Sebastian Junger

In fact, why don't you just kill yourself right now and just get on to it because that's when the good part starts.

It would ruin what life is.

It would strip it of value.

On the other hand –

Like the two other guys in Dostoevsky's group of friends, if we could prove, like literally prove scientifically that there is no afterlife, and you can't prove a negative, but somehow if we could prove there was no afterlife whatsoever, we're biological beings.

When we die, that's it.

We rot.

We return to the soil.

That's it.

Done.

If we could prove that, that might be so psychologically devastating that it would be actually quite hard to lead a meaningful life because in your mind you're thinking, well, what's the frigging point?

Right.

So where we're at right now, there's the perfect level of ambiguity.

that there's not such a proof of afterlife that why bother leading our lives, but there's also not such a doubt about it that it's psychologically devastating.

We're in this sweet spot, which allows us to sort of invest maximum meaning in the least amount of psychological distress in these decades that we're allotted.

So in a weird way, where we're at right now is to sort of tune perfectly to the human brain for giving the maximum amount of meaning to this time that we have here on Earth.

And if you go in the extreme of either direction of absolute certainty that there is an afterlife or is no afterlife, if you go to that extreme, it actually just robs us of what we do know for sure that we have, which is this life right now.

Yeah.

And the reason Karl Marx hated religion is because basically the peasant class had been told, listen, don't worry about it.

Your lot sucks, right?