Everyone Dies at the Same Time

A non-religious perspective on the probability of reincarnation.

When we imagine dying, one of the hardest things is how the world seems like it will go on without us.

We’ll never get to see our kids grow any older, or help them through the trials they’ll face.

We’ll never get to see if good triumphs over evil. We’ll never get to see what our friends accomplish

or what we would have accomplished, or feel all the pleasure and pain and surrender and happiness we would have felt.

The world will go on without us, and eventually everyone will forget we were ever even here.

Death makes life seem like a party we attend only briefly and always have to leave early due to some cruelly strict curfew.

It’s knowing the party will go on all night, and that before it’s over no one will remember we attended;

it’s the fear of missing out on everything that could possibly mean anything that we feel when we feel terrified of death;

but the terror is misplaced. There’s probably some evolutionary reason to feel it,

so we fight harder to live, so we run faster through the savanna when chased by a saber-toothed tiger, or whatever;

but the terror is misplaced because it fundamentally mistakes how time actually works.

Once you die, you’re not only gone, but for you, there is no more passage of time.

One second after you die is the exact same moment as ten seconds after you die, or ten years after you die, or ten million years after you die.

One second after you die is the exact same moment as ten billion years after you die, or ten trillion years after you die, etc.

Because of this, when you die, you literally arrive at the end of time, and you don’t arrive there alone.

You arrive with everyone who has already died and who will ever die.

All in the blink of an eye, the lives of every living thing zoom all the way to the end of everything.

Sure, on Earth time probably “keeps going” at the ordinary pace, but for the dead beyond the veil where time no longer passes,

all of time ends in an instant, and whatever is destined to happen at the very end of time,

will also happen in that instant.

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Some say the universe, which is expanding, when it reaches its limit, will begin to contract.

They say it will eventually contract to a single point, when it will become infinitely dense before bursting outward again, recreating itself.

The interesting news for the dead is that, once the universe starts over, it may cycle through endless iterations

of what came before: a Big Bang propelling an outward whoosh that lasts billions of years,

followed by an inward whoosh that lasts billions more, followed by another outward whoosh, an inward whoosh, over and over

with all of time revisited repeatedly with slight variation, great variation, or no variation at all.

No one knows how much variation the universe exhibits in each of its subsequent or previous iterations.

No one knows if the iteration we’re in is the first or the last of many, the one and only, or a random one in a series with no beginning or end.

All we know is that all of these cycles, however many exist, elapse completely in the instant

immediately following your final breath on Earth.

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Reincarnation is just as plausible as anything else. What if the moment you die

the universe fulfills its natural cycle of expansion and contraction, over and over,

a nearly infinite number of times until the exact same circumstances that led to you being you

are arrived at once more, and you’re reborn as yourself. Improbable as it may seem,

I can’t think of why it wouldn’t happen eventually. The good news for the living

who find themselves more troubled by death than life

is that the inconceivable amount of time that it would take for the universe to recycle itself

enough times until you were eventually reborn exactly as you are now, is only an instant.

It may even be true that there’s only a hiccup of an instant in which we’re dead at all.

Instead of huge chasms of nothingness winging outward from either edge of life, the first we plunge out of

abruptly the moment we’re born, and the second we plunge into forever the moment we die,

perhaps death is just the narrowest sliver of quiet squeezed between innumerable noisy lifetimes

like single black frame linking the end of one movie with the beginning of the same movie immediately restarting,

a frame so brief you’re guaranteed to miss it.