But, I mean, if ‘everything I wanted’ included a library of good books, I think I’d be happy for a few years at least.
Probably. This is something I thought a lot about when considering “Heaven” and its eternity: you eventually know everything there is to know about anything you could possibly interested in, and you eventually have all the conversations you could have. But this version of Hell makes it “worse” (not technically, because any finite time against eternity is infinitesimal, but you get the point).
If you’ve ever read the fairytale “The Magic Thread”, you know what the problem is. Namely that you could learn the contents of any book in an instant. You could skip any boring chapter you wanted and still be able to recite it word for word. Any boring paragraph even. Boring sentence. You could know everything there ever was to know in a nanosecond. There’s nothing stopping you, and you don’t even have to wish for it aloud or anything.
Pretty much inevitably, a human will start to optimize the fun out of reading, because they’ll be a little bit bored and skip to the exciting part with all the requisite knowledge. Without material barriers, this will keep snowballing.
And, of course, probably one of the few things you can’t do is just reset yourself to forget, since that goes against the torture.
Probably. This is something I thought a lot about when considering “Heaven” and its eternity: you eventually know everything there is to know about anything you could possibly interested in, and you eventually have all the conversations you could have. But this version of Hell makes it “worse” (not technically, because any finite time against eternity is infinitesimal, but you get the point).
If you’ve ever read the fairytale “The Magic Thread”, you know what the problem is. Namely that you could learn the contents of any book in an instant. You could skip any boring chapter you wanted and still be able to recite it word for word. Any boring paragraph even. Boring sentence. You could know everything there ever was to know in a nanosecond. There’s nothing stopping you, and you don’t even have to wish for it aloud or anything.
Pretty much inevitably, a human will start to optimize the fun out of reading, because they’ll be a little bit bored and skip to the exciting part with all the requisite knowledge. Without material barriers, this will keep snowballing.
And, of course, probably one of the few things you can’t do is just reset yourself to forget, since that goes against the torture.