Don’t Believe in Heaven (If You Want to Be Happy on Earth)

May 7, 2022 — Heaven may seem comforting, but believing in the next life can make you take this one for granted.

I’ve never been a religious person, but the one thing that’s appealed to me is the idea of heaven.

Especially after my grandparents died, I started to feel a sense of dread about losing friends and family and never getting to see them again…

…so I hung onto the hope that there might be some sort of afterlife, and for years the filename of my existential package read (awkwardly): “Atheism+Heaven.zip.”

The problem was, I didn’t believe in heaven.

There were too many logistical conflicts (i.e. “How can good exist in a place with no evil?), and my brain just couldn’t leave them alone.

The more threads I pulled, the more heaven unravelled, until I was left naked with nothing but life on Earth.

Hack: Bet on Earth

Even after I stopped believing in the afterlife, I still felt attached to the idea of it.—but over time the perks started to fade.

For example, eternal bliss seems great, until you consider the actual timeline.

I mean, how many millions of years can you spend stuffing transcendent experiences into your soul before everything starts to feel kind of…pointless?

The truth is, urgency creates meaning, because if something lasts forever, there’s no rush to enjoy it.

So, strange as it sounds, I’m glad to die.

I wake up every day and do the things I love with the humans I care about…and what more could I want?

I’ve already hit the jackpot.

Don’t bet on the afterlife. Odds are, Earth was just heaven all along.

p.s. If you liked this story, you can find more comics and video guides on Instagram @fthelines and on YouTube, or subscribe to get new articles in your inbox whenever I publish. Thanks for reading! — Andrew (: