[Kalimac]

This is fascinating - the Curse of Immortality is a big theme in fantasy (I remember reading "Tuck Everlasting" at the age of seven and being terrified at the prospect of living unchanged forever). The immediately obvious drawback to immortality, even if you're an Elf, is that quite a number of your friends and acquaintances (hobbits, Men) are not immortal - imagine what it would be like to watch literally hundreds of generations be born, have children, die and so forth. The people with whom you spent your youth will have gone on to the afterlife, and you'll be left behind. Then there's the cyclical nature of history - another war, another battle, yet again, the same mistakes you witnessed two thousand years ago being repeated as the new generations of mortals have to learn their way about. Isildur had a bad time, and died young and painfully, but didn't Elrond in a way have the rawer deal? He had to live on and see the generations of Isildur's descendants sinking, see Sauron rise again, and watch Middle Earth almost destroy itself yet again.

Elrond and the other Elves could manage this, and their characters must have been innately much stronger than those of mortal men. Supposing there was an opposite choice - for example, if Aragorn became immortal by marrying Arwen - how many men, even of Aragorn's stature, would have the strength of character just to *last* that long and not simply fade away from depression or grief? Not to mention the knowledge that all of their mortal companions would eventually pass beyond the rim of the world, while they'd be left behind.

So in short - I don't think men could handle immortality after a while. And while the old joke about how "everyone wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die" is true enough, I think most people would rather use the dying route than the one the Elves take.