We Were Immortal
When was the last time you felt immortal?
For me, there’s a stretch of time in our lives when we were immortal, or at least it felt that way. Maybe you never noticed it until now (sorry). Or maybe you stopped being immortal a long time ago.
When I think about this, I find myself dividing my life in two, or at least I like to place my immortality somewhere in my first fifteen or twenty years.
Back then, the idea of mortality was distant, blurry. So abstract that I kept pushing it to the back of my mind until it disappeared altogether. It was something that happened to older people, or something you saw often on TV, but in everyday life, luckily for me, running into death wasn’t the norm.
One of the first times I felt anxious about mortality was when I downloaded SpaceEngine on my computer, sometime around 2015.
SpaceEngine is a simulator of the known universe, built to scale and rendered in photorealism. It’s fascinating, you can explore everything like a space tourist, however you want, at whatever speed you want. Moving faster than light feels like being aboard the Millennium Falcon. But the most striking part is trying, at least trying, to grasp the scale of everything around us.
If you want, you can zoom out infinitely beyond the known universe. That’s when the simulator starts generating new galaxies in real time, complete with solar systems, nebulas, whatever you can imagine. Like Google Earth, but for space.
Infinity feels like a very expensive concept to understand, or maybe an impossible one. Traveling toward that spatial infinity triggered something inside me I had never felt before, a sense of being tiny. Like a speck of dust floating in nothingness when a beam of light cuts through a window.
That’s when the feeling of immortality began to fade. My awareness of time grew sharper, and the things happening around me finally buried that sense I didn’t even know I had, until I started reflecting on it.
Being mortal is, at the very least, strange. It can bring anxiety, even fear. Who really likes thinking about their own end? Probably very few people. It’s one of those questions we shove to the back of a drawer, it resurfaces now and then, but we push it back in.
But is being immortal even that great?
I’m not sure I’d want to feel immortal again. Mortality has its advantages, gratitude, nostalgia, memory, a really good joke among friends. A trip you took years ago. A burger you ate a few days ago. A hug.
I don’t know much about infinity, but I do know about finite time. Life is a chain of those moments. Like an album. A sticker album, but one of those you never managed to complete, either because luck wasn’t on your side or you ran out of money.
And still, what better feeling than sticking a new sticker into the album, and finding others you didn’t have yet?
The bad news is this album can never be completed. You could say it’s infinite. Yes, something infinite inside something finite.
But it’s ours. And we’re free to fill it however we want, even if life sometimes forces us to add stickers whether we like it or not. Those might be the hardest ones, the painful, meaningless, sad ones. Probably the ones that pulled you out of immortality and dropped you into this pool with the rest of us.
Still, the shower you took yesterday won’t be the same as tomorrow’s. The trip you planned but never took might happen someday. That movie you watched on Sunday and loved. The song you forgot about that suddenly finds you again. A message you weren’t expecting. A late-night conversation that goes further than you thought. The smell of something that takes you back without warning.
I like to think that, in the end, what we take with us is just that, a collection of memories.
And there’s still a lot left to do.