With Great Power Comes Great Inconvenience
Everyone daydreams about having superpowers, from flying among the clouds to turning invisible – there are certainly a lot of opportunities to be had. But some powers are more like a curse than a blessing. With that in mind, here are 20 superpowers that would honestly suck in real life.
1. Super Speed
In comic books and movies, it’s important to suspend your disbelief to accept the narrative. So super speed may seem like a fun and useful power. But in reality, there are lots of consequences to moving that fast. In terms of physics, you’ll end up getting badly hurt anytime you impact something. Another issue that even the comics explore is the calorie deficit. You’ll have to keep eating 24/7 to maintain the calories you lose – and that’s expensive!
2. Shapeshifting
Shapeshifting may seem like a fun and versatile power, but in reality, if you don’t have the ability to focus and keep your mind on track, you’ll probably end up constantly shifting through different forms. Keeping up a human appearance alone might get difficult.
3. Intangibility
Walking through walls and phasing through floors sounds cool. But imagine if you’re sleeping at night and you suddenly lose control, only to phase through your bed, a few floors, and the ground. You’ll probably end up waking up stuck in the middle of the Earth – which is terrifying, to say the least.
4. Healing
Wolverine is known for his insane healing factor, making him essentially immortal. But the issue is just because you’re healing doesn’t mean you aren’t feeling immense pain. Plus, you would never be able to get a tattoo or undergo surgery, and you’ll likely have to say goodbye to everyone you love.
5. Empath
Empaths have the ability to feel and control the emotions of others. While controlling emotions can be useful, feeling them is likely to be more trouble than it’s worth. Imagine you’re trying to help someone through a hard time only to absorb all of their sadness and dread.
6. Fire
The thing about fire is just how easily it spreads. You basically have to avoid using your powers at all times. Whether you’re inside or outside, the sheer heat and flammability of objects make it more risky than it’s worth.
7. Super Strength
Super strength by itself is useless and kind of an inconvenience. There are few things in life that require you to have super strength, so you’ll spend most of your time trying to be gentle and manage your grip. On the other hand, if you do plan on saving the world, super strength without invulnerability just makes you an easy target.
8. Immortality
Similar to the Wolverine scenario, immortality by itself is also pretty terrible. First of all, immortality without never aging is a nightmare, as you’ll grow super old but never pass. On the other hand, if you don’t age, eventually the rest of the world will, and when Earth’s gone, you’ll likely be floating aimlessly through space all alone.
9. Super Hearing
Unless you can turn it off and on at will, having to constantly hear everything going on around you is enough to drive anyone insane. Plus, even if you could turn it on at will, isolating the sound you want to hear from the hundreds you don’t would also be a headache.
10. Touch Absorption
In X-Men, it’s clear that Rogue’s powers come with a major caveat. She’s forced to wear gloves 24/7 and can never enjoy skin-on-skin contact. This makes relationships impossible and would be a terrible curse for most.
11. Mind Control
While there don’t seem to be any physical negative consequences to mind control, the mental consequences are numerous. There’s no way to use this power without being a terrible person. If you’re forcing everyone to like you, that really speaks to your insecurity as well. Of course, the only way this works is if you mind control bad people to do good things!
12. Time Travel
By now, after seeing the hundreds of movies on time travel, it’s clear that messing with the fabric of the space-time continuum just leads to disaster. It’s so complex, and it’s so easy to accidentally end the world – so it’s better to avoid this power.
13. Seeing Through Clothes
This power’s pretty useless, and even if for some reason you’d enjoy seeing through people’s clothes, odds are there are more people around that you would never want to see like that. Also, worst of all, you’ll never be able to find your own clothes or do laundry!
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14. Turn Into Water
Hopefully, you’re able to control this, because if not, you might end up spending the rest of your life sleeping in a bucket. Besides, there’s not really anything useful you can do being water.
15. Heat Vision
There are two kinds of heat vision out there. Either you get the Superman variant, where you have some control over it, or you’re stuck with Cyclops' never-ending heat beams the moment you open your eyes. This means you’ll probably have to spend most of your life looking at things through a pair of sunglasses.
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16. Turning to Sand
Fans of the original Tobey Maguire Spider-Man series know firsthand the downsides of turning into sand. There are many consequences to consider, like will a strong gust of wind blow you away, and essentially, you can never go out when it rains.
17. Super Smell
Unless you want to spend the rest of your life living in a scenic mountainside cabin, you’re going to hate being able to smell everything around you. Having this power in a city would be the worst.
18. Future Sight
Future sight by itself is pretty useless. You basically know all the bad things that are going to happen and are essentially powerless to stop them. People will either think you’re a freak if you warn them, or they’ll assume you’re one of those psychic scammers.
19. Shrinking
There’s very little an average person can do with the ability to shrink. Plus, you should keep in mind the ever-looming threats of birds, vacuum cleaners, and people’s shoes.
20. The Thing
Turning into The Thing from the Fantastic Four may grant you invulnerability and super strength, but at a major cost. You can never turn the power off, and getting into a relationship or doing normal human stuff will likely be difficult.
