04/09/15
The Twilight series shows the adventures of Bella Swan and her want to become a vampire, while battling werewolves and who knows what else. Bella yearns to live forever and fall in love with the dreamy Edward Cullen. However, in our world today there are no vampires, werewolves, or immortality for that matter. Living an extremely long life has many advantages because of more experiences, but can be a disadvantage due to the loss and exhaustion from living that long.
Living forever or even living an extremely long time is an accomplishment itself, but there are other advantages to living a long life. For example, my great-great-grandmother lived to be a whopping one-hundred years old! She always told so many stories of her memories growing up, like during her service in the war, or memories of her mother teaching her to bake. Too often, people believe that a long life is terrible. However, my grandmother was able to see and do so much more than she ever could have if she only lived to be fifty. Her extremely long life proved to be an advantage because of her memories and experiences. In addition, having immortality would also allow someone to see the world grow to progressing new heights. For example, a girl named Lisa was given the gift of immortality by an old, crippled, gypsy, fortune teller. Lisa was born in 1800’s, and has been able to live and see the world grow bigger and better every day. She saw the world during the World Wars, during the poodle-skirt-50’s, and during the crop-top-80’s. Lisa’s eternal life allowed her to experience true immortality and live life to the advantage of experiencing new moments in history. Both my great-great-grandmother and Lisa had the chance of a lifetime, literally, to live life experiencing more than other “ordinary” people.
There are many disadvantages to living a long life, but loss and exhaustion seem to be the most effective in people’s lives. For example, in a popular television series “One Tree Hill”, one of the main Characters, Peyton Sawyer, always makes the point come across, “people always leave”. Peyton lost her birth mother, adoptive mother, and her first love. Through all her tragedies, she realizes that people will always leave, even if we don’t want them to. To a person who would live a long life, this would be a disadvantage because of the amount of loss and tragedy that a long life provides. The loss that Peyton suffers is terribly exhausting and presents one of the true disadvantages to living an extremely long life. In addition, people don’t tend to want to live a long life because of exhaustion. For example, Julie is eighty-four and can’t catch a break from being tired all the time. The kind of tired that is like the Sunday-evening-feeling of not wanting to go to school the next day. Julie’s exhaustion from her long life is affecting her day-to-day schedule. She can’t take time to do her daily chores without wanting to take a nap. As a result of Julie’s misfortune, her disadvantage of living long has caused her tiredness. Both Julie and Peyton are examples of disadvantages because of Peyton’s suffrage from losing loved ones and Julie’s tiredness from old age.
Bella’s hope to become a vampire and live forever with the love of her life, is just one example of living an extremely long life to its advantage. However, because of the amount of loss that a long life provides, living forever would be a disadvantage from the tragedy and exhaustion.