Immortals and Risk-aversion

Would immortals-by-lifespan who were not invulnerable be very, or infinitely, risk averse? Would they be very unambitious and inactive, since there would always be time for stuff later?

I'm not going to get into the genuine intellectual issues at stake, just going to enjoy the chance to survey some Sci Fi, fantasy, and related genres of fiction.

Some say that in "contemporary vampire fiction" vampires are extremely risk-averse. I suppose that this refers to the Anne Rice novels, none of which I've read. But it does invite an obvious question about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was otherwise generally very good about imagining a world that made sense given its initial premises. Why would any vampire hang out in Sunnydale? The Master was bound into the Hellmouth, and some of his servants were bound to him. Occasionally there was a vampire who wanted the glory of killing a Slayer. But then there were the countless, often nameless, vampires who just inhabited the town and treated it as their feeding ground-- until they got staked. The Hellmouth might have attracted demons, made it more likely that new vampires would be created, and generated generic magical weirdness. But wouldn't an even-remotely-rational vampire, even one who had been created in Sunnydale, move out of town immediately upon realizing that he or she was much more likely to get destroyed there than any other place in the world? Even the glory-hounds must have thought that the glory of killing a Slayer was inordinately valuable, given that they should have wanted to avoid any risk at all of getting slain. Instead, they continued to congregate in the least rational place for them to do so.

Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long was not highly risk-averse-- but he did not know that he was going to turn out to be immortal, and by the time he knew, his habits of mind, his aversion to boredom, had been very well-set. Many of his fellow Howards did become very conservative and risk-averse, especially those who were born after the advent of rejuvenation and who therefore knew all along that they were functionally immortal.

The characters in Poul Anderson's Boat of a Million Years have interestingly varied reactions-- some but not others become extremely conservative for parts of their lifespan.

Characters in the Highlander universe of course face a somewhat different incentive structure. They are immortal-- but know that only one of them will be truly immortal, the last one to survive the last swordfight. That creates an incentive to engage in swordfights along the way, so as to remain in practice. [NB: Yes, there are also intermittent claims about each immortal 'gaining the power' of each other one he or she kills in combat-- but there's not a lot of consistency about just what that means, and whether that 'power' makes one more likely to win the next fight.] Accordingly, we again see variation in strategies adopted, from the strategy of spending centuries at a time on holy ground (off limits for swordfights), in order to protect one's immortal life, to the strategy of fighting all the time in order to hone skills and increase the chances of being the last survivor.

Isaac Asimov's Spacers, on the other hand, almost all become extremely risk-averse, even though they only have lengthened lifespans rather than infinite ones.

For those wondering about Tolkien's elves: they may well be a special case, as there are mixed suggestions about what happens when one is bodily slain, and some suggestions that they cannot be permanently bodily destroyed. Tolkien's elves can, of course, die of wounds or poison. They can also lose the will to live. But in either case they travel to the Halls of Mandos and reside there, apparently incarnate. It's left unclear whether doing so differs in any clear sense from simply travelling over the sea to Valinor; the long-term existence of an elf who is shot with an arrow may not be that different from the long-term existence of one who just sails away. Moreover, the texts that suggest life with Mandos is not embodied also suggest that it is possible to become re-embodied-- in a substantially identical body with the same name, spirit and memories. Both Finrod and Glorfindel apparently did so. Whether one re-embodies in Valinor or in Middle Earth, Elvish 'death' seems to be a lower-stakes affair than most other variants of the same.

Often even when some of the long-lifers/ immortals grow risk-averse, the narrative centers around the one(s) who doesn't/don't, and implicitly or explicitly condemns extreme risk-aversion. The wisdom gained over long life teaches that life has to be lived in order to be worth living... or something like that. But that might well tell us more about the demands of narrative than about what immortals would actually be like-- the risk-averse just aren't the most interesting people to tell most kinds of stories about...