[maximara]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Partial amnesia is an obvious potential mental disadvantage, and possibly a way to escape worse ones.

In Robinson Mars trilogy you have a chilling passage when a character, after a couple (?) century of longevity, come across the picture of a long dead character who once was extremely important to him, and remark "look nice. Who is she ?"

Sounds like "Me" in Doctor Who's "The Woman Who Lived" who has become much like the Doctor's first incarnation. She keeps a library/diary of her memories ripping out those she doesn't want to remember. Her empathy to the "mayflies" as she calls normal human has dwindled

Jonathan Swift's Struldbruggs are another nasty form of immortality as they keep aging. Their memories effectively stop when the reach 80 and the society notes them as "Legally Dead" at that age.

Per Swift this is because "avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public."

There was an EC story where people who reach a certain age are given a choice to stop being immortal as some people just don't "adjust".

In another story the Twilight Zonish ending is that the child the couple has been taking care of is actual a robot they have leased for this purpose as there are no more children.