This is my second philosophical rambling post.  I’m really excited about this one because the first one was such a colossal failure.  It broke my Burrito Bowl Diaries record for least amount of shares.  This is exciting to me for a few reasons, which I’ve listed and subsequently deleted, because even by my standards they didn’t really pertain to the article at hand.

Thank you for reading this blog even if you spend the vast majority of the time questioning your life decisions.  Without further delay…

Forever Will Happen and Why It’s Incredibly Upsetting

Forever is something that will happen regardless of whether or not you’re a part of it.  From what I can see, there are two big possibilities and they’re both incredibly upsetting.

1. We exist, forever
2. We do not exist, forever

Not great options.  Let’s move on.  Do you believe in God?  What about an afterlife?  I frequently think about life and death and what it all means to be human.  One question I always bang my head against is this idea of forever.  Whether we live through it or not, forever is a thing that will happen.

If you had the choice whether you wanted to exist or not exist, forever, which would you choose?  That’s easy.  You’d choose TO exist. Right?  But, it’s not so easy when you really think about it.  Forever is a long time.  Do you really want to be around for it all? ALLLLLLL of it?

How long would it take before you no longer wanted to live forever?

On the surface, the question might seem asinine.  But, imagine waking up day after day for billions of years.  At what point would you have done everything so many times that even the most thrilling human experiences would feel like nothing more than a tedious chore?

Unhelpful visual explanation of eternity

I’m trying to think of a way to fully express what I mean by living forever.  This may not be helpful, but it’s free.

Imagine, for every hundred years you live, a grain of sand is placed on a beach to represent the passage of time.  Now, imagine living enough hundred-year lives to equal all the sand on earth.  Trillions and trillions of hundred-year lives all back to back to back.

Now, do all the sand on Mars.

After you’ve done that, you’re officially .0001% of the way done living forever, if we’re rounding up.

You want that?

It just really seems like a long time. Unfortunately, we don’t get a choice about what we’re doing while forever is happening.  We either will or won’t exist, forever.  Within that there are four possibilities for how we’ll occupy our time, and none of them are ideal.  I’m sure there are more possibilities than four.  I came up with three initially but then added the fourth later.  For sure there are many other possible outcomes.  Don’t mind me.

Option one- We exist forever in either heaven or hell

In the view of many religions, once we die we go to heaven to permanently praise our version of God, or we go to hell.  I have lots of questions about heaven and hell and God in general, but I usually don’t ask them.

Here’s a quick sample though, in case you were curious: Is it fair to spend eternity in hell no matter how naughty you were in life?  How many times has God gone through the whole create-become disappointed-eventual rapture thing with humans?  I’m sure this isn’t his first rodeo creating things. 

Has he done this experiment a bunch of different times, each time picking a different animal to give human levels of consciousness to?  I bet his favorite was when he made dogs super smart.  Cats were probably the worst.  Humans are somewhere in the middle I’d guess.  Probably above fuzzy caterpillars but below kangaroos.  Moving on. 

I just got a real kick contemplating what sentient ostriches would be like.  I imagine them running around in a hurry to get to their important business meetings, possibly wearing hats.

Is God right- or left-handed?  Is heaven one long church service?  If God didn’t exist, would we still invent him to make ourselves feel better?  Since God is omnipresent, does he feel trapped in a box that is the universe? Does God ever feel like he’s going crazy because of all the voices in his head?  Does God like being American?  Surely our view of God is super one-dimensional, and probably inaccurate, right?  So why do we feel the need to defend that version of God?  

Is there really only one God or did God just TELL us there’s only one god so he wouldn’t have to compete for our attention?  Why is God a jealous god if he’s the only god?  Etc. 

I have several more pages of questions.  This is a very small sample size of the questions I’ve thought about for more than a few minutes each.  I have mixed feelings about the time I’ve spent pondering such things.

Heaven doesn’t sound like an ideal place to spend forever

This is a super bummer thing to contemplate.  Heaven sounds exhausting.  Imagine being in heaven.  After trillions and trillions of years praising God, we glance down at our watch and notice the time says 9:46am and our worshipping God church service started at 9:45am.  You can’t escape.  Heaven is in full swing and you made the cut.  That’s the GOOD option of option one.

Or, maybe you can escape.  Maybe eventually everyone gets thrown out of heaven for some infraction or another.  I’ve always thought you can’t really get kicked out of heaven, but apparently Satan did.  What if we did the same thing he did?  After trillions of years, what if we forgot that we weren’t just like God and tried to be equal to him?  It seems like, if you CAN’T escape hell, but in certain situations CAN get kicked out of heaven, on a long enough timeline everyone would end up in hell.

Hell is probably worse

Are you still reading?  You’re a real trooper.  The bad option in option one is we end up on the wrong side of whatever deity we believe in.  Hell sounds upsetting and not ideal for many reasons, like being held upside down and having our feet tickled or poked for eternity. The good news of the bad option is our view of hell doesn’t actually come from the Bible, but from a very dickish book called Dante’s Inferno.

The Bible does say there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, but doesn’t mention all the torture we normally think of when we think of hell.  Still, being as though heaven is the reward, I can’t imagine hell is a day of ice cream cones and ice skating.

Hell will have all the drugs, sex, and rock n roll though, so…

Fortunately, being cast into heaven or hell isn’t our only possible way of spending eternity.  Unfortunately, the next three possibilities aren’t super great either.

Option two- Humanity finds a way to thwart death and exist forever on Earth, and probably eventually the other planets.

If science keeps doing its thing, I think we’ll eventually be able to cure aging, and even reverse death.  Once that happens, we’d more or less be able to live indefinitely.  That is, unless something catastrophic happens to us, either individually or collectively.

Maybe at that point in time we’re not so much a physical species anyway.  At that point we might be entirely digital or living in some sort of simulation.

Side note:  How do we know we're not already there?

I think living forever on Earth, and eventually in space in general, would be pretty fun for a long time.  We’d either find ways to move faster than light or we’d find ways to pause our lives while we traveled around from planet to planet.  Maybe both.  The trip to a new solar system would be pretty rough though before we figured out how to do that.

There’s a lot I’d like to see.  I imagine even this would grow old after you’ve lived for a few millennia.

There are a lot of downsides to this possibility.

Downside one- We’ll always wonder if we’re missing out on the traditional heaven/hell afterlife.

It’s kind of a weird thought but, once we’re able to manipulate how long we can live, we’ll have to wrestle with the idea that we might just be delaying our entrance into heaven.  Despite being a super long church service, maybe heaven is actually incredibly awesome.  All our ancestors are having the time of their lives (afterlives?) and we’re stuck in human existence like a bunch of idiots.

Downside two- We’ll either exist with the same partners for millions and millions of years, or we’ll have to eventually say goodbye to them.

Break-ups are hard.  I can’t imagine how hard a break-up would be if you’d been with that person for several thousand years.  The current divorce rate is right around 50% so I’m not sure how many couples would be able to keep it together indefinitely if human lives didn’t have a finite end date.  How would you know when it was time to split galaxies with the love of your life?

I’m sorry I put this section in. I just got really sad.

Downside three- You’d have to eventually kill yourself

Aren’t you glad you’re taking this journey down the rabbit hole with me?  Assuming humans have figured out how to live indefinitely, we’d have to kill ourselves to end the cycle.  This creates a real conundrum if you are the religious type who feels suicide is a sin and puts you on thin ice with God.

You might think in this case you wouldn’t be killing yourself but, if technology gets to the point that it can revive you no matter what, then you’d have to make the conscious choice that you don’t want to be revived.  While this isn’t exactly suicide, it does present a gray area.

Something to think about.  <–It’s actually not.  This is something you don’t need to spend any time at all thinking about.

There are probably a lot of other downsides, but let’s move on.

Option three- We cease to exist, also forever.  

So maybe we won’t ever get to the point where we can live indefinitely, and maybe humans made up the concept of religion, God, heaven, and hell, to help us cope with the possibility that after we die nothing happens.  We already pretty much agree that all religions, except our own, are false.  All it would take for us to not exist forever is for one more religion to be made up.  In that case, option three comes into play:  Once we die, we cease to exist, forever.

This option is kind of like being awake during major surgery.  It would be absolutely terrifying if we knew what was going on.  Ceasing to exist forever is not a huge deal because we aren’t conscious for it, but man, imagine KNOWING that that was happening.

We’ve all been there, not existing throughout all of eternity.  I’m quite upset about it when I really think about how long I stayed non-existent before now.  I mean, I assume that’s what happened, but maybe not.

Option Four- We’re Already IN Eternity 

Sometimes I imagine we’ve always existed and are already in eternity.  Maybe religion, heaven and hell, aren’t what happens after we die.  Maybe it’s something else entirely that we can’t understand with our human monkey brains.

Every once in a while we get on the amusement park ride that is life on Earth.  I’m sure we’d get bored of hanging out being eternal all the time and would want to forget all about it and experience a finite life.  For sure we’d want to do that.

How many solar systems could you watch be born, exist, and die?  How many universes could come and go before you eventually got bored of the whole thing?  If that were the case, someone would for sure suggest building some sort of ride where you got to have a finite existence.

Of course part of the ride would have to be removing the knowledge that you actually have been around for trillions of years.  Otherwise, what’s the fun?

But, maybe we don’t get to take the Life is Finite amusement park ride.  Maybe life really is finite and this isn’t a ride at all.  Maybe, this is all there is.

Something Something Life Message

This is the section where I bring my ramblings into some type of useful message.  I’ll be winging this next section as I really just wanted to write about existence and the idea of forever, regardless of what life lessons could be gleaned from it.

First takeaway- Don’t spend your life hoarding money.

I guess, no matter what option comes into play you should save your money to the point that the juice is worth the squeeze.  Humans aren’t likely to conquer death in the next few decades, so even if option two eventually becomes the norm, it probably won’t help you.  So, most likely, you’re going to die.  You can’t take your portfolio with you, so don’t waste your life hoarding money.

Normally this isn’t something even worth mentioning since most people don’t even save money, much less hoard it.  However, since this is theoretically a financial independence blog, people who read it are either a) related to Mr. Burrito Bowl or b) interested in financial independence.

If b, then you’re probably already into saving money and are closer on the spectrum to potential money hoarder than your average American.

Second takeaway- No matter what, we might just be in for a very long next several trillion years.

Whether we exist or don’t exist, the next several trillion years will happen in some form or another.  It’s going to take a long time and you’re going to either be there for it or not, but the time will be the same.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

Third takeaway- Don’t worry so much about the future.

Whatever will happen will happen whether you worry about it or not.  Don’t suffer twice.  Let life happen to you and enjoy the ride.  It would be silly to go on a rollercoaster and spend the entire ride bemoaning the fact that the ride will end.

Do your best to live in the moment.  Enjoy every dip and turn for what it is, because it might only happen once (unless option four turns out to be true). We’re all going to die.  This rollercoaster of life is going to end sooner than we think, so enjoy the trip for what it is.

If you enjoyed this article, or shoot, if you managed to read it until the very end, please share it with your friends and enemies. Or, don’t share it if you hate my philosophical ramblings. I WILL for sure keep writing them so you may as well drink the kool-aid and start liking them.  

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