To Live Forever

Some people are in such a rush to hopefully live forever that they would, if it was a matter of their preference, blindly choose to have eternal life regardless of what it would actually entail.  Eternal life could be a thing of infinite peace and joy, or it could be what allows for the greatest possible agonies.  An afterlife would not even be logically necessary to live forever, as it is logically possible but highly unlikely that a person will never actually die, that some supernatural or natural power would intervene to keep them from death.  No, death is not and cannot be an absolute certainty for beings with human limitations, for it does not logically follow even from the vast sensory evidence that death is inevitable that this evidence is not some illusion.

The very legitimate logical possibility and evidential probability of death nevertheless drives some to desire one of two things: to never undergo biological death of the body at all or to live on in some kind of afterlife with or without a body to house their consciousness.  Each brings with it its own possibilities for endless torment, though a nonspecific version of each form of eternal life might seem appealing to someone in a moment of longing to overcome death.  What are some logically possible ways that living forever could be something few or no people would actually want?

If the collective universe ceases to exist as the scientific evidence of physical decay points to, but a person was to have eternal life without having biologically died, they would either exist as a consciousness alone or as a consciousness with their body endlessly (the latter requiring that their body is the exception to the universe vanishing), as aeons and aeons pass after the destruction of the cosmos.  A total annihilation of the universe would mean that there is nothing else but logical truths, the uncaused cause, and empty space that would by necessity exist along with this single observer unless the observer is the uncaused cause, who would have little to no sensory stimulation from the void of space without matter to fill it.  While logical truths and introspection alone could occupy someone's mind for an eternity as they savor metaphysical and epistemological necessities, to perceive this lack of matter in all of its variety and familiarity could terrorize the soul that forever outlives the cosmos.

There is also a hypothetical existence where a person's mind would deteriorate, stopping when going further would render them unconscious but existent, which would be far from eternal bliss.  Would someone who wants to never perish voluntarily take this fate instead?  As for afterlives, many different things are logically possible, if not seemingly as unlikely in one sense as someone not dying on Earth.  Some of them could involve eternal life, and not all of these would be objectively or subjectively pleasant.  Eternal torment in an amoral hell would be eternal life, yes (eternal conscious torment is Biblically unjust as many of my other articles detail, but also unjust by logical necessity as a default punishment for finite moral errors if there is morality at all); it would also be a hell that not only is either morally unjust or irrelevant to one's moral standing, but it could not be escaped by death or by one's actions to become free from whatever eldritch entity might inflict such a thing.

I have not even described many potential details of various logically possible afterlives like this, and yet the concepts that have been articulated already disprove the idea that eternal life must be peaceful or pleasant because it is eternal life.  To live forever is not something that is inherently peaceful or desirable.  People who desperately hope to exist forever one way or another as a perceiving consciousness, without caring or knowing about what it would or could truly be like, are incredibly foolish.  To have never come into existence at all would by far be pragmatically better for someone than to experience any of the aforementioned kinds of eternal life that are wildly different than the Biblical type, which is contrasted with a definitive end to the souls of those in hell (John 3:16).