Lets discuss immortality. Someone made a post asking: “The Addams daily lives in a graveyard, but are basically immortal, so what kills an Addams?”, and the answer was “ they leave when they are done”.
First I want to mention Q from Star Trek TNG. There is an episode where Q is trying to explain his existence, standing in an old dusty clearing, he explains that living forever and being able to do anything can be boring. How he even became the scarecrow hanging outside doing nothing for centuries, just to experience it. Leaving aside the rather obvious God metaphor the TNG writer was trying to make, and seriously consider what immortality would be like.
For the last couple hundred years humanity has changed what being alive is like in very rapid ways. For thousands of years advancements in lifestyle were local, slow and permanent. But that's no longer the human experience. My grandfather told me he was able to remember the first time he even saw a car. As a rancher he had to repair his own equipment often, so by the time I came along he knew motors inside and out. His entire life was surrounded by machines in a close way. During the time I lived there, the power lines finally came that far out of town, so I was able to experience the transition from using kerosene lamps as the primary lighting source, to using electricity as if it was nothing. The house had been wired for electricity so it has outlets and in-ceiling light fixtures. But prior to the power lines coming out, it needed to be powered by a diesel powered generator. Which was another machine he understood the workings of and made repairs to, but even with the farmers discounted fuel prices, it was expensive so we only ran it on the sabbath, the day of rest. It was a small luxury and a way to offer Grannie a bit more while deserved rest. What I’m trying to say is in a small way I was also able to experience some of the rapid progress of even the last century, and its extreme disruptions to everyday life. Growing up this way, it's natural that I would assume that immortality would be a blessing. That my time would be filled with constantly changing things, and always something new and exciting to learn and experience.
But let's consider the experience of some eleventh century peasant. What would the prospect of immortality be to them? Labouring every day as their family dies around them for thousands of years isn't the same prospect at all. Sure they could probably look for ways to move into the aristocracy or noble class, and then at least there would be less monotonous labour. But monotony would be all they could expect out of the future. {the type of person that would be suited to surviving immortality then, wouldn't be the type of person that would be at all suited to surviving it now}.
Or put another way, Would Ann Rice’s Contemplative Louie or Thrill-Seeking Lestat, be more suited to eternal survival? (Using the character types from the later books, we are definitely in a Lestat era).
Back To Q. In his existence, of being all powerful and immortal, he seeks novelty, he does everything he can to find something, Anything to fill his time. We get a sense of desperation from him, a need to do absolutely anything to find a new experience. There is an underlying feeling that even as he has a mastery over time, that time itself is his prison, that existence may be his true antagonist. {keeping in mind the current understanding of the heat-death of the universe, Q would then be aware that he will either be forever suspended in absolute nothingness, or he would have to also be spread out amongst it, essentially being the nothingness itself. None of the Star Treks from the Q era ever breach this subject though}.
So Q is definitely the type of immortal that wouldn't be scared of periods of change, we see his character as one that would find the long expanses of time where change is slow and rare to be more a threat to him. His novelty-philic identity drives him through time. Where someone who would be comfortable being immortal during the long stretches of time of low change, the novelty-phobic, would be the type that would thrive.
Currently there is a popular notion that our period of high change will continue indefinitely. But that seems unlikely, for if change is the only constant, then surely there must be changes in the rate of change? Or put simply, doesn't it seem likely that we will reach another plateau where life altering advancements become rare again. Our transition from hunter/gatherer, to villager/farmer was some high change, but we had literally thousands of years where the lifestyle of the average person changed little between then and the last couple hundred years.
I want to take this back drop and return to the Addams family. One thing that sets them apart from most of our other stories of immortals, is they are a family. Not simply in individual. This would definitely help ease the tension between the novelty-philic and novelty-phobic. As they have the stability of their family group to offer support during times trying to any of them.
We can see they have an old Victorian house, showing that they enjoy the comfort of predictability.
But they are as individuals some of the most open ones ever shown in common media. They judge no one, they are open to anyone, and welcome all who pass by into their house. The novelty they crave is through human interactions. The children are still immature and crave the experiences of pain and loss, while Gomez and Morticia are enthralled with the more nuanced experiences of love and sexual lust. Gomez with his slightly more contemporary look, shows that he enjoys much of the progressive changing world. While Morticia, is content to spend her days in the conservatory, tending to her plants. This leads me to believe that the primary driving force for each of the Addams is to experience all the internal and emotional experiences of the human condition. Their immortality is nothing more than a tool to help them find more experiences. They don't seek distraction like Q, because being alive isn't a chore to them. In fact they are quite immune to being distracted. What they seem to intuitively be able to ignore, are mostly the things we generally focus on. We see style of clothing, the markers of wealth and poverty, flesh markers of beauty and ugliness, even markers of the passing of time and the temporariness of life. And all of these things the Addams seem oblivious to. They see only other people who by interacting with, they may experience something new, or exciting. Something real.
And in this day where everywhere we look we see the faking of authenticity as a means to convince us that their distraction can give us something “real”, the Addams have a clear message to us. That, what we should fill our time with, is others. Their immortality and wealth remove the need that drives much of our daily lives. Who would you be if those concerns were removed. Truly removed so you weren't shaped by the things shaped by them. “Money can't buy happiness” is a quote only truly believed by those with enough money that trying to survive in its absence isn’t something they can even grasp.
I hope our current time of technological advancement will continue at least until our need for money as a tool to deal with scarcity is gone. And until our lives are long enough to feel long enough to us and those we leave behind.
But to survive, and to thrive in such a reality, we will need to lose our need for distraction that we hide as novelty, and our need for predictability that we disguise as stability. We will need to become disconnected with the world and the zeitgeist, and become more connected with each other and experiencing the now.
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