I don’t believe in God. It would be nice if I did, but I don’t. It’s just not in my blood, yo. It’s just not my style, Jack. I don’t rule out the idea altogether, though! If I had clear evidence of a God or an afterlife, I would consider it. As it stands now, if push came to shove and I needed to stop straddling the agnosticism fence because Mike Pence has a gun to my head and needs to me to choose a second before he kills me righteously, then I would stand by my gut conviction that, no, God doesn’t exist. However, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s what I’ve settled on and accepted for myself with respect to this philosophy:

1) God may or may not exist and we’ll never know, even after we die.
2) The existence of God is inconsequential.

THEREFORE, I firmly believe that if God does exist (and it may be in some way or form that has nothing to do with the manner in which every religion in the universe has decided), then worshipping such a God is a waste of time anyway! Like, what are you doing? If you had an ant farm in your bedroom, and the ants all collectively, as a little ant society, decided to worship your ugly, pimply face as their God, what the fuck are you going to do to ensure their eternal afterlife accommodations? How could you possibly be in charge of that? The most you can do is smite them if they piss you off. Like, if they barely make a dent in your ant farm dirt and all their tunnels are lackluster, then you can settle their earthly fates with a toilet or a magnifying glass. It’s not like you have any control over them afterward, though. Then it begs the question as to why some petty, immature adult child should be worshipped at all in the first place. Right? Yes. Thank you.

You’re not fooling anyone, lady. Those wings are fake. You’ll be dead and extinguished from the universe with the rest of us.

Where does that leave me? For starters, the petrifying concept of eternal oblivion! Exciting!

Let’s flesh that one out, shall we?

– Hey, Tom! Forget about oblivion for a moment! Let’s say an afterlife does exist! Heaven or Hell! Wouldn’t it be better to just assume that Heaven and Hell are real and definite? Then you can live your life with the knowledge that either reward or torture awaits based on the decisions you make during life!

Yes, ok, that’s not a very good point at all, but I’ll indulge. The ideas of “reward” and “punishment” mean nothing to an unconscious brain. If you believe in a soul, then you also believe in some sort of consciousness associated with that soul. As in, your “self” as a dead person, whatever that might be, would be able to actually experience this reward or this punishment. That doesn’t fly with me.

Then, there’s the very human concept of justice. Do good stuff and you deserve good things. Do bad stuff and you deserve bad things. Every religion has its own distribution of morals and ethics into respective “right” and “wrong” categories. Murder? Bad! Helping? Good! Abortion? Bad! Sustaining damage to parts of your brain that control emotion, cognition, empathy, and social behavior, resulting in shooting up a Dairy Queen? Gray area! Dying before baptism? Bad! Performing a reprehensible action with complete ignorance? Maybe ok! Maybe bad! There’s too much ambiguity to almost all human actions, thoughts, and behaviors! If I tell God to go fuck himself at age 14, is that it? No going back? Harumph!

In short, no, I don’t think it’s healthy to base all your morals and ethics upon the possibility of getting a reward at the end of the day. Then, arguably, you’re not really doing it because you want to. You’re doing it out of fear of the punishment.

♪♫ If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower! ♫♪♫♫

– Hey, Tom! All that sounds kind of rude and callous, but to each his own! Let’s go back to oblivion now! Is the thought of eternal bliss way more appealing than eternal oblivion? Even if you don’t believe in God nor an afterlife, isn’t the idea of happiness that lasts forever appealing?

No. Here’s the most haunting quote I’ve ever read about this subject. It’s from Hendrik Willem van Loon’s book The Story of Mankind, a fucking book for children, from 1921.

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is one hundred miles long and one hundred miles high, and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

Chilling. If one believes, in some way, that consciousness persists past death, then I believe that the very notion of anything lasting forever is panic-inducing. It sounds unfathomably torturous. I’d want to kill myself! And I wouldn’t be able to! I’d need a goddamn out, man. Even if I was completely chickenshit about afterlife suicide for seventeen quadrillion years, I’d still be more comfortable knowing that I could end it completely once and for all at some point.

Therefore, eternal nothingness sounds way more appealing once you realize that you wouldn’t be conscious. It sounds awful now because I certainly AM conscious at this point in time, and even the knowledge that I was unconscious for 10^{10,000,00010,000,000} years prior to being alive doesn’t really make me feel any better about what comes after. Psychologically, an eternity in the direction of the past is less terrifying than an eternity in the direction of the future. It’s not like I minded then. Why would I mind later? Because I think I would! For some reason.

Ohhhh shit. I needed to stop for gas but no fucking way, man.

– Hey, Tom! You sure are writing a lot of boring words that I’m barely paying attention to! I have one final question, though! HOW, exactly, are you making this existential crisis work for you? Huh? You see that post title up there? Try that one on for size, hotshot!

OK, you called my bluff! Nothing works for me. I’ve read dozens of articles and ideas and analogies and theories and philosophical musings in order to find something I find even somewhat agreeable. Every time I find an opinion about the aftermath of death that was slightly reassuring (you don’t care now about the eternity before you were born, and you won’t care about the eternity after you die), I’d find something else that was unspeakably horrifying (at the time of death, what’s left of your dwindling consciousness will initiate a near-infinite time dilation slowdown of your perception, causing a true eternity of conscious absolute nothingness).

So here’s the closest I’ve come to accepting theories that seems simultaneously plausible and comforting:

1)  The concept of “existing” is a construct that our brains invented to maintain our arrogant idea of self-importance. Not “existing” anymore is just the way things eventually have to be for anything, including the universe, and I’m not going to be around to give a shit when any of that happens.
Here’s some corny stuff coming up, but I have decided to fully agree with it: There’s an infinitesimal chance of you existing at this point in time in this part of the universe. But it happened. And if you’re reading this right now, chances are very good that you ended up in one of those prosperous first-world English-speaking countries. It’s a gift. So make the most of it.

Oh, that’s not that comforting? How about this: If you think about it, you become unconscious every night when you sleep. Not fully, but you know what I mean. And you don’t give a damn. You go to bed at 5am and you spend 14 hours not knowing 14 hours passed and then you wake up at 7pm. That’s everyone’s experience, right? Maybe you’re normal and sleep 18 hours a day! In either case, now imagine going to sleep and, instead of 18 hours passing by, you never wake up again! Not so bad, is it? Ha!

Oh hey there, sailor. You come around here often?…

2) Never, ever waking up again isn’t as scary as I initially had multiple lung-destroying panic attacks about.
I spent a lot of time rationalizing my way through this one and I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head around this idea, but endless oblivion can be tackled with this thought exercise:

Let’s say you get hit in the head by a flying Christmas fruitcake and you’re knocked into a coma. You have no absolutely no idea. You’re blissfully unaware that you’re only alive because of a fucking tube, and you’re getting hellishly nasty bedsores that you can’t even feel anyway. We’re going to completely take out the emotional factor with respect to losing loved ones, feeling like your life was wasted, everything in society being completely different, global warming, etc. etc. This is purely “I’m alive” stuff.

OK, nix that. Pretend you were cryogenically frozen and preserved! That way you won’t make decomposing flesh arguments!

-Let’s say you wake up unfrozen in 60 days. Two months. Not so bad, right? You suddenly jumped ahead two months, and you’re none the wiser. You might feel disoriented that you missed out on time, but you didn’t even know that this missing out was even happening.

-Let’s say, instead, you wake up unfrozen after 60 months. That’s five years. Very disorienting, but it was a blink of an eye. You’re alive, and that’s what matters now.

-Let’s say, instead, you wake up in 60 years. A blink of an eye from your perspective, right? We’re still ok.

-6,000 years! 1.5x the age of Earth! In the blink of an eye! For all intents and purposes, you did not exist that entire time, but here you are, fresh out of your stinky cryogenic state, completely unaffected mentally by this lapse of time. Still doesn’t seem that daunting, right?

-6,000,000,000,000,000,000 years! That’s 18 zeroes! Six quintillion years have gone by! You didn’t even notice. It almost feels refreshing. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, and this is literally 437,956,204 times longer! 438 MILLION TIMES LONGER! All that time did not matter one fucking bit. You could go another six quintillion!

– Are you headed for a point here anytime soon?

Yes! No more finite numbers. Here we go…

-Infinity? Holy shit, dude. No. No thanks. That’s absolutely terrifying.

But why? Why is that scary when a 1 with nine million zeroes on the end isn’t? It’s because the mere thought of waking up again makes the impossible-to-fathom stretch of time bearable. No matter how long it is, it’s fine. No matter what, we want to just exist. Not existing is against everything everyone ever strives for!

Fine, you win. I’ll believe whatever you want me to, just keep those skeletons away from me. They give me the willies.

As far as I’m concerned, infinity is the last roadblock, and it’s the last construct to tear down. Infinity isn’t really a “time”. It’s a state. Once you remove the time aspect and think of it as a state of being (er, not-being), it becomes a little…less scary? Maybe not entirely. But we’re getting there!

– You don’t actually have any ideas on how to make your existential crisis actually work for you, do you?

Not as such, no. But banging out this post has certainly helped me put some of my thoughts out of my head! That helps. Sorry you read it, though. You should go back to a state of being where you didn’t click the link to get here.