I find it so weird that someone dying is considered to be them being in a supposedly better place now.
I can think of maybe two reasons for it: 1) the world is fucked up and perhaps it's hope for someone to think that what lies after death is a better, more beautiful world and 2) we're just really scared of death and perhaps there's some comfort in thinking of death being a guide to a paradise since that makes the thought of the beyond a lot less scary.
Thoughts?
my impulse thought to this is "it's just cope." and i think that actually hits both of those reasons! but i think i mean it in a fun third way: 3) people don't mean anything by it, and merely by asking you've put more thought into it than they really have.
the fun third way is super common because we've really just eroded all meaning from life over time as our economic system feeds off of and perpetuates humanity's worst impulses, but it's also boring because "the erosion of all meaning" implies a, uh, lack of meaning. (at least in the context of this question. i think that the idea that "there is no meaning, only control" is super interesting and is the guiding ideal of modern society--it's just not what you asked.)
okay, we're scratching that. this is actually just super interesting. i think the angle of it is a liiiiittle bit tangential from what you're asking, but it's not tangential from where it started: someone else's idea of what death is. (my thoughts are also a bit of a flurry today, so i'm leaving the workshopping in.)
their idea is fundamentally boring because they are just saying it. it doesn't matter to them because nothing matters to them. to them, life and death are just presumed. you wake up, do what you can to perpetuate the cycle, and then you leave, (hopefully) satisfied with whatever you have done to perpetuate the cycle. after all, neither life nor death matter. through money, you can live forever. we live in the most boring fucking death cult imaginable, fixated on life and death as simple things that merely happen en route to the accumulation of wealth. everything else on that path is just cope.
but, uh, i think i'm getting off-track.
they say a thing, and we don't believe them. but i'm going to try and assume that they at least mean what they're saying now--"it's just cope" implies that they don't. it's a belief, right-- it's what you hit when you don't have evidence. from that frame, i don't think i like 2) a lot--fear doesn't really make for the basis of a good belief system. 2) and 3) aren't really so different, but at least the death cults you make out of 2 are fun. 1) at least kind of has a sense of a reason to keep living built in--there's something else for you out there--but it also kind of doesn't work without, y'know, a different force that keeps you living.
but at the end of the day, all of these kind of still imply that you're not thinking about death. so i think at the end of the day, it all just comes down to cope. it's a way to stop thinking about the thing.
