How Views on Death Affect Everyday Life

What is your relationship to religion and spirituality, especially as it pertains to the afterlife?

Many of us inherited a religion from our parents. This came with rules, rituals, and a general set of beliefs about what it means to be a good person, what the world is and means, and what happens after we die. Some of us remain with those religious traditions as we grow into adulthood, while others move away from them. Even if we move away from organized religion, we all tend to want to believe in something; to have some sense of the meaning of life. There seems to be something about our human nature that attracts us to spirituality, even if spirituality looks very different from person to person.

On one hand, many of the religious worldviews we have inherited here in the West are destination-based: Be a good person in order to have a good afterlife. Be a bad person—which generally means breaking the rules set forth by that God or religion—and you risk an afterlife of eternal damnation.

On the other hand, there are different perspectives that are more widespread in other parts of the world. Many Eastern religions are more based in the here-and-now, where the focus is on being present, becoming intimate with the moment, and learning about the inevitability of change and unpredictability. From these perspectives, the afterlife is often a new lifetime, one in a cycle of endless reincarnations, with the collected karma of your past lives left for you to deal with. In some Eastern traditions, there is no afterlife at all—just this moment.

If we believe that we have only one life and one chance at an afterlife that will be either wonderful or horrible, how does that affect the choices we make each day? If we believe that when we die we are reborn endlessly, with endless chances to learn the lessons of life, knowing that our choices may affect our future lifetimes, what, then, does our day-to-day life look like? What if we believe there is nothing at all after death? Then what do we do with our “one wild and precious life,” to quote the famous poet Mary Oliver?

Ancient Views on the Afterlife

In the Netflix show Kaos, a series of modern retellings of ancient Greek myths, we encounter a people whose belief system is that a good life and a valiant death would be rewarded richly in the afterlife. Some sacrifice themselves willingly to the gods, while others gleefully give themselves up in battle, sure that they will have a chance to return and do it all over again. There is a character who devotes herself so completely to the gods and her idea of the afterlife that she never marries, never experiencing the love and passion that so many of us strive for. Without spoiling the show too much, it turns out the afterlife wasn’t what these people had been sold. It raises the question of how life would have been different with a different understanding of death.

Many ancient cultures all over the world had pantheons of deities who presided over different aspects of life. There was almost always a deity whose sole domain was death, the afterlife, or the underworld. In ancient Mesopotamia, this was Ereshkigal, whose underworld was cold and dark—a place where the dead eat clay as their food and drink dust as their wine. According to Norse mythology, half of the warriors who die valiantly in battle are taken by the goddess Freyja to live in Folkvangr (“the People’s Field”), while the other half are taken by Odin to Valhalla, where they feast and fight until Ragnarok, the end of times. Meanwhile, those who die more mundane deaths go to Helheim to be cared for by the half-dead goddess Hel.

In one Greek myth, the spirit of Achilles is summoned from the underworld by Odysseus, who tells Achilles that he is renowned throughout the world as a great warrior. At his birth, it was prophesied that Achilles could either have a long, mundane life, or a short one filled with valor. The Greek concept of kleos, or glory, was incredibly important to the ancient Greeks, and Achilles chose the short life. But having spent some time in the underworld, Achilles tells Odysseus that he chose wrong. He says, “I’d rather serve as another man’s laborer, as a poor peasant without land and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.” If Achilles had really understood the preciousness of his short time on Earth, he would have held onto that time as long as he possibly could have. The kleos, it turned out, wasn’t worth it.

A Kinder View of the Afterlife

One particular view of the afterlife that may appeal to people is shared by both mediums and people who have had near-death experiences. This perspective asserts that we have many lives to live. Our soul or central self is consistent from one incarnation to the next, trying to learn lessons or have experiences. The “afterlife” is more of an in-between place where souls who have passed over receive healing and non-judgmental learning about the choices they made in that life.

There are some very comforting concepts here, including the idea that the afterlife is not a bad place, even if you made bad choices on Earth. This perspective also suggests that we choose our incarnations, and that our deaths always come at the right time, even if they seem premature. This perspective suggests that there is a benevolent meaning to everything and that the human species is trying to evolve for the better, for the most part.

As you consider your theories about death and the afterlife—whether they were inherited, chosen, or both—what do you notice about how you live your own life according to those beliefs? If you believed something different, would anything change for you? How does your understanding of death affect your life?

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