They live out their lives in one manner of misery or another, desperate to die but unable to figure out how to off themselves. But in reality, it would probably be much different. Radical life extension would be good for the individuals who took advantage of it; it's society as a whole that would suffer.
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Many believe that the shortness of life gives it pleasurable urgency and lends meaning to the things we do. But there's little reason to believe that while a life lived in 80 years is meaningful, one lived in or would be dull and purposeless. You could just as easily predict that people would be able to spend half a century working for Doctors Without Borders, then spend another 50 years traveling, creating great art, or sampling whatever other experiences they wanted.
But as great as it might be to have all that time at your disposal, the truth is that the advancement of civilization requires turnover. Artists and scientists often reach the peak of their creative powers early in their careers. We need constant infusions of new ideas, new perspectives, new blood ha!
What happens when the CEO or the tenured professor in his 15th decade refuses to step aside so someone can take his place? Are your great-great-great grandchildren going to want you around pinching their cheeks? If that worries you, at least you can take solace in the fact that we haven't gotten there yet and maybe you'll be dead by the time we do. There have been many false starts in this area lately — remember resveratrol, the supposedly magical chemical in red wine?
Turned out it couldn't make you live forever. But the impulse is a constant in human history.
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As soon as the first cave dweller realized he was going to die one day, he started wishing for immortality. There is a reason why all religions, everywhere and at every time, have one thing in common: Some say they'll grant it through ascent to heaven, some through infinite reincarnation, but all say the same thing to their current and potential adherents: Believe, and you will be free from death. It is entirely appropriate, then, that such creatures be confined to the darkness — as like seeks like, so does shadow cling to its own.
As to their motivations, they are few and simple: At their core, vampiric creature fear more than anything else death. While this is common to all creatures of the Lord God, it has utterly subsumed any other desire or objective for the nosferatu. Such creatures fear it so much that they're willing to go against the very order of Life Itself and God to avoid it. Often, vampiric creatures actually rather idolize and hold up as paragons of courage those who would willing face their on deaths - especially if they've been offered their own version of the "font of eternal life" and rejected it.
They often wax about how they "long for death" They are, when stripped of their mystique, utter cowards with no sense of honor. The case for their own narcissism is much the same: They care about themselves, and only themselves. They'd typically gladly sacrifice their own "children of darkness" if it meant they'd be able to escape and live another day, should their interests or sanctum become threatened.
The complaint is really about effort. They do not bitch about eternal life, they bitch about eternal youth and lack of change. If you look at the different mythologies, you will find that this trope is especially prominent in those mythologies that have the eternal youth trope for Vampires. In Mythologies where Vampires can change and can grow old, they do not tend to bitch even if they life eternally and become young again once they feed. They do not want to die, they want to experience the things that mortals experience: Feeling that death is waiting leads to a change in opinion, you see life differently.
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In your youth, death is so far away, you are careless. But then you grow older and everyone has kids and you want some too because soon you won't be able anymore. Then you get older and your bones become brittle, and some friends start to die, you start to think about your own mortality, you might change opinions, you might become religous. Also, in ancient greek, there were two ways for mortals to become immortal: Hercules who could only become a god once his whole family was dead. Sure, a Vampire can sire other Vampires, but he doesn't have to and he doesn't have the pressure to do it in a certain window.
And if one offspring dies he creates the next. Mortals have a tiny window to do so. And cannot redo it infinitely.
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While we think that old age is something negative as we get uglier and less mobile and start getting more forgetful and have this weird connection to kids and not being forgotten and leaving something for the next generation and eternity, Vampires will never have that. They will never know the fragility and what it is like to know that it will one day be over.
Not because you chose it but because it will happen. They will never know the feeling when you know death is coming for you and you cannot escape. What we see as negative, they see as something unobtainable. They stand there and observe it, they have seen countless mortals die, they might have seen friends or even loved ones age and whither. But they cannot do this themselves. And even if it is an unpleasureable one, they cannot share it. It's basic human nature to need something to whine about no matter how good your situation is. Some extremely rare few can resist this, but the vast majority of vampires will go absolutely insane and frenzy when threatened with sunlight.
The very idea is more than they can handle. They aren't upset that they can't die, they are upset by the transience of everything else comparatively. It is why they often make other people they like into vampires. I think it depends on the kind of vampire we're talking about. Some vampires can die to a multitude of methods like a stake, holy water, magic, sunlight, and even extreme garlic exposure.
These are the ones that get off easy and could off themselves with a short period of sunbathing. But then you have ones like in Darren Shan, and those in The Witcher series. In the former, those who die are sent to the Lake of Souls, a rather disturbing place not unlike Hades's River Styx in Hercules. Killing themselves essentially sentences them to an afterlife of torture in the Lake of Souls, until Mr Tiny decides possibly to retrieve them. Even then it's probably better to remain in the Lake at that point, as Mr Tiny's plans and machinations are far from benevolent.
In The Witcher series in addition to vampires mostly being fine with the sun as shown in Blood and Wine , it isn't so easy for vampires to even die in the first place. And even then, staying dead? Regis explains that higher vampires the ones who take humanoid forms and have greater power than vampiric beasts like Ekimmaras can only be permanently slain by other higher vampires.
Otherwise they slowly reform over time. If we ignored the vampires' resistance to sunlight or used another iteration of vampires that also cannot be permanently killed by typical means and assumed it would in fact kill them in this setting, suicide by sunbathing is the worst idea for them, as instead of permanently ending their life it's essentially keep them in a cycle of solar disintegration and magical regeneration. As for bog-standard sunlight-weak vampires? My guess is a strong survival instinct, coupled with an intense desire to feed and grow in strength. I always hated this part of the vampire mythos.
Rocks don't have souls but they reflect in mirrors, why can't a vampire? You get your hair done right before becoming a vampire, and then your body "remembers" that hair. Whenever you cut it off, burn it off, or lose it from rottign in the ground, it will instantly grow back to the "remembered" shape. Atop of that, the newly grown hair will be undamaged due to vampiric healing, and healthy hair look shiny and silky by themselves.
I think the big element is that vampires don't usually die from this. Which they might be conscious for.
Their problem is that being a vampire is actually pretty awesome, but only as long as there are very few other vampires. So they moan and complain about it to discourage mortals from figuring out ways to join them. In the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter novel, they usually actually do commit suicide in some way eventually. Vampires that live more than two or three centuries without doing this are rare. In some fantasy becoming vampire means losing your soul or selling it to devil or some other evil being. So dying in the sun will result in oblivion as where regaining humanity gives hope for afterlife.
They're being stupid and ignoring their real desires. Do you honestly think you'd want to die after a measly years? I think it's a lot more simpler than metaphysics, I bet they can't break earth's gravitational pull. It takes a lot of money and effort to put something into space, and they simply can't be bothered to learn rocketry and waste their time meddling with human minds that could help them. Same thing as stake through the heart being a weakness. Pretty sure stabbing a human though the hearts with a stake would kill them as well. Vampires are absolutely afraid of the sun.
People with a fear of heights probably wouldn't choose jumping off a building as their method of suicide, and vampire's are the same. Sometimes rich people complain about problems relating to their wealth "friends" asking for loans, children scheming to usurp the family fortune, etc , doesn't mean they're gonna suddenly donate their millions to live the middle class life. In the book Let The Right One In the vampire girl finds one other vampire in her lifetime and asks her where all the others like them are.
She's told that most commit suicide rather than live as vampires. In the same book, the girl accidentally creates a vampire, who then kills herself by burning in the sun. Cause theyve had years, if not decades, to sink into the culture, human perception of his nature, and become as emo as you'd expect. I also suspect joining the undead might affect your serotonin? I think theyre just an angsty people. There's no reason not to turn some good and willing friends to spend eternity with, or flat out kill yourself.
Shit, I'd become a daredevil if I wanted to end it but didn't want to actively commit suicide. Its completely dependant on the mythology or lore of the universe, but in the Ann rice vampire chronicles the explanation for this is that vampires are mostly just as ignorant of the afterlife as we are. Some do choose to end it all when they're feeling particularly depressed, but just like mortals most would rather deal with the certainty of unlife then the great unknown of death.
Some of them even routinely sleep in open daylight to get a tan that makes them look more passable as humans. Vampires may have only a few weaknesses, but their survival instincts are a strong as a mortal's, if not even stronger. A vampire can't ordinarily just walk out into the sun any more than a healthy mortal could just go jump off a bridge.
Mortals need to be seriously depressed to override their survival instincts, and vampires, having a condition that precludes all mortal ailments, simply aren't nearly as subject to crippling depression.
What they do in the shadows: my encounters with the real vampires of New Orleans
Ennui, sure, but boredom won't drive you to suicide. Because suicide is a very difficult thing to actually do and if you fuck it up, you could just be making things a lot worse for yourself. Same reason I complain about having to go to work every day and not being a multi billionaire just living and partying on those sweet sweet investment returns. The train tracks are right there but the human will to keep in living is a damn powerful thing. More powerful than the resolve of the immortal undead too apparently. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.
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Become a Redditor and subscribe to one of thousands of communities. Want to add to the discussion? Anywho, back to suicide, in old world catholicism you could not go to heaven. What is wrong with you? But Also Vampires Are Real.
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