One of the greatest mysteries that continues to elude us is what happens when we die.
Many religions and spiritual belief systems believe in life after death–that one's passing is merely but a transition into the next realm of existence.
Are we immediately reborn? Do we go to TheGood Place?
People shared their various thoughts and ideas when Redditor throwawayacctlmaooo asked:
"What do you legitimately believe happens after we die?"
Not having a clue what happens was a common response, and some quoted literature or movies to convey what they thought did the concept justice.
Uncertainty
"I don't know and that's mostly okay by me. Sometimes I stress about it because I enjoy my life right now and I'd like to keep it, but other times I realize there's a lot we don't know about existence. It's kind of weird to see living things blip in and out of existence for what is, ultimately, such a short time."
"People have long since said that children tend to reference memories that couldn't be theirs. There are countless stories of older people seeing people before their passing. Many people cite having dreams or waking nightmares about loved ones passing suddenly even though they had no idea death was imminent."
"In my humble opinion, if there's more to life than our current, we'll find out when we get there. If not, I suppose it won't hurt us either way. We just need to remember to enjoy the good times as much as we can so when the time comes, there's no regrets."
– tehnutmeg
A Quote Describes It Best
"No idea, but there is this quote from the TV show 'The Good Place' that I really like and have found comfort in."
'Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.'
'And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.'
– AlexEvenstar
Words Of Wisdom From LOTR
"Gandalf to Pipin:"
"PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way."
"GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it."
"PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?"
"GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise."
"PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad."
"GANDALF: No. No, it isn't."
– DiabeticDave1
A Poignant Novel
"I was forced to read a book called 'Tuesday's with Morrie' in my english class. I hated it, because I was forced to read it, despite it being a great book."
"Anyway, somewhere in the book that i forgot, there's this quote, a joke I guess."
"The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air-until henotices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. 'My God, this is terrible,' the wave says. 'Look what's going to happen to me!'"
"Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, "Why do you look so sad?' The first wave says, 'You don't understand! We're all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn't it terrible?'"
"The second wave says, 'No, you don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean.'”
"Anyway, I thought it related. And read 'Tuesday's with Morrie', it's good!"
People found peace in accepting non-existence.
State Of Not Being
"Just like before you were born. Not good, not bad, just non existence."
– SniffCheck
"In the great words of Mark Twain:"
'I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.'
– Eva__Unit__02
Not Dreaming
"It’s basically being unconscious and not dreaming. I find it comforting."
– UncleRooku87
Life Goes On Without Us
"Almost everything continues like it did before we died. It’s not that the party is going to end, it’s that we must leave and the party will go on without us."
"But your question is probably about what will we personally experience after death..There will simply be no more me to experience anything, just like there was no me before I was born."
– Bilbo_Fraggins
A perpetual existence through transformation or rebirth was another idea that brought comfort.
Transference
"Our energy — just like that of every living thing before us — will go on and become new things. Soil. Plants. Lions. Toilet paper. Space ship wheel arches. Dragon fly toes. We're all just part of the same system. Neither manufactured nor destroyed. We're just transferring that bestowed upon us from all those before. Death is life."
– four__beasts
A Father's Poem
"My dad wrote a poem a few days before he died that basically said this - i don't have it with me and it was much more poetic, but it basically said 'i died a star and was born a planet, I died a bird and was born a seed, why should I be scared of dying rather than excited to be born again?'"
"At some point I want to get it tattooed (he died in 2020)"
– ermagerditssuperman
Interbeings
"I like how Thich Nhat Hanh taught it (paraphrasing here): We have our human ancestors. We also have vegetable ancestors, mineral ancestors, animal ancestors. All of these things exist within each other, the philosophy of interbeing."
"The vegetables you eat don't cease to exist, they become part of you."
"Just yesterday I laid my 4-legged best friend to rest. Instead of cremation or burial, he was laid down surrounded by flowers (he was a squirrel I had raised, so a small animal). Another creature likely already came along, whether a coyote, vulture, hawk, or any other such animals we have around here. He will live on in another form."
– SuperflyX13
A Fresh Start
"i'd like to think we reset like a game and we could choose weather we get reborn or go to some sort of heaven or something."
– No_But_Yes_
According To Calculations...
"I'm under the impression that death is a separate experience we can't comprehend. Like someone with vision will never truly know the concept of blindness or someone with hearing will never know the concept of deafness."
"You only experience it while you're doing it and I am currently experiencing being alive as a human. You don't know what it was like before you were born because you're obviously alive. Just like you don't know deafness because your ears work."
"Beyond that, I believe the universe is in endless million-trillion year long cycles of growth and collapse and the fact that I exist at all means, throughout infinity, I am a guaranteed mathematic outcome and must repeat again."
"If you have infinite space, infinite time, and infinite possibilities, everything will repeat eventually. If you have infinite space, infinite time, but limited possibilities, what currently exists is a possibility and must repeat eventually. If you have limited space, but infinite time, and limited possibilities, what currently exists is a possibility and must repeat eventually. I don't believe a combination of limited space, limited time, and limited possibilities even exists but if it does I believe that means the limited time, space, and possibilities is contained within something and must always exist, meaning this world always exists as if a point on a graph."
"In the time between I think it's possible for atoms and particles that once made my brain to periodically reunite for small periods of time meaning that my memories will echo for eternity. Potentially, if mixed with other memories, or reuniting in someone else's brain, fragments of me exist for all time in varying degrees of sentience and lucidity."
"I find something as simple as 'God' or even 'Nothing' to be too limiting to be accurate. I feel like 'nothing' is just one out of an unimaginable number of possibilities. To claim to know one single answer out of infinity is ridiculous - and that extends to people who thoroughly believe in any religion. 'Religion' and 'Nothing' are two explanations out of infinity and neither are likely to be true by that ratio."
"I also think it's a little silly to suggest that there're no elements at play in regards to the universe, consciousness, and sentience that might escape human comprehension or scientific observable measurement. We're limited by our technology and our own minds and to think that humans have (or even can) unlock the secrets to everything is foolish. I absolutely believe that the universe works in ways which can't, and never can, be measured."
– bermudalily
The length of our journeys on this planet varies, but we all inevitably wind up making a departure towards the unknown.
The idea is frightening to some, while others accept the unknown and find peace in what lies ahead on the other side.
Wherever that may be, I hope it's a place where our energies reunite with the memories of those with whom we traveled closely as passengers on planet earth.
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Unlike introverts who tend to shy away from engaging in random discussions, those who are comfortable–or too comfortable–in their own skin love to get all chatty.
That doesn't mean they have anything significant to say.
"What’s the weirdest thing someone casually told you as if it were totally normal?"
People whom you don't know tend to overshare as these Redditors experienced.
A High Request
"A story from a friend - in Colorado, someone once asked, 'Could you watch my wolves, I can pay you in weed.'"
"There's a lot to unpack in that question!"
– surlymoe
"You don't unpack wolves, you keep them together."
– hwarang_
Unsolicited Prediction
"Husband (30) and I were pushing our shopping cart out of the grocery store when a random man (who honestly looked like dumbledore) looked at my husband and said 'take my hat, you're gonna need it, you'll be bald very soon.' Obviously my husband didn't take it. It was super odd of him to say because my husband had a FULL head of hair."
"Three months later, my husband was diagnosed with a condition that made him lose all of his hair. Weird coincidence."
– hollyjollyaf
Self-Casting
"A guy once told me how he loved the feeling of wearing casts, so he'd put casts on himself- for days or weeks on end. Even if it meant he couldn't drive and would be stuck at home the entire time. He'd use vacation time just to wear full leg & arm casts."
– Present_Dust_2308
Homophobic Homosexual
A homophobic guy I know: 'Being gay is a choice.'"
"I said something like - ok, choose to be gay for a day, an hour, a single minute if you can."
"Guy - That's easy, I'm attracted to men all the time, I just choose to only like girls because I'm not gay."
"Me - Ummm..."
– discostud1515
Longheld Grudge
"Once, an older woman came up to me on the street, took hold of my wrists and simply said 'they ripped out my afterbirth', and then carried on walking."
– JennyW93
"It's strange to grab strangers. But one day in Walmart, my granny walked ahead of me, and reached to grab me to show me something, without looking and she was pulling on an old lady's arm obliviously, and the old lady's eyes were like O.O."
"My grandma didn't even apologize, she just let go and yelled at me to stay closer."
– chzygorditacrnch
A Hairdresser-In-Training
"I was getting my hair done this last weekend by my daughter at her cosmetology school. One of her fellow students was excited to meet me. She talked nonstop and eventually told me that she has hemorrhoids and that she has her husband push them back in. So much TMI from a stranger!"
– Digjam823
You never know about the personal lives of people you see on a regular basis.
Squeaky Clean
"I had a college professor on the first day of class say that she is obsessed with Q-tips and cleaning her ears and that her family has to limit her to 3 a day-"
– lokeilou
Here's The Story...
"That they have 6 kids, all with different dads & each dad is in prison."
– ChyCgx2
"I once had a coworker who had seven kids with five different women and he'd constantly complain about how most of his paycheck went to child support. You uh, dug your own grave, pal. I'm really not sympathetic to your plight."
– apocalypticradish
It's the end of the world as we know it.
End Of Civilization
"I know a guy, we don't talk often but due to business we cross paths on occasion. More or less every time we talk he asks if I'm ready for the total societal collapse coming next week, or Tuesday, or at the end of the month.. and so on."
"I just tell him that it's not gonna happen; he usually then asks about my "crystal ball" so I remind him that I've been right every time."
– rkpjr
Zombie Apocalypse
"I went to a ComicCon type event in my city years ago(Walking Dead was a new show, first season for reference) and went to a panel about zombies. They talked about historical zombie lore, the first zombie movies, and the exciting first season of the new show Walking Dead, with some actors on the panel. When they opened it up to the audience for questions one of the first ones was, 'what kind of zombies do you predict we’ll have in a real zombie apocalypse? (Fast vs slow)'…panelists don’t really know how to answer, each gives their personal favorite or worst case scenario. Then we get to, 'What do you think the timeline is for the start of a coming zombie apocalypse?' Panelists are kind of like….? Talk about how things usually play out fiction."
“'No, but exactly WHEN do you think we’ll need to be fully prepared for zombies in real life?' Like, guys, these are actors and media studies academics, first of all they don’t have the level of belief you do and second, the people you should be asking about this stuff are probably biologists."
– AlternativeAcademia
Whenever I feel threatened by a homeless person who is pressuring me to hand over them cash, I tell them, "I''m allergic to corn."
The random phrase throws them and in the brief moment they assess what they heard I'm afforded more time to distance myself from them.
It always works, especially when they realize I'm all kinds of crazy and not worth targeting.
