Photo: Avery Evans | Unsplash
Philosopher Sam Scheffler has an interesting thesis: we all believe in an afterlife. But Scheffler’s afterlife is not the personal paradise of the pious. Rather, it’s the simple, but profoundly important belief that other people will live after you. He calls this the “collective afterlife”. As Scheffler writes, “the coming into existence of people we do not know and love matters more to us than our own survival and the survival of the people we do know and love.” We need people we will never know and never meet to exist for critical aspects of our own existence to be meaningful, or even just bearable. In fact, our deepest wells of meaning are critically dependent on this reservoir of belief. When it dries up, the hum of energy that drives even our most mundane routines threatens to dissipate. We are all believers in an afterlife, Scheffler argues, whether we know it or not.
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