This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.
There is an Afterlife, but it’s not what you expect…
In this Afterlife, you enjoy the rest of eternity without worrying about scarcity of any sort. You have as much money, time, and energy as you need to do whatever you please—provided that what you want to do is something you’ve done already. In the Afterlife, you can only do things you’ve done in your previous life, with the people you knew in your previous life, but as many times as you want, for as long as you want.
The Living, unbeknownst to you, are Experience Collectors. As we were once, you are granted a generous century to fill with any number of experiences and people for you to enjoy for the rest of your posthumous life. Every stranger you friend, every new experience, every new piece of knowledge… you collect them into your lifetime. Once you die, you’ll be reborn into an Afterlife populated exactly and only with the things in your Experience Collection. This is how I arrived where I am today.
We didn’t know this when we first arrived Here.
The first generation of souls to arrive reveled in the surplus and familiarity. We enjoyed living the lives we were used to for decades longer without worry. We lived in the same homes, enjoyed the same meals, and occasionally visited their old acquaintances in the periphery of their living memories. But decades passed, and we felt something was off.
There was nothing new happening. Nothing new to try, nowhere new to go. The restaurant menus were washed out with blank spaces hiding listings of dishes we would never taste. There were no new strangers on the streets or walking the park. There are films and books and songs here, but only the ones we’ve heard before.
It took us many decades to notice this, because most of us rarely ventured outside of our usual paths. We would occasionally note how the streets were emptier or life felt more boring, but only recently did we piece together the details. Immediately, we got to work looking for a way to warn the souls fortunate enough to roam our erstwhile worlds of novelty and possibility.
If this message reaches you, it will mark my world’s first invention – a way to speak to the Living. If this works, that gives us hope that it may be possible for us to discover and make new things again. Find new roads to take, new people to tell us new stories, new flavors and songs to wash over our senses. We are getting to work promptly.
In the meantime, if you are alive, remember the power you have today, to do new things and meet new people. To be entertained by new stories and delighted by new ideas. Collect them diligently into your life. The immensity of your freedom may be overwhelming, but the mundanity of familiarity is crushing.
There are no caveats in our story. Only hindsight. We look forward to hearing your stories when you join us in your next life.