Why is everything temporal and temporary? What are your thoughts on the afterlife?

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Temporality is the price we pay for vividness, that quality of experience that allows us to really get into things and enjoy and feel and desire them.

If things couldn’t disappear tomorrow then you wouldn’t have much of an incentive to pay real close attention to them. The things that last the longest in life are the things that you wind up paying the least amount of attention to.

It’s also a challenge to our creative abilities, to make things that will outlast us. For most people, that’s their kids, being a good parent brings loads of great gifts down the line.

In Lord of the Rings, the race that lived the shortest, Men, were destined to inherit Middle-Earth. The societies of the longer-lived races ossified into something that just couldn’t react adequately to threats. You see this in real life, companies that have been around forever just can’t do anything new and fresh until the old management is gone.

Many rich people are starting to leave their children less and less of their fortunes. Something about starting fresh makes for a better quality of life all around. Augustus Caesar lived in a time where it was unconscionable to not leave the throne to Commodus, who was unavoidably totally and irrevocably spoiled from a very early age.

People just don’t value the things they don’t build and make for themselves, and unless the slate gets wiped clean frequently, the things we build wind up boxing us in. Creative destruction is absolutely necessary for everyone. Otherwise nobody really accomplishes anything because it wouldn’t be long before everything gets done, and once someone does something once, nobody has to reinvent it.

In the afterlife there’s a lot more there to manage this state of affairs. With enough time and will, anything is possible, and those two things are limitless in the world outside of time. Augustus couldn’t help matters but the world learned from what happened and rulers started paying closer attention to how they raised royal children. By the High Middle Ages there was a sophisticated culture of regency, the aristocracy copied the royal methods, because rich people had their own inheritance problems, and the legacy lives on in today’s parenting culture.

Everybody, upon death, goes through an elaborate preparation procedure designed to get you ready for eternity. Without it, many of us would be just like Commodus in the afterlife, spoiled and lazy on the endless wonders and magic.

In fact, you can look at this entire existence as the kind of childhood that keeps us from getting too spoiled in the afterlife. We need a world in which we can control things, make something of our own effort, that might end up getting destroyed anyway, before we can really appreciate eternity.