order to allow them to live forever? The physics and biology are unclear. But what would be clear is that there would be no such thing as sex. A dismal thought, especially if it’s forever.