I’m sure I could get a lot more interested in the after life if I could come up with some appealing notion of what I’ll actually be doing through eternity. Eternal bliss sounds eternally boring. Absent a physical body, playing tennis or golf, boating, eating (no mouth or stomach), reading (no eyes), traveling, playing bridge, having sex and playing with the grandchildren will not be possible. Cruising the Internet seems undoable, as does anything that’s not totally passive. That leaves watching movies and TV (whoops – no eyes), and possibly reflecting on the creator as the only possible pass times. But those aren’t my favorite things even now, so how appealing will they be in 50 million or 50 billion years?
Anyhow, the Sun will explode taking with it our entire solar system in about 4 billion more years. If my DNA continues, I’ll presumably have several million relatives to talk to in the great beyond by then, but will we have anything in common? Will they seek revenge for their baldness? It’s tempting to believe that all of today’s most urgent issues will seem trivial to them, so what would we talk about?
I won’t be able to fill my time worrying about things, since there’s nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no existential quandaries to unravel, no bills to pay, no disagreements with anybody about anything. By now it must be obvious that my knowledge of the after life is nil. The only thing I’m certain about is that my own understanding is at least equivalent to the combined knowledge of the Pope, the leaders of all Protestant sects, the mightiest ayatollah, the most brilliant rabbi, and Tom Cruise. However, some of my detractors are so unkind as to suggest that the problems I’ve laid out here are not issues that I will have to deal with.
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