"The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever"
About this Quote
Immortality is supposed to be the prize at the end of every myth, religion, and Silicon Valley pitch deck. Herb Caen punctures it with a shrug disguised as a punchline: the problem with living forever is, bluntly, the forever part. The humor works because it flips the usual emotional math. We’re trained to treat death as the catastrophe and permanence as the fix; Caen treats permanence as the actual trap, an endless sequel nobody asked for.
As a journalist and chronicler of San Francisco’s daily theater, Caen understood time the way newspapers do: as a relentless conveyor belt of novelty, repetition, petty drama, and slow erosion. Immortality, in that frame, isn’t heroic. It’s an infinite subscription to the same human cycles - fads returning with new branding, grudges outlasting their reasons, history rhyming until it becomes background noise. The line carries a sly sympathy, too: wanting more life is natural, but the fantasy of limitless extension ignores what makes life feel sharp - deadlines, scarcity, the knowledge that choices close doors behind them.
The subtext is less anti-life than anti-sentimentality. Caen isn’t arguing for despair; he’s warning against the kind of wish that sounds benevolent until you read the fine print. Eternal life isn’t meaning multiplied. It’s meaning diluted, stretched thin across an infinite calendar, until even joy risks becoming just another item you’ve already done.
As a journalist and chronicler of San Francisco’s daily theater, Caen understood time the way newspapers do: as a relentless conveyor belt of novelty, repetition, petty drama, and slow erosion. Immortality, in that frame, isn’t heroic. It’s an infinite subscription to the same human cycles - fads returning with new branding, grudges outlasting their reasons, history rhyming until it becomes background noise. The line carries a sly sympathy, too: wanting more life is natural, but the fantasy of limitless extension ignores what makes life feel sharp - deadlines, scarcity, the knowledge that choices close doors behind them.
The subtext is less anti-life than anti-sentimentality. Caen isn’t arguing for despair; he’s warning against the kind of wish that sounds benevolent until you read the fine print. Eternal life isn’t meaning multiplied. It’s meaning diluted, stretched thin across an infinite calendar, until even joy risks becoming just another item you’ve already done.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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