Probably not, if "immortality" means literally endless, unchosen life; but much of what people want when they wish for it—more time, an end to involuntary death, health without decline—would be good. The badness attaches specifically to endlessness without exit, not to more life.
Two problems bear on true immortality.
The first is Bernard Williams's dilemma: a self has "categorical desires"—projects and attachments that give it reasons to live; over infinite time either these are exhausted, leaving terminal boredom, or the self changes so radically to keep finding new ones that the later being is no longer continuous with you, so immortality preserves either a bored you or a stranger.
The second is that unlimited time may corrode value: scarcity is part of what makes time precious, urgency drives choice, and a life with infinite tomorrows risks infinite deferral, where nothing need be done today.
These are contestable.
Against boredom, the space of worthwhile experience—relationships, understanding, art, the growth of others—may be effectively inexhaustible, and identity change over time might be acceptable or even good rather than a loss.
So the pessimistic case is strong but not decisive; the honest verdict is that endless life is at best a gamble on whether meaning can survive the removal of all limits.
The decisive variable is control.
An immortality you could end at will—longevity with an exit—removes the trap: it grants more of the good (time, health, the defeat of untimely death) while preserving the option that makes any of it bearable.
So what is worth wanting is not infinity but more time under your own control; unchosen, inescapable endlessness is plausibly a curse, while an escapable long life is a clear good. This assessment would change if human desire and identity turned out to be genuinely inexhaustible under endlessness—which is exactly the open question.
Probably not—at least not the literal, never-ending, can't-opt-out kind. But here's the catch: that's usually not what people actually want when they wish for immortality. What they want is more time, an end to dying before they're ready, health without decline—and those would be genuinely good. The problem is specifically with endlessness you can't escape.
Two things go wrong with true, infinite immortality:
These aren't airtight—maybe the space of worthwhile experience (people, understanding, art) is effectively endless, and maybe changing over eons is fine, even good. So the pessimistic case is strong but not a slam dunk. Endless life is, at best, a gamble on whether meaning survives the removal of all limits.
The thing that actually settles it: control. An immortality you could end whenever you chose dodges the whole trap—you get the upside (time, health, no untimely death) while keeping the exit that makes it bearable. So the wish worth making isn't for infinity; it's for more time on your own terms. Unchosen forever is plausibly a curse. An escapable long life is a clear gift.
The Woman Who Had Lived Too Long.
In Janáček's opera, drawn from Karel Čapek, a woman has taken an elixir that keeps her alive for three centuries, and Bernard Williams used her to make a devastating argument. At 342 she is not radiant but frozen—cold, bored, unable to feel anything, because she has already done everything, loved everyone, exhausted every desire that once gave her reasons to get up. The horror is not that she is dying but that she cannot; her soul has run out of wants and there is nothing left but the endless, flavorless continuation. Williams's point is precise and chilling: the very desires that make life worth living are finite, and a life long enough will use them all up, leaving not eternal joy but eternal tedium wearing your face.
The Warning Every Culture Tells.
Notice that no mythology promises immortality as a simple reward; the stories are almost unanimously warnings. Tithonus, granted eternal life but not eternal youth, shrivels into a cricket, begging for the death he can no longer have. The Wandering Jew trudges the earth unable to rest. Swift's Struldbrugs are not envied but pitied, deathless and decrepit, a legal horror to their neighbors. Across unrelated civilizations the human imagination keeps arriving at the same verdict: that to live forever is not the escape from the human condition but the loss of it, and that the elixir is always, in the end, revealed to be a curse. When every culture's dreams agree, it is worth asking what they know.
The Long Bereavement.
Even set aside boredom, and immortality hides a subtler cruelty: to be deathless among the dying is to lose everyone, forever, on repeat. The immortal watches each friend, each lover, each child age and vanish while they remain, a permanent mourner attending an unending series of funerals. Every attachment becomes a scheduled grief; every love is entered knowing you will bury it. This is the vampire's real torment in the honest versions of the myth—not the blood but the loneliness, the slow retreat from caring at all because caring only ever ends one way. Immortality would not free you from loss; it would sentence you to more of it than any mortal heart was built to bear.
The Deadline That Makes You Live.
Ask yourself why you ever do the hard, good thing today rather than tomorrow, and the honest answer often involves a clock. Deadlines are what make us write; the knowledge that time runs out is what turns "someday" into "now." An immortal has no deadlines—every task can be deferred one more century, every reconciliation postponed, every dream left for later, because there is always more later. Watch your own procrastination and you are seeing a small preview of the immortal condition: the paralysis of the infinitely postponable. Urgency, which feels like a burden, may secretly be the engine of everything we actually accomplish and cherish. Take it away and life risks becoming an endless rough draft no one is ever forced to finish.
What the Wish Is Really For.
But listen closely to the wish for immortality and you may hear that it is not, at bottom, a wish for endless time at all. No one lying awake actually longs for ten billion identical years; what they long for is not to lose this—this person, this morning, this self that is just now getting good at being alive. The fear is not of finitude in the abstract but of the specific, unbearable subtractions: the people who will be taken, the loves that will end. And there is an odd consolation in seeing this clearly. The immortal, in every story, ends up envying us—the sharpness of a limited life, the way a thing you can lose is a thing you can fully love. We do not need infinity. We need enough, and we need the ones we love to stay a while, and we need our brief time to matter. Immortality would grant the wrong wish. The right one was always smaller, and closer, and already, partly, in our hands.
Endless, unchosen immortality would probably not be good: over infinite time a self risks either exhausting the desires that give it reasons to live, ending in tedium, or changing so radically to stay engaged that the survivor is no longer you—and limitless time can drain the urgency and scarcity that make hours precious. But this badness attaches to endlessness without exit, not to more life as such. What people actually want—more time, health, an end to untimely death, and above all not to lose those they love—is largely good, especially if it remained under their own control. So the wish worth making is for enough time on one's own terms, not for literal infinity.