I'm thinking about c!Phil again and about immortality and the worldview of those who live for centuries. And not only how so much of both shapes his character, but how he's simultaneously, in some aspects, the antithesis of what can sometimes be expected for immortal mindsets.
He's a survivalist at his core, and he's been surviving for so long, hundreds of years at least. And with that alone, a survivalist's whole world view is so fucking different. People are shaped by their environments, by the people around them, but when you're immortal, you've lived too long to let that shape you. You've outgrown that influence. There are still little things, the kindness in humanity, that give you hope, but you are shaped only by the decades and centuries you spent seeing the world grow and change around you.
And because of that, Phil cannot fully connect to humanity and the mortals among him, because he just... he simply can't. He tries and does his best, but it's impossible to fully accomplish. His apathy is prominent, even if that apathy isn't out of cruelty but merely an effect of acclimating and growing numb to things that don't matter, in the grand scheme of everything. His viewpoint is limited, even though all viewpoints are, but his is so much more noticeably so, only because it's so different from everyone else's.
It'd be so easy to let that apathy wholly consume and grow into cynicism, to think little of humanity because the cycle of violence and corruption continues to spin its corrosive wheel. It'd be so easy to think of humanity as something small and insignificant. Because when you live forever, its's easy to grow numb to what does not matter. But Phil doesn't think that at all; really it's one of the most important parts of his values and beliefs.
Time isn't fleeting, it is forever. People feel so temporary, but their importance in life is eternal. Objects, at the end of our lives, become rust or dust or become reclaimed by the earth by time itself, nothing more. Humans, by the time they're buried six feet under, still carry something in this world. Pieces of them scattered through time and space.
And Phil would rather love than let those pieces fade into dust and become forgotten. He loves and he cares and he tries, even if he cannot completely understand the people around him. He may not totally relate to or understand why Tommy is so connected to his disc, but he wants Tommy to understand the value of people in our lives. He doesn't know the depths of Wilbur's mental woes, but that is his son, who he loves with everything within him, and he'll try everything he can to help him on the right path.
Phil continues to try to save humanity, even if his methods aren't perfect. He'll help rebuild a country that his son died for, because everyone is gathering among debris and ashes to fix their homes and buildings, and everyone is gathering as a community, and isn't that great? He'll destroy corrupted countries and let nature reclaim what is its own. He'll beg people to see that the values of the people around us outweigh some thing that does not have a voice that wants to be heard. He's immortal and he's disconnected in a sense, but he cares so fucking much.
