No offense, but long term relationships are a fuck-load of work. You don’t just stay in love with someone indefinitely. People change significantly over 10 years, let alone 100 or 1000.
Being stuck with one person for 5m years is worse than living for 5m years without a guarantee of being with someone the whole time.
Half of marriages end in divorce and only a subset of people who are “in love” get married. HARD PASS
Yes, multiple times. I'm 25 years married and we still have a great relationship. You have a very romantic notion of love if you think it could last even 5000 years.
given the option of spending 5m years with another human I'd pass. A lot of other variables would need to change (ability to retain long term memories, fertility, time it takes to raise a child, how we raise our kids if at all ...) But even changing one of these variables would change things in ways we can't fully imagine (complex system so there would be lot of emergence/chaos)
While the first years of such a "long term relationship" are probably great, (I am high on my hormones imagining that I potentially will spend some millions of years with my partner) they might also be a nightmare for the same reasons.
The more successful relationship I had were all about managing each others long-term expectations, and not risk breaking promises. How would I do this over that horizon idk (more importantly I trust potential partners even less to know)
What would reality look like if we only lived twice as long and were able to retain memories along the way. Holocaust survivors, Spanish flu survivors are dead now and I wonder what they could teach us about 2020. I wonder how such a Malthusean society would feel about Tech, the environment, urbanization, wars, politics, ... Our inability to live long enough and remember things keeps coming back to bite us in the ass I think so doubling our life expectancy would be cool but 5m years is an unthinkable dystopian horror show.
Considering most people are unable to have a great relationship with themselves. Many consider their love / partner a person that "completes" them. In other words they don't love themselves enough to think they need another person that makes them whole. That's a lot of pressure in 40 years but 5m it would be hell. But maybe this would solve the actual problem and it would force people to love themselves first? 5m years isn't just a lot of time to make it a nightmare but also to get many things right we currently don't. I'm not convinced we can accurately imagine/paint this picture tho.
kortilla|5 years ago
Being stuck with one person for 5m years is worse than living for 5m years without a guarantee of being with someone the whole time.
Half of marriages end in divorce and only a subset of people who are “in love” get married. HARD PASS
tasty_freeze|5 years ago
DyslexicAtheist|5 years ago
While the first years of such a "long term relationship" are probably great, (I am high on my hormones imagining that I potentially will spend some millions of years with my partner) they might also be a nightmare for the same reasons.
The more successful relationship I had were all about managing each others long-term expectations, and not risk breaking promises. How would I do this over that horizon idk (more importantly I trust potential partners even less to know)
What would reality look like if we only lived twice as long and were able to retain memories along the way. Holocaust survivors, Spanish flu survivors are dead now and I wonder what they could teach us about 2020. I wonder how such a Malthusean society would feel about Tech, the environment, urbanization, wars, politics, ... Our inability to live long enough and remember things keeps coming back to bite us in the ass I think so doubling our life expectancy would be cool but 5m years is an unthinkable dystopian horror show.
Considering most people are unable to have a great relationship with themselves. Many consider their love / partner a person that "completes" them. In other words they don't love themselves enough to think they need another person that makes them whole. That's a lot of pressure in 40 years but 5m it would be hell. But maybe this would solve the actual problem and it would force people to love themselves first? 5m years isn't just a lot of time to make it a nightmare but also to get many things right we currently don't. I'm not convinced we can accurately imagine/paint this picture tho.