Just think. You go to sleep one night. And you never wake up. That's it. You had no idea your existence was ending. It just did. You had no time to think about it. To accept it. You figured you'd just get up the next morning and go about your day like you did for the first however many years of your life.
That would suck. I want to know when I'm leaving this life. I'm sure it wouldn't give me much notice, but I'll get some notice at least. If I get the expected heart attack, then through the pain I'll at least know. It takes a few seconds, but when you're dying I'm sure that takes longer than your typical seconds. I'm sure I'd figure it out in that brief period of time. I'd accept it. And I'd be OK with leaving the world.
I don't want to be robbed of that moment. If there was an afterlife, I'd feel ripped off. But there's not. One of my biggest concerns about the eternal afterlife was actually addressed in THE GOOD PLACE. I suspected it was coming in those last episodes, and the writers did not disappoint.
So here's my argument against an afterlife. Let's take the Christian approach since America is unofficially the most Christian nation on this planet. Say you wind up in Heaven. And you finally get to do all the things you missed out on while alive. There will come a point where you've done everything, and you have no desires anymore. Eternity is pointless. You will eventually get bored and wish for it all to end.
Conversely, you might end up in Hell, where even the lenient current Pope will agree that you will suffer torment and torture for the rest of eternity. But . . . that won't matter either. There are only so many times you can get your eyes ripped from your skull before you get bored with it. You're shoving barbed wired down my dickhole for the 666th time? Eh, yawn. I imagine Prometheus hated getting his liver eaten out of him every day at first, but I'm sure by the month point he yawned and checked his schedule as the owl did it to him again.
How about Islam? When you get to Heaven you get 72 virgins. Personally, I don't dig virgins. Why would you have sex with someone who has no experience? But say virgins are your thing. You have an eternity to deflower 72 of them. What then? Do their vaginas reseal so you can do it all over again? And losing one's virginity isn't just a physical thing. It's a mental and emotional thing. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, as they say. At what point do you get bored with that? You can't have sex with virgins for eternity. You'd get just as bored as the dude getting barbed wire in his dickhole.
The thing that makes us special is the fact that we are finite. We all die with unfinished business. I think Amos from The Expanse said that was the definition of death. It sucks, but if we died with all of our shit done, that wouldn't be interesting in the slightest.
That's why I'm always in a hurry. I want to get as much shit done as I can before I finally croak. And I want to be awake for that deathly moment. I want to know that this is it. I'm not going to get anything done tomorrow because I'll be too busy being dead. But if I went to bed and died in my sleep? That thought would never occur to me.
I need to die when I'm awake. I think sometimes of that guy from House of Pain that went on to Everlast. Not a big fan, but he went to bed one night and had a heart attack in his sleep. He would have died if a roommate hadn't checked on him. He survived, but imagine if he didn't. I heard that interview, and it fucked with me. So yeah. Dear Death--take me when I'm awake. Please and thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment