Hi,

In a previous thread, a poster asked why some of us yearn for a post-death consciousness. I think that it's a lot more than just consciousness, and I'd like to explain why I hope for an afterlife.

All of us have either been, or will inevitably become, ill, whether psychologically or physically. (Perhaps putting it that way is redundant, and the psychological reduces to the physical.) Illness reduces the quality of life, sometimes causing such pain and suffering as to make the victim wish that they were dead.

I think that yearning for an afterlife involves not only consciousness, but well-being. It's a supreme sense of well-being, a supremely high quality of life, that I think we all yearn for. When we year for an afterlife, we're tacitly acknowledging that we don't hold much hope for conditions improving much for us in this life.

It's possible for many of us to go on for years--even decades--and not face a major illness (again, psychological or physical). In such a case, it would be very difficult to understand what others of us go through. We're biological beings. If one's body (including brain) is letting one down, everything else will quickly collapse, too.

There are circumstances that cause a dramatic plunge in one's well-being. Depression can come out of the blue and rapidly incapacitate a person. Any number of things can emerge rapidly, and destroy one's quality of life. Things can turn on a dime. You just don't know.

Wanting an amazing afterlife is a way of expressing hope that we can escape our suffering in this life and achieve ultimate justice, which invariably means enormous joy and the fulfillment of all of our hopes and deepest, most intense desires. We desperately want The One. We desperately want to never have to work, or worry about money, again. We desperately want to be eternally young and have bombshell bodies that others drool over. We want to surround ourselves with nature and beauty, but never risk being infected with pathogens such as harmful bacteria or viruses. We don't want to deal with conflicting personalities. We don't want to deal with bosses and performance reviews. We want to be taken care of, and not imposed upon. We want meaningful relationships with others.

Many of us don't have many--if any--of these things in our actual lives, and so it's only natural to wish for them, and we then project that into a hypothetical afterlife that we yearn for, knowing fully well that it may be nothing more than a fantasy, or magical thinking. But we yearn for it because it's the only thing that gives us hope to keep living despite enormous obstacles.

We're in a brutal battle against nature, which is cruel--or, rather, apathetic to our suffering. Our bodies evolved through the process of natural selection. They evolved to survive, not to make us feel happy all the time, even though that's exactly what we want. The central problem in life is that there's simply too much suffering and it rarely remits. Sometimes, there's no possibility of it remitting short of dying. And then, if we cease to exist, there would be no one to be grateful that it ended.

We yearn for an afterlife because--although we wouldn't generally put it this way--we hate this life so much. We don't want to slave away at a faceless corporation just to earn enough money to live. We don't want to watch our parents grow old, frail, perhaps senile, take an enormous toll on us emotionally and financially, and then die. We don't want to be gay and alone when we die. We don't want to be diagnosed with inoperable cancer and told that we have months to live, at the age of 40. But these things happen. Children--even babies--die of horrific illnesses. Sociopaths are real. Serial killers murder college students just starting out on their lives. We yearn for an afterlife because we desperately want justice. We want all that's wrong to be put right. We want to know that we won't be ostracized or shunned, or die of a terrible disease, if we're gay and unlucky. We want to know that in the end, we'll be safe, loved, and happy.

Had we been born in Sudan rather than North America, our lives could have been unimaginably worse. The truly frightening realization is that we don't have multiple options. If a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, she can't press the "Hyperspace" button and find herself in another country, in another body, freed from a life-threatening illness. She has to play the awful hand that she's been dealt. Imagine that one of you men reading this post had been born with a certain set of genes that predisposed you to pedophilia, and that you grew into an adult constantly fighting your urges, and possessing an IQ lower than normal. (We know this is the profile of pedophiles based on scientific research.) Nature doesn't care what it "creates," but we do.

We have our cultures, which are templates that we follow. These templates are different types of games, such as board games. One game is "Life," another "Monopoly," another "Scrabble," another "Sorry!" We find meaning in life in the same way that we find meaning in playing a board game: by following the rules and trying to win. Partly, nature defines the rules for the human game through the laws of physics and through the genomes that it endows us with, which enable and constrain various potentialities. And partly, we add rules to the mix. We call these rules "culture," which is an overlay on top of the biological hardware. I stress "overlay," because that word implies that without the hardware, the software wouldn't matter; it wouldn't have anything to run on. It doesn't matter if you want to play "Monopoly" if you don't have the board game, pieces, cards, etc.

There is sometimes--perhaps often--a mismatch between who we are and the board game (culture) that we're born into. For instance, I'm gay, and I was born into a virulently anti-gay culture. This has caused me a great deal of fear and shame, loneliness, anguish, anxiety over the constant threat of rejection, and a sense that my life is meaningless. It feels meaningless because my board piece isn't suited to game play.

In concrete terms, every once in a while, I drive to an enormous bookstore in a large college town. I get some books, sit down, and start reading. Every once in a while, I look up, and invariably see a boy--perhaps 21, 22, 23--and instinctively wait and look for the girl that he's paired with. There always is one. I never, never see a boy and a boy. It's always a boy and a girl. Sometimes there might even be a girl and a girl. But a boy and a boy? Never.

It's hard for me to convey to anyone who isn't gay what effect such alienation from the mainstream culture has. If you're born straight in a culture built for straights, at least you know what's expected of you, and the culture's institutions and values work to help you along your way, which is largely preplanned. A good example of this is the Mormon expectation that a boy grow up, go on a mission, finish college, and get married, in rapid succession. Everything in the Mormon culture is arrayed in such a way as to promote those expectations, and increase the probability that they will be achieved. Gay boys don't have that luxury. Not only do they not have a template designed for them. The heterosexist template that they were born into is, in fact, at deep odds with their own happiness.

While it's true that there are subcultures, nothing can really protect us from the mainstream culture in which we live. We need acceptance. Until we get it, on the whole, I suspect that gay men will struggle, and that our quality of life will be less than what it would be had we been born straight. This isn't invariably true, but I suspect that if you look at group means, it would prove true.

I yearn for an afterlife because my actual life, despite some apparent, minor, successes, has been extremely difficult, lonely, unfulfilling, interrupted with mental and physical illnesses that most people won't have to bear, and precarious. I hope that there will be some ultimate justice, that I'll somehow be compensated for having had a cruel and abusive father with borderline personality disorder, for the perpetual loneliness associated with being gay, for my chronic inability to fit in somewhere and find meaningful relationships, and all sorts of other injustices. I yearn for an afterlife because it's the last great hope that keeps me going. It's a thin, fragile strand of hope to which I hang on to in order to brace myself against the unspeakable cruelty of daily existence as an permanent outsider who is aging--just as we all are. But unlike most of us, I wouldn't be surprised at all if I died alone, and younger than I normally would due to a lack of meaningful social connections (which causes stress and decreases one's life span).

I yearn for an afterlife because what I've gotten in this one--with more than half of it over--has not only not been very good, but rather positively bad. I want to believe that "it gets better," but over four decades of experience leave me with little hope that that's anything but a vain hope.

I've read the responses of those who say that they're satisfied to be remembered by others. I think what they miss is that death involves the dying process. At some point, your body will be overcome by pathogens, a terrible disease process such as a growing arterial blockage, or cancer. Maybe it'll be an accident. Whatever it is, the chances are high that you're not just going to go to sleep peacefully and never wake up again. No.


Death involves a terrible, life-and-death struggle. You might be informed that you're ill. And as you go to the doctor, more and more frequently, the diagnoses will keep piling up until you're told that you have a fatal diagnosis and that there will be no escape. This will be accompanied by growing disability, accompanied by fatigue, vomiting, diarrhea or constipation, and difficulty breathing. You'll be given various drugs with many side-effects, and things will gradually get worse. You'll feel yourself slipping away, seeing how your body is increasingly failing, and this will cause you such terror that you'll experience unremitting panic attacks.

The process of dying will be something akin to being trapped in a room on a ship that's taking on water. You can't escape, and the ship is foundering. More and more water enters. You find yourself clinging to the ceiling, but the water rises, and all of a sudden, there are no more pockets of air. The next time that you attempt to breathe, you will inhale *water*. But you'll continue to live--in agony, fully conscious--for one or two or even three more minutes. You'll feel the terror and pain associated with suffocation. You'll feel the emotional desperation of helplessness and isolation. You'll be shown no mercy. There will be no miracle. You'll know that you're going to die. You'll feel the cold of your body, the involuntary thrashing of muscle spasms, the tachycardia. And then your heart will stop, and within a few seconds, you'll no longer be conscious. What happens to your body at that point won't matter. It will die. It's the process of consciously experiencing dying that's so unimaginably awful. And you--and I--are going to go through it. That's why I'm terrified. That's why if you're not terrified now, you certainly will be when the time comes, which is likely much closer than you dare think. I don't say this to scare you, but to share with you what I've so clearly seen ever since a dangerous illness I had as a 22-year-old. I recovered fully, but one day, something will get us: both you and me. And the worst part of it is that we already know that it's not just we who will die, but the world will go *on* without us.

That's why I yearn for an afterlife. I don't want it to end that way. I don't want to endure a horrifying dying process to have the lights go out permanently at death. I want there to be a tunnel, and a light. I want there to be a post-human life, and immortality. I want to find the love of my life. I want to be happy.

Are these goals only possible in a theoretical afterlife, or are they up to us (at least in part) to achieve--if they can be achieved at all--in this life? The truth is that none of us know what, if anything, will happen to us after death. But we have plenty of evidence that shows that the journey from here to death can be absolutely miserable, and probably will be. I yearn for an afterlife because it seems that what I've longed for most in this life can't be achieved. And it's not to be a multi-millionaire or a GQ model. It's just not to be alone. It's to feel loved, and to be able to love.

As my friend who committed suicide, Doug, told me: "What's most wanted is most denied."

I want to see Douggie again.

Substitute the word "Gay" in my subject line with "Ill," or "Old," or "Afraid," or "Depressed," or "Heartbroken," or "Divorced," or "Terminally Ill," or any of the other descriptions under whose weight we suffer so greatly. Our suffering is the one universal thread that connects not only all of us, but all sentient beings.

I yearn for an afterlife to escape the horror of this one.

Steve

If you do not change the way you act and think, you will have the exact same problem in the afterlife you do in this life. As with this life, it is doubtful that the gays will bend to your ideas of what gays should be.

By what I know of the gay community (being well connected, know lots of gays, been active in the community for decades, able to get dates, etc.) and what I have read from you, your issues with the gay community are all of your own making.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2013 12:16AM by MJ.

Gay philosopher,

As a gay man, I can understand your pain, but there is happiness to be found. What kind of people do you surround yourself with? I feel like your attitude is hugely cynical, and maybe rightly so, although that does not imply you do not have the power to change that.

Sure there are plenty of people who hate us, but there are also people who support us. You can choose to surround yourself with these people. You have to seek these people out. They are out there, and I would encourage you to do so.

Sometimes you just have to put the politics aside, stop thinking about the complexities of a society that clashes. It is okay to sit back and enjoy the simple things in life. It is okay to take a break from trying to change the world, and have fun with that part of the world that apperciates you already. I have read many of your posts, and you are a great and intellegent guy, but I can tell you get bogged down with negative thoughts and ideals. Sometimes you just have to say "fuck it" and enjoy yourself. You cannot make everyone like you.

I do agree with your sentiment of the afterlife, the idea is nice, but you insinuated that as a gay man you feel you have no place here in this world, which leads me to believe you have yet to surround yourself with good people. There are people out there who don't care, and would love to be your friend, you might need to seek them out, but that's okay. You will also find that many of these people do not like to always think about the complexities in life. You should be taking an equal amount of time to appreciate the small things in life. Such as sitting back, tipping back a drink, and talking with a group of friends about the senseless things in life. I have found it is the small pleasures that keep me happy. If I am always focused on the chaos going on in this world I become cynical as well.

Best of luck, I come in piece, just hoping you can feel better.