feelings of immortality

Cop show Cold Case is as good as ever. Sunday's episode had me wondering about something though...

It was about a man who, when he turned 17, came down with MS. It went into remission a few years later, but it had been a brutal realization that he wasn't immortal and he decided to teach that lesson to other 17-year-olds by burying them alive.

Did you feel immortal at 17? I certainly didn't. Oh, I was quite healthy at that age, but that was in 1972/73 and a sign of the times was that theaters showed movies like Soylent Green. The future was not going to be pretty and, if we didn't foul up our nest so badly that we'd choke on the accumulating refuse of our rapidly growing numbers, we'd instead run out of resources and starve ourselves into oblivion.

That didn't leave much room for feelings of immortality.