There’s a common tendency in a lot of fantastic fiction portraying long-lived races or individuals interacting with shorter-lived types. It often defaults to, “they have a mindset of slow and patient consideration in the face of Problems. After all, they have plenty of time.”
(Until, of course, they don’t, and the Evil Overlord obliterates lots or possibly all of them.)
It’s a valid way to portray a fantasy race, I guess. But I think it misses a critical consideration of sapient life. And that’s pattern recognition.
To boil it down – if you’ve lived a long time, and you pay attention to what’s going on around you, sooner or later you will recognize when things are about to go nastily sideways. The river-folk down there and the mountain-folk up there have had a new generation grow up without bloodshed; sooner or later some young buck out to make a name for himself is going to dig up the old feuds all over again. Or, we’ve had three years of bad harvests in a row, I bet the nomads think we’re weak now, let’s watch for raids. Or (and much worse), this guy is making speeches about a Glorious Past and Restoring the Nation to its Rightful Place in World Affairs… right, time to duck, world war incoming.
If you’ve had time, you’ve seen things happen. If you’ve had enough time, and survived it, and even a little breather afterward, you can sift back through the history leading up to When All The Maps Got Arrowy, and try to see what set the whole mess off. So if you see similar precursors go off again….
Slow and patient consideration might not actually be your preferred plan. Instead, you might opt for, find the bastards and shut them down, fast.
Someone slaps you? Walk out now, no matter what anyone else thinks. Squatters on your land? Find them and toss them out on their ears so hard they bounce. Sabers rattled your direction? Make it absolutely clear there will be heavy weapons firing back – as soon as fired on, not “two years later after we’ve deliberated it to death”.
Because if you’ve lived for a while, and you anticipate living a lot longer – think about it. “I’ll be a slave for a decade, then die,” is bad. “I’ll be a slave for a century, and that’s only if they let me die-”
Yeah. That’s worse.
With a long lifespan, the number of Bad Things that can happen to you automatically increases, just by virtue of your being alive to have them happen. Why would you want to give any avoidable Bad Thing a chance to happen?
Wouldn’t it be possible that an elf, cultivator, dragon, or other creature who might live centuries, might actually be quicker to act than regular humans?
I have found this in one fantasy setting. In Lejentia, by Flying Buffalo Games, the Aelvan Nations finally beat down and imprisoned the Hyl Sudiar (Hellish Seducer) and the demon who possessed him, and breathed a sigh of relief. Some centuries later, said demon persuaded another person to become the next Hyl Sudiar… and the Aelvan Nations declared war immediately.
Human kingdoms: “Whyfor you do that?”
Human kingdoms a few centuries later, after despite all efforts the Hyl Sudiar’s armies have conquered half the world: “…Oh.”
I have to think about this, given I have a story that has at least one nearly three-hundred-years-old vampire, and a somewhat younger cultivator who has still outlived three emperors and is working on a fourth. (Zhengle, Jiajing, Longqing, and Wanli, if you’re interested.) They’ve seen threats to their people. They know, over and over again, what it is to lose people to the actions of evil men. What it is to live on, while those you love die, and it never stops hurting….
Long life might not mean slow and deliberate action. Just a thought.
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
The question is how granular they choose to be.
It might be that they don’t even bother to check the details.
“Humans don’t keep treaties. A few years and a new leader and they won’t see any value in it. Therefore, we shouldn’t depend on humans keeping a treaty. Ever.”
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The scale of the pattern they are looking at is a huge factor for sure. There’s “people as a whole” and “people as individuals” with countries and cultures somewhere between the two.
I could buy long-lived races being much less trusting of individual people or countries to be “stable”, whereas something like “cultural region” are overall stable. Especially when it comes to things like “family structure” or “driving cultural emotions”. There’s a big difference between “all humans don’t keep treaties so we shouldn’t trust them” and “we’re in the Philosophical East and those cultures are primarily Reputation-Based Cultures no matter *who* is in charge”.
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I think a lot of folks miss that the important bit is and it can’t hurt me. Like, the Ents took forever to do anything, because they were hard to hurt.
And Tolkien’s elves were… well, shellshocked.
:random thought: Ooh, ooh– “on a scale of (failed) to (learned from the pa– oh it’s Elrond)”
https://www.tumblr.com/vitamaeternum/751094135792058368/on-a-scale-from-turgon-to-elrond-how-well-did
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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/805511083367841974/
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errors out
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WP!
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I had not thought of it that way, but I’m inclined to agree.
I’ve been playing a lot of Helldivers 2 lately, to the point that I’ve already maxed out everything except titles. Basically I’m a gray beard in the game. What I’ve found is, the longer I play, to more chill I seem to get. But at the same time, I’ve also developed a lot of instant responses to thing. Bile Titan starting to stick its nose up? Immediate 500kg bomb to the forehead. Don’t be in the blast radius. 🙂
I’m very chill, but I also go from zero to tac-nuke at the drop of specific hats, because I know just how much of a goat rodeo it is trying to handle a Bile Titan on the loose, especially with a new (read unpredictable) player on the team who’s just seeing this four story tall, ridiculously fast death machine for the first time.
I’m not even sure he was aware of the titan showing up before the very large explosion and assorted very large bug parts rag-dolling all over the place either.
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There’s another factor that I don’t think people take into account and that is the sort of government a long lived race has. If they have a powerful centralized government, even one that’s normally fairly hands off, like a kingdom led by a wise/enlightened king or queen, then likely they’ll have a quick turn around time in terms of seeing a threat and taking action.
The more distributed power is though, as in the more people who have a say in what the nation/state does, the less likely it is for action to be taken swiftly. Everyone will have an idea of what needs to be done and if it’s a large enough portion of the population you’ll even get voices claiming that nothing should be done or that the opposite of what history says needs to be done is the answer.
Because long lived people are still people and age doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom.
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I’m going to need this for my Urban Fantasy. There are good vamps here, some younger than others. But they WILL recognize various patterns and go, “Oh, HELL, no.” Might need it for a few alien races as well.
After a point, I think elves and such get a combination of the Tolkien and Star Trek treatment. The elves hold a council in Elrond’s house to decide the fate of the Ring; what’s missed by most is that the question isn’t “go to war,” it’s “how do we get rid of this thing, as fast as possible?” It might be missed because it takes an entire day of arguing the how (and telling Boromir that no, using the Ring is a bad idea, plus there’s a long history lesson involved…it’s no wonder people miss the point, it must be said).
On the Star Trek end, you could argue Vulcans are Space Elves, being older than humans and sworn to logic. Logic is portrayed as something you do slowly more often than not, and only the books in the ST universe do we get to see Spock act *fast* while in his head or another character’s. The rest of the crew kind of blink and roll with it, then ask later, “Why’d you do that?”
Spock breaks down the logic chain for them before finishing with, “It was only logical.”
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Bit of a tangent, but I absolutely LOATHE Star Trek’s depiction of “Logic” with Vulcans. It presents logic as something that it isn’t.
Logic isn’t some magical objective way of looking at the world and situations, it’s the chain of decisions used to reach a decision or to accomplish a goal. It requires a starting point – often a value judgement or emotional impulse – and then a desired outcome. Logic is simply the steps used to go from point A to point B.
The Vulcan use of logic would, in proper context, be a decision making frame work and methodology that starts at the point of “emotional decision making is bad” and have trained their people to exercise self-control and take a step back in situations to calmly evaluate what is going on and then to dispassionately determine what should be done then to take the most efficient steps to do that.
And that sort of thinking while useful, it isn’t always the way to reach the correct decision or the most optimal outcome. Which, I think, is part of why the Vulcans are part of the Federation. To obtain outside perspectives from people who run on a more emotional logic and decision making framework that the Vulcans have a long and bloody history telling them does not work for their people.
Sadly most writers present it as this magical objective way of looking at things and portray any mistakes Vulcans make as being a case of them being emotionally compromised and thus not using Logic.
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To be fair, it’s not just that they’re strong, smart, and naturally very emotional, or even the bit where their biology attempts to force males to have sex or die.
It’s that they’re touch telepaths. And as much as I dislike drama, I would REALLY dislike being dragged into somebody else’s emotion drama.
The Romulans do things another way, but they definitely should try not to be too grabby.
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My low and suspicious mind wonders if that biology lunacy mode might have been intentionally surrepticiously engineered into them as part of their logic revolution. Because otherwise they’d never actually have any contact with one another and die out.
Interestingly, the never bothering problem seems to be a large part of why the Frieren elves are dying out: they don’t seem to die of old age, so they’ve got so long they just never seem to get around to it.
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The ‘touch telepath’ thing really hasn’t gotten a fraction of the love that it deserves.
all the drama. all of it.
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Umm…what does that have to do with the misuses and misrepresentation of what Logic is in Star Trek?
Asking because I am genuinely confused.
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McCoy was more logical than Spock. Start with his premises and you always reach his conclusions.
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Yeah, a lot of the ‘logic’ they have the Vulcans use is just bad writing.
Some of it you can have piles of prior givens piled up, though– with the baseline that is just radically different than humans. They can’t let emotion have influence, it’s too powerful– and if you’re familiar with folks who have major personal weaknesses, some of their “it’s logical” stuff starts to look really familiar.
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I tend to think about some of the occupation experience effects of the time scale assumption with elves.
Long life could be quite alien, and there seems to be a lot of stuff often handwaved. One of those is economic.
If elves have to eat at the normal human rate, where does that come from?
If elves live long enough, then they should predate the technology of mechanized agriculture, or at least have oral history of the period before.
Princesses are a feature of a split between security labor, and agricultural labor. Which is skill specialization, and somewhat an adaption to short lives.
Again, and again, I find that thinking things through, I have doubts about how much material difference there might be between a royal elfess and a peasant elfess in ordinary daily life. I tend to conclude that royals must also be spending quite a bit of their lives on agricultural labor.
Which leads to the question of how many maiming or fatal agricultural accidents can be mitigated with extreme skill?
I tend to assume that elves must have some level of ability to recover from maiming. Which actually seems to fit with Tolkein’s truely immortal, but goes ‘far away’ model.
The combination of the labor question, with the risk mitigation question includes what they will tolerate in behavior from domesticated animals. Also, what kinds of problem wild animals they would make a point of hunting down.
And, if curating wild animal populations, maybe has some implications for time spent ranging, and how they think of the work load.
One of my conclusions this morning is elves-as-industrial-engineers. Statistics adn risk management.
In such a world where this is a valid description of elves, the industrial revolution or revolutions maybe has something to do with elves learning a language that would allow them to communicate these concepts well to shorter lived races, or also to younger elves.
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I think part of this comes from taking how we as people experience time to its extreme. When we are young, a “year” is a large percentage of our lives, so it *seems* to pass by more slowly than when we get older and a “year” is a much shorter percentage of our lives. Now extend that out to where a “year” is a really tiny percentage (if that!) of someone’s life. It’d be like someone talking about a *day* relative to how long they’d been alive. There’s reasons you’ll sometimes see writers make immortals talk about decades or centuries as if they are years.
How long a “year” *seems* to pass affects how fast people make decisions. What do we mean when we say “make a decision to act *now*” anyway? How long is “now”? A second, a minute, an hour? How about a day… or a month… or a *year*… or even longer. “We’re going to go deal with that nascent oppressive regime ASAP because we can tell where it’s going” is still going to take months/years to do. Simply because of the scale of the problem and how many people it’ll involve (assume assassination isn’t the way to deal with it… and given how many assassinations have started wars… there’s reasons not to go that route…).
I do think there is a good reason for there to be a disconnect between shorter-lived races and longer-lived races on this topic. It’s like an adult telling a kid that they’ll get to do something “soon” and the kid doesn’t believe the adult. Because the adult is thinking about “soon” as in “next week”, while for the kid “next week” is like saying “next month” or “next year” in terms of how long that *feels* to them.
Like anything, this can be taken *way* to far, especially if there’s no justification made by the writer for why it’s like this. Consciously experiencing time going by *faster* than other people doesn’t mean someone *can’t* act quickly. They can. It does mean that their view of “how fast things change” or even “what *doesn’t* actually change over time” is probably going to be rather different than most people’s idea and hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around.
This also is related to why History is so hard to teach. There is always *more* history to learn that is being made all the time. How do you decide which is the important history to learn about and why? Now extend that for as long as a very long-lived race is alive. And history is important because history is how people figure out the patterns of how other people behave over long periods of time. If you can’t look at the right parts of history, you won’t notice the patterns of it.
Also, noticing patterns only works if you notice the *right* patterns. Noticing the wrong patterns makes things *worse*. What do you do with an long-lived being who thinks everyone *really is* good deep down? Or one that keeps influencing governments in bad ways? Normal people don’t like reality’s patterns *all the time*. What makes a long-lived being any different in that regard?
This is something that gets seen over and over in Journey to the West (to it’s credit). There are a fair amount of evil immortals who manage to influence/take over regional governments and run them into the ground (very often to get wealth and/or supplies for continuing their false immortality). Sometimes the regional government doesn’t know they’re doing that or got taken out by them when they first showed up… and *sometimes* the regional government knows what they’re doing and doesn’t care because they’re benefiting from them too much. If you’re long-lived… then yeah, you’ve seen *a lot* of history and know *a lot* about how people work. And there’s *a lot* of ways to use that information for evil purposes. Even more so when you can do stuff like control the weather, make a leader (supposedly) immortal, etc.
At the end of the day, long-lived beings are people like *everyone else is*. They just live a lot longer. This gives them a lot longer to do good *or* evil. Which can be either an awesome time or a horrific time for everyone else involve.
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To play devil’s advocate: living longer might make the “I’ve been doing this for XXX years, I’m not changing now!” problem worse. Greater hidebound issues, less innovation, less pressure for innovation. And having lots of pattern recognition wouldn’t necessarily help when a complete OCP drops on their heads.
Longer lifespans is likely to biologically associate with lower birth rates, all other factors being equal, so that’s another factor reducing population “churn”.
On the gripping hand, long-lived races are less likely to forget “the lessons of history” as quickly. The signs of the Dark Lord re-emerging after Ten Thousand Years might get poo-poo’d by shorter-lived races, but elves that were around when it happened might be less prone to dismissing the portents.
Civil engineering might be better. New Orleans got drowned by a “century storm” — engineers that can personally recall multiple centuries of outlier natural events might “over”-engineer their bridges, dams, etc to a degree that shorter-lived ones might ignore.
Going tangential… instead of living for different lengths, what about living at different rates? As I understand it (and I probably have this somewhat wrong), we sleep because it’s the price we pay for our cognition — our brains “burn” pretty fast during waking hours, and produce a lot of toxic waste products, which sleep is necessary to provide time to flush out the waste.
I’ve speculated about what an alien race whose evolution chose a different tradeoff might be like. Say, beings that don’t sleep, instead using a slower-but-constant waste clearing cycle. Averaged out over a lifetime, they could be just as intelligent as humans, but intellectually more “tortoise” to the human “hare” — making up for being “slower” while awake by being awake constantly.
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That’s pretty much how it worked for Tolkien’s elves, on the sleeping point: Elves *don’t* sleep. They just go still and dream/think/reminisce.
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There’s also some speculation that stuff like REM sleep and dreaming were evolved to throw random noise into the brain so it doesn’t overfit models to reality, like happens with statistical models in math. So the brain isn’t so rigid predicting what’s going to happen from past data that you get eaten!
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I do wonder if anyone has ever done a detailed study of if/how a certain degree of randomness seems to be an actual beneficial factor for species survival. Honeybees, for example, perform air-conditioning in their hives in a way that looks cognitively planned, but it turns out to be random numbers. Basically, bees on “hive duty” are all genetically programmed to drop whatever other task they’re doing and switch to ventilation mode when the temperature inside the hive hits a certain point. But that trip point is randomly different for every bee — that is, within a 5-10deg range, every bee’s thermostat is randomized. The end result is that as the temperature goes up, the number of bees switching over to ventilator duty increases until the temperature stabilizes, and then the reverse happens as the temperature drops.
Among humans, having a steady trickle of weirdos who just won’t stop trying to go against the grain –trying to find ways to eat things Everyone Knows are inedible, the obsessive tinkering that leads to fire/wheels/antibiotics/Mars colonies– seems like it might be part of humanity’s “survival reserve” against OCP events. No matter how OC an event is, it’s almost guaranteed that there’ll be The One Weirdo whose particular obsession hits the sweet spot for surviving.
I’ve often thought that certain sub-genres of SF are an outgrowth of this — the stories that throw a “what if?” and then chase down all its ramifications like a dog with a bone. It’s almost like a cultural immune system response to a world that’s changing so fast, we need massively crowdsourced “wargaming” to build mental models for “how do we handle Next Big Thing X?” Bujold’s treatment of cloning in the Vorkosigan novels comes to mind.
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Minor quibble, it wasn’t the century flood that drowned New Orleans, it was the appallingly bad maintaince of their levees that failed.
To a certain degree having a giant hurricane dancing in the Gulf probably saved lives by making people pay attention, when in reality, they were ready to go after a moderate rain.
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Agreed on the longer lifespan sometimes coming with a lower birthrate. Even the bible seems to show that, if you look in early Genesis- people living eight or nine centuries, and several of those named had their first son at around 150… though there could have been daughters before then. Earliest I recall before Noah was Enoch at 65.
Even if they had many children, that late start would have had an effect.
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‘Trash’ isekai LN reader here.
Some of the harem ones, there is a nubile elf lady, who has been isolated in whatever home location a long time, and is pretty ready and willing to go out on adventure.
As above, this is rarely someone really sick of constant agricultural labor.
Archetypes include princess, wizardess, forester/ranger, and maybe lady knight.
What I think is rarely done is a really excellent combination of a) shaped by own life experiences b) risks of adventuring handled in a way appropriate to life experiences, and to risk model over lifespan.
How deadly is growing up an elvish princess? If adventuring is significantly more dangerous, then maybe there would need to be some shifts in mindset. Assuming she is not a risk seeker who survived to age 3500 thanks only to constant supervision by more cautious persons. If growing up an elvish princess is fairly deadly over the course of her current age, even with similar risks at any point to a human princess, then maybe the natural choice would have been for her to wed at a far earlier age than her current.
Though, this train of thought implies that an unmarried spinster elf, perhaps at this point thought of as unlucky, could have survived many generations by becoming fairly skilled and cautious, and at this point a bit culturally alien to whatever surviving kinsmen she is related to through sibligns, cousins, etc.
If your elves have a fairly high generational turn over, then it might be rare but not statistically impossible for someone to survive past a marked cultural shift in marriage or inheritance customs.
Dunno.
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I once was pondering the reason why mankind dominates D&D worlds when they are the shortest lived. Skipping lightly over the actual, out-of-universe reason, you could imagine a lot. (The gods favor them! Don’t love them, but favor them, because they are fickle. Better when you’re a new god, but more demanding later.)
One might be precisely that they are the shortest lived. One elven wizard informing young human apprentices that he will still be alive in a millennia, and some percentage deciding that in a thousand years, people will still be asking you if you really knew me when I was an apprentice — none of them even have to be remembered that long for their actions to help boost human status.
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I’m currently working in a setting where a set of Dunedain analogues live to about 150, normal people live 70-90 years if they’re luck, and some occult bad guys can live to be considerably older. The main Dunedan type guy we meet is generally in a hurry, and if he doesn’t come off as particularly impatient, it’s because he knows the value of courtesy, and his brand of irritation tends to burn cold rather than hot. The female lead, once she finds out that he’s 44ish years older than her instead of like, 7 or 8, remarks that she should have realized something was up when he never seemed to be surprised at any of the weird stuff happening around him.
The other tell, although she hasn’t picked up on it yet, is that the Dunedain types tend to acquire new interests over their long lives. The main guy is a medical doctor with a decent understanding of steampunk tech and the training to pilot a minisub with charts alone; he has a cousin who got into mechanics and hydraulics after a somewhat checkered career in experimental medicine and anatomical dissections.
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