2021/6/3 How to be immortal – I watched a pointless, gross, and violent anime miniseries about an immortal woman. I don't recommend it but there was one idea that was illustrated that really struck me. She was usually able to remember that she was immortal but sometimes she forgot. When she forgot she would feel afraid and the need to work for money to survive so she got a job that she didn't really like with a mean boss and lots of stress and boredom. When she was aware that she was immortal she would do work that she really wanted to do and worked for herself. If you are to be immortal there are some things that you must take care of. You'll need to make arrangements to clean and organize your psyche regularly because if you just collect information and experiences for centuries without organizing, processing, and discarding, you'll have an overload of unnecessary info and emotional garbage getting in the way of what would be useful to you. Here are some guidelines: – You must process everything Every memory must be dealt with and processed until it is able to be used or let go if needed. Unprocessed trauma or information overload will make it difficult to function. Generally, if you live somewhere with more than 400 people or are traveling you'll find that there are more things going on than you can account for and understand as they come at you. If you live with 10 people in a stable ecological niche and don't go anywhere or have visitors or any sort of media then perhaps the inputs from your senses will all be able to be processed in real time when you are fully grown and not actively learning any new skill. We'll assume that that is not the case and that you have more activity surrounding you than bandwidth to take it in and what you do take in is more than you can focus on and respond to as it comes. Some way to process it when away from activity must be used. Meditation, conversation, cognitive or somatic therapy, deeply thinking on it, dream work, or any other tool set might be used. – You must forget everything If you don't forget you'll find that eventually you don't have room for more. Good organization can help with making better use of the memory available to you but eventually you'll have to let things go if you want to continue to function. Even over the span of a mere decade, if you don't reduce the fidelity of your memories and collate them so that similar experiences and ideas can make use of the same references you'll find that reviewing and finding memories takes too long, that you loose the ability to prioritize and make some memories more meaningful than others if you always make sure to have accurate and full replays of every event without distinction. Unprocessed memories are harder to discard. Eventually, when the world around you has no relation to the one from your past, you'll not have need of any of the memories from then. Fresher memories of walking, chewing and other basic body functions can be used and the longer past ones let go, if your body is still at all similar to the one you had that is. – You must renew and start over so that you can forget and experience novelty You'll need to seek out other places and styles of living so that you can actively disconnect old memories from your present life and let ancient memories go. New language, new environment, new customs, new people, new philosophy, new interests, new music, new foods, new everything. – You must take care of the world or at least not create a bad situation for yourself in the future If you start wars and totalitarian regimes where bad things are done to people and threats are destroyed or imprisoned, you are setting yourself up for some negative experiences. You may one day find yourself at the wrong end of the power structures you built. It would make sense for you to spend your effort on creating a better place to live since you'll be living in it. Teach kindness and respect. Enforce freedom. Push the boundaries of understanding and inclusive humanitarianism. Reduce suffering. If nothing else at least don't fund warlords or become one yourself, it'll come back to bite you. The same goes for monopolistic enterprises. – You must learn to be happy and to be ok with not being happy Situations will change. Long stretches of stability may happen but they won't be forever. You need to understand how to be ok with change and adaptable to different circumstances. You would do well to understand how to find contentment regardless of external events. Sometimes major upsets will occur. You might try to numb yourself but then what's the point of continuing. Better to be at peace with the negative as well as the positive. Train for a positive baseline, thought processes that trend toward nice feelings and are resilient with and recover from negative feelings. – You must remember that you are immortal Sometimes it might be really boring. The lack of pressure from time or physical need can be demotivating. Getting those back may seem like a fun and exciting idea for a moment. There are ways that you could brainwash yourself into the belief that you are mortal. It is a dangerous game and I advise you not to play. Unless you can somehow be assured that you will be reminded or rediscover your immortality you could find yourself in many negative situations. Once you let go of the assurance and safety of the knowledge that you can not die you might be convince to do any horrendous thing. There really isn't a way to ensure you will remember. You could always be convinced of some new derivation of being long lived, preserved, copied, virtualized, new with old memories implanted, or otherwise still alive but still fragile. Even if you know you will live for a million more years you could be afraid of being imprisoned for that time and coerced into action that you don't yourself think good. You should strive to maintain the knowledge that you are immortal. Refresh it regularly, and let go of the oldest memories pertaining to it perhaps, but don't let it go altogether. – You must not let yourself be controlled You are powerful. If you let another use that power without your discernment you may not like the consequences. You'll be around to experience them. There are other ways of coercion besides fear of death or loss of years of life in confinement. If you start to cede your power it becomes a slippery slope to get it back and all too easy to find yourself with much less leverage than you thought you had. At some point you might be convinced to give up your power entirely, becoming a permanent slave to some system or family. You would have to give the first bit of your self control away to begin with or none could ever get the leverage to coerce you further. If you feel a need to escape confinement, or protect a love, a principle, a treasure, a technology, then you open yourself up to control. This is not to say that you shouldn't connect or align yourself with anything or anyone, just remember to asses what you are giving to that idea and always be ready to cut it off if the future of that connection is untenable or under too large a threat. You will outlast it all so maintain what is most important first, your self command.