Re: 1000 years old?
Live for a 1000 years? Why, cool. I can see the picture, some 30 years in the future from now...
A new drug for sale - very expensive, but once you've bought it you've got plenty of time to pay back that tiny bit of money. I'd say 98% of all "pills" would be sold in our part of the world - Wealthy White West.
First thing I'd do is work really hard for the first say 50 years or so, earning up enough money to be able to live pretty well the next 950 years from the interest alone. Ummm... but since everybody else seems to be doing the same thing, countries and states worldwide quickly force banks to adjust deposit rates to a minimum in order to prevent everybody from just sittin' on their asses earning interest. As a result, people stop putting their money in the bank, keeping it under their mattresses instead. Banks start to look for a new way of building up a capital to work with.
On the other hand lots of folks start thinking "What the heck! I've got plenty o' time - lets have a party!" and they'd go an' loan huge sums of money, utterly convinced that they'd some day win this amount in the lottery anyway - I mean, you can't fail to win when playing for a 1000 years, can you?
(But of course gambling associatoins and compagnies (?) across the world predicted this situation and readjusted the chance of winning accordingly.)
Banks figure this out, raising loan interest in order to compensate for their losses. The bank advisor would go like: "why, think new, Ma'am. Now You've got a 1000 years of work on that can-factory to pay back those loans - Don't worry, Ma'am!"
But since population for unknown reasons seem to explode even faster than back in good 'ole 2K, people need to work even harder to earn a living, than anyone ever thought possible. Since disease and poor health are gone, the human body can now pe pushed to endure unbelievable sufferings. What a good thing we live longer now - no other way to pay off them ugly debts. 1000 $ for every glass of non-diseasing chlorated water? why cool! I got time enough on my hands to pay them bills.
But then some people would start to think" Man, I'm only 200 years old and I already owe 2 billion $ to more than ten thousand different creditors. It costs me more than I can earn just to have a solicitor taking care of all the formalities for me. Man, that sucks!"
And then, after some soul-tearing decades, whirling deeper and deeper into that maelstrom of debt, they'd start going like this:
"I mean, who cares about time, anyway... Time's worth nothing, man... Everyone's got time... The more time you got, the less it's worth... Man, since time's worth nothin' it don' matter if I live for a 1000 years or if I just go end it all just now. Hey, that's what I'm gonna do!"
And they would do so, and all coloured people in the world would live happily ever after - at last freed of their bleach northern money-loving masters, that have made their lives miserable through centuries.
Happy ending!
H.H.