In the excellent movie Interview with the Vampire, there is a fascinating scene where the 500 year old vampire Armand explains to the recently made vampire (and main character) Louis that there are not, in fact, many old vampires. As he explains that most die for pointless reasons or just fade away because they lose the will to continue, he says:

Do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality? How quickly they perish of their own will? The world changes, but we do not. Therein lies the irony which finally kills us.

This life is very strange, because it is not really about itself. We are made for eternity but currently living in time; we are not in the book, but in the preface to the book. We make things which, being good in themselves, should last forever, but instead all good things must come to an end in order to make way for other good things. This is the (apparent) contradiction which fools so many people into thinking that life is an illusion. This is also the (apparent) contradiction which fools so many people into sinning, since most sin consists of trying to hold on to the good things which we should let go of.

Interestingly, what Armand is describing to Louis is really why it is so difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. As I explained in some detail in my video The Rich Young Man & Who is Rich Today, there are two ways of defining “rich.” The one which is only really relevant to envious people and people dealing with envious people is relatively. One can coherently define “the rich” as “the top 1%” or “the top 0.1%” or “the top 50%” or whatever suits one’s purposes to the moment, which usually means defining “the rich” as “those who have more than me” because the most common purpose for this kind of definition is to complain about those who have more than one. The other way to define “the rich” is in terms of the power one has to modify one’s environment to one’s desires.

If you consider the vampires in Interview with the Vampire, they very much fit this definition of rich. They’re beautiful, physically capable of dominating humans, can easily live in places with abundant prey, and can easily avoid all danger. Combining the experience of age with the vigor of youth, they can build almost anything they want. With the exception of having to sleep during the day or at least spend their days underground, they can easily satisfy almost any immediate desire that they have.

But what they cannot do is to take part in building up eternity. Not literally, but symbolically, I mean. Vampires are no longer reproductive creatures, and they’re no longer part of society. They’re here, but that’s it. They’re not doing anything. They are merely existing. And the problem they run into is that they know that they’re supposed to be doing something else, but can’t. That’s what “the world changes, but we do not” means.

Of course, if one went beyond the symbolism of the story and took this merely as a science fiction premise, vampires could take part in society, and in building up eternity. Monks did enormously valuable work in building up the world despite not being reproductive creatures who were not immediately in society, and vampires could, in theory, do likewise. They would be absolutely fantastic builders, for example. A single vampire could probably build a gothic cathedral in a year. They could contribute enormous amounts of beauty to the world. They could combine extensive learning with long-practiced wit and obliterate most heresies before they spread, guiding the youth on the path of truth. There’s a lot they could do.

But the vampires in Interview with the Vampire did none of that.

Because it is very hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Because, being so able to conform the world to his whims, it’s much easier for him to lie to himself that he already is in heaven, where people do not marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels. It would be very hard for a vampire, who is immortal, to have a sense of urgency. And that is one of the things necessary for happiness in this life—to realize how each moment is precious because each moment is different, and so to know the urgency of not wasting a single moment. For the rich man craves eternity, and so he uses his power to make the moments like each other, and so he doesn’t value them, and so he wastes them.

It is interesting to note that what is true of the Vampires in Interview with the Vampire, with regard to how they are able to conform their environment to their desires, is largely true of middle class people in modern industrialized society. We are all rich, in an absolute sense. And, as can be seen by the explosion of mental illness and epidemics of suicide, a surprising number of rich people don’t even have the stamina for mortality.