What If?
Even though this work is my own, the idea of writing an afterlife narrative is not. Read Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlife by David Eagleman to read similar works by the man who actually conceived this brilliant template. I have introduced one additional idea here which I think is generally absent from Eagleman’s work. Can you spot it?
In the afterlife, you get to realize one what-if from your actual life and live the life which would have resulted as a consequence. You only get to pick one so choose wisely. On the other hand, nothing is off-limits, except immortality of course.
What if you were born with an IQ of 180?
What if you were born in a family and community deeply steeped into music, thus picking up the guitar at a very young age?
Maybe in your real life you were a smart woman born into a regressive, patriarchal society and always felt that your true potential remained tragically dormant. What if you were born into a progressive society where your potential would be identified and encouraged?
You get to choose one of these what-ifs, whichever you feel is crucial enough for you, and live that life. After-life is truly your chance to live the perfect life by undoing what stopped you from getting there in the first place. If you are imaginative enough with your choice, the life you actually lived could seem embarrassingly unrealised in comparison.
Of course, a lot of us are not so imaginative — many merely choose enhanced physical beauty. They choose to be a version of themselves who is taller, has broader shoulders, bluer eyes, wider hips et cetera. The underlying motivation for this was probably to live a life with a greater quantity and quality of sexual partners. And they do get that. But, it does not make the after-life perfect. Because seducing someone is too easy for them, they can find themselves with a new lover almost at a whim. And that robs it of meaning. Because sex is so available to them, it loses its allure and begins to feel empty. Because they have so many options, they cannot fathom sticking with the same person through thick and thin. Therefore, they live their after-lives drifting through lovers and yearning for true love.
Another lot chooses money. They wish to be born into a rich family instead of a middle-class one. Indeed this gives them an enviable childhood — they’re picked up after school in a BMW which then drops them to the best swimming club of town. Extremely capable chefs arrange their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, striking the perfect balance of nutrition, delicacy, and variety. They not only have their pleasantly stress-free mothers but an army of maids fussing over them. Unfortunately, this robs them of a basic ingredient of human evolution — meaningful challenges. Their families never pressured them to do great in school. The abundance of pleasures denied them the tolerance for boredom and frustration. Therefore, even their natural inclinations and curiosities do not evolve beyond casual hobbies. They grow up to be connoisseurs of great things but never their creator. They live their after-lives collecting rare paintings while being majestically tortured by the lack of their morning coffee.
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Others, however, are imaginative in their wishes — someone chose a high IQ and was reborn as a wonder kid, eliciting gasps from adults at his intensely sharp intelligence. He thunder rolled his way through puberty and grad-school at the same time, establishing himself as the most promising physicist of the generation. One who will bring general relativity and quantum mechanics into coherence. The one born into a musical family indeed picked up the guitar at the age of 3 and by the age of nineteen, was dubbed as the scariest guitarist alive. The smart lady who was now born in a progressive society went on to pick a career in cancer research and set herself as the leading figure of the field.
And yet, somehow, the perfect life kept eluding everyone, no matter how imaginative their choices. The physicist solved the deepest mysteries of the universe and became the most exciting person in theoretical physics of that decade. Engineering took over and turned that into energy harnessing machines beyond anyone’s wildest fantasies. But, there were no new problems for the physicist to solve. Over time, he turns into a has-been, taking solitary walks on university grounds. Incapable of being truly useful anymore, through no fault of his own.
The guitarist enjoyed many decades of being hailed the GOAT — greatest of all time. Top composers and musicians would reach out to collaborate with him. He kept traveling and touring all his life, never settling in one place or community for too long. He would play trailblazing show after trailblazing show and move on to the next project. Groups of old friends or lifelong lovers would excitedly remember the one time they all saw the GOAT perform live. Our guitarist’s mighty virtuosity fuelling so many shared stories. His own sunsets, however, were often coloured with a deep yearning for lifelong love and friendship.
The lady with an illustrious career in cancer research could never bring herself to channelise her energy into building a family, even though she at times felt the pull. Her career was always too promising to lose priority. When she went to parks, watching another woman being adored by her kids stirred a deep something within her. Something like nostalgia for what she never had.
In this way, almost everyone’s afterlife was in essence the same as their real lives. The details had changed but the patterns of joys, sorrows, and yearning for something different somehow kept emerging again and again, afterlife after afterlife.
There were a few exceptions to this pattern. People who had spent their lives trying to understand the mind, wondered something unique -
What if I was born free of desire?
The architect of this afterlife smiled begrudgingly at this one. But it had to be done. Parameters were tweaked and these uniquely imaginative ones were reborn into the afterlife, their minds free of desire in every possible interpretation. Because they were not clouded with a desire of the way the world should be, they could see the world exactly for what it is. Because they were free of the desire to have a stable, un-conflicted self-narrative, both good and bad experiences passed their minds like images on a mirror, without affecting or distorting it. This fundamental wisdom interacted with the natural curiosities of each one of them in unique ways and set off different life trajectories. Some became hermits, living in complete harmony with nature. Others became artists, merely for the sake of art. Others lived an ordinary life deceptively similar to the ones fraught with yearnings and seeking, but enjoying its humble pleasures to the fullest and casually shrugging off its ultimately inconsequential anxieties. Ultimately, there was one common thread binding them all in their afterlives.
They were truly free.
