hai..! welcome back to another sophiepost. this will describe what i've been up to as well as thoughts ive been having about what happens when people die. actually the second thing is probably more interesting than the first so i'll put that first so if you send this to like your coworkers or aunt and uncle then they can read that without getting bored. ok? ok here it is.
i was driving one day and got really scared because i was like "what if hell is REAL?!?" but not like the christian hell or anything but more general than that, like the concept of "a state of consciousness that sucks really bad forever." i was thinking something along the lines of "every pain receptor is asserted forever. like 'hell' isnt even creative or anything with its torture, it just activates all the stuff that gives you pain so you feel all kinds of pain for the rest of time." some groups of people might respond to this by Praying It Doesnt Happen To Them and Being Especially Virtuous So They Dont Get Sent To The Bad Place, but this assumes theres even such a concept of a not-bad-place like heaven.
like, humans are only alive for around 80 years. can you imagine being sent to a world and forced to live there FOREVER? that sucks! like, it would take you at most 100 years to experience the fullness of the world in its current state, if you really appreciated every rock and stone path you walked on in each and every city of the world. you can bump that number up to like 200 years if you decided to Work instead of just vacationing in each location (so when you visit japan you decide to work a few representative jobs there before traveling to the next place). accounting for the fact that locations change over time (so visiting japan now is different from visiting it in 50 years), we might extend this number even further. but like, at what point does it all become boring? any person who travels nowadays would attest that the american-big-city is like 80% the same place as the england-big-city, so you cant get THAT much variety and interest. whatever way you might propose to make this more interesting in the long-run would get counteracted by supposing "you would still get bored [your number times two] years in the future, though." so ETERNITY is just impossibly boring.
my main thesis here is that "heaven looks indistinguishable from hell if you go a million years into the future." it doesnt matter if all your pain receptors are being asserted all the time, or if youre free to do whatever you want forever; at the end of a million years, youre going to want to wish you stopped experiencing anything in general. this leads us to a better interpretation that "hell is anything that has experiences, heaven is a place with no experiences," but it still supposes that these concepts even make sense in the first place.., which we can still argue with a little further.!
ok so the next big idea here is "why does any of this make sense at all."
- Sophie