Yeah it’s a common thought: An afterlife where people gather before going on to the next.
Usually, people think that the quality of your choices for the next life will be based on whatever criteria they think was most important in life. Someone who went out of their way to be nice will believe that it will be based on how nice you were. Whereas someone who spent their life accumulating money/power will assume it’s based on that.
For all we know, though, your “afterlife score” could be based on how many different sorts of food you tried, how many buttons you pressed, how far you traveled from where you were born, etc.
I actually have a novel idea about this concept: Dude dies and gets the red carpet treatment in the afterlife. He’s very happy about it but he doesn’t understand… He never got married and spent most of his life doing data entry and courtroom steganography.
Turns out, he got the high score in “button pressing.” He’s at the top of the leaderboard and this qualifies him for all sorts of “premium” reincarnation options. Not only that, but the gods intend to put his talents to use right away on “pressing issues.”
I like that idea, that we have no real idea what determines your standings the next time around. I always just figured it was a form of communism (but not in the financial sense, which does not exist in this context) where the goal is to collect all the experiences to “complete” a soul, which then moves onto something else entirely (godhood, perhaps, of another universe or galaxy?). Or maybe if the concept of godhood is hard for one to grasp, the concept of humanity. Maybe we’re not the first step. Maybe you have to go through the lives of various animals and other life. Like you have to have been a good dog a few times. And maybe some plants are even above us, like being a tree. So you would have had to have all these experiences to advance to the next species, or category of species. I dunno.
I do like the idea of it being something random and unexpected though. Seems a bit Douglas Adams — and I’m totally here for that.
Yeah it’s a common thought: An afterlife where people gather before going on to the next.
Usually, people think that the quality of your choices for the next life will be based on whatever criteria they think was most important in life. Someone who went out of their way to be nice will believe that it will be based on how nice you were. Whereas someone who spent their life accumulating money/power will assume it’s based on that.
For all we know, though, your “afterlife score” could be based on how many different sorts of food you tried, how many buttons you pressed, how far you traveled from where you were born, etc.
I actually have a novel idea about this concept: Dude dies and gets the red carpet treatment in the afterlife. He’s very happy about it but he doesn’t understand… He never got married and spent most of his life doing data entry and courtroom steganography.
Turns out, he got the high score in “button pressing.” He’s at the top of the leaderboard and this qualifies him for all sorts of “premium” reincarnation options. Not only that, but the gods intend to put his talents to use right away on “pressing issues.”
I like that idea, that we have no real idea what determines your standings the next time around. I always just figured it was a form of communism (but not in the financial sense, which does not exist in this context) where the goal is to collect all the experiences to “complete” a soul, which then moves onto something else entirely (godhood, perhaps, of another universe or galaxy?). Or maybe if the concept of godhood is hard for one to grasp, the concept of humanity. Maybe we’re not the first step. Maybe you have to go through the lives of various animals and other life. Like you have to have been a good dog a few times. And maybe some plants are even above us, like being a tree. So you would have had to have all these experiences to advance to the next species, or category of species. I dunno.
I do like the idea of it being something random and unexpected though. Seems a bit Douglas Adams — and I’m totally here for that.