this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Life will pound you into an uncaring jaded disinterested unloveable husk of a being after too many emotional scars from losing loved ones, too much of seeing humanity make the same mistakes, and too much watching the knowledge you gained turned irrelevant.
Or, life will beat into you an uncanny ability to converse and relate to others, even if fleetingly.
Watch The Man from Earth.
But do not watch the sequel. It ruins the whole beautiful thing.
Yes and No. You could argue that True Love was the factor between them
You don't need immortality for that. Only a bad decade in your 20'.
I've watched the Man From Earth a couple times. Can only recommend.
However it doesn't fit your description. Oldman says that his memory is basically limited. Just like any mortal's. Only the brightest, most impactful memories are retained and the rest is a blur. If you are forty plus, you barely have memories of your childhood today, unless you have recorded them as soon as you could and rehashed them frequently. Same for him. As such, he is constantly evolving with the world mentally (and physically apparently).
The first paragraph is how I imagine he was during the first few centuries of his life, when all the scars were fresh and he had no idea how to deal with it. From the sounds of it he has been in ruling positions, and may have even enjoyed it briefly, before he adopted the humble mindset that he has now and tries to inspire humanity with small acts of compassion.
(I write "adopted" but I like to think that his actions actually reflect the hazy consciousness of humanity at the time, and so maybe he was molded into this persona over the years, as humanity grew somewhat kinder? Or he learned that the highest value one can have is not through wealth or power, but through compassion, i.e. something that all humans would eventually learn, a.k.a humanity does have value if given a chance).
I do wonder how his skills have decayed. Can he juggle? Can he do a backflip, or it's been too long and he no longer remembers how? How elastic is his brain exactly, and what precisely is there left of him in there that just isn't a hazy imprint of his circumstances over the last few centuries.
Imagine a neural net with limited nodes that has been subject to more training data than it can handle. Eventually it just learns to approximate all the data it has seen (overtrained) and isn't elastic enough to predict or react to new stimulus, and becomes set in its ways. Is this the case with John? Or does he summarize old historical data and leaves himself with enough elasticity to learn new things from the last X decades?
Juggling might be in the same vein as bicycling, or swimming. Learn it and it's really hard to unlearn it. Or maybe like tying your necktie or shoe laces. You learn it once with more focus and then periodically if recalled you retain it.
Anecdotal, but I've learned how to flip the balisong over a couple days in my late teens at the cost of lots of cuts on my hand and fingers (more dramatic than it sounds really) without a guide. I haven't had one in three decades, but I got my hands on one a year or two back and I was able to recall the motion and technique in only a couple tries without any cuts. Even today when I think about it, I can do the flick motion and my hand and wrist instinctively yearns for the weight of the cool steel.
Yeah I figure that he has some skills that he can just "snap" back into, and clearly he still has some good reflexes when it comes to aggressive situations. In that sense, I guess he can choose to retain the skills that he still finds valuable (e.g. hunting, teaching, kindness, child-rearing(?))