P154 waited for the holograph machine to finish rendering its coffee cup. Though coffee had no taste, no caffeine, no purpose in this realm, the HSS division of the After Life Processing center had taken to adopting this mundane human ritual into its own break time routines. 

P1665 ambled over, waited for its turn at the holograph. It was dressed up in a suit – as close as one could get to the typical corporate cogwheels that had started showing up with startling regularity. 

“Another office worker huh?” P154 remarked, picking up its coffee cup. 

“25 years at an insurance company. All he wanted to do was see the lives where he spent the least amount of time in the office. Which makes you think, if he hated it THAT much, why stick with it in the first place? I swear, I will never understand how these HSS brains tick.”

P154 gave a short huff of amusement, and walked away with the coffee. Walking past chitters and titters from the processors in the Insect division, it pulled up the next case in its mind, and nearly stopped in its tracks as it read the details. 

This was going to be an interesting one. 

Jip opened his eyes violently, gasping for breath and grabbing his chest, until his brain finally processed the signals from his eyes and ears – that he was no longer sinking to the bottom of a fast flowing cold river. In fact, he seemed to be not moving at all.

“…be joining you shortly, so please wait for a few moments.”

He stood up straight, clinically taking stock of his surroundings. In the shadowed corner, he noticed a woman – tall, but not taller than him, in a powder blue power dress that fit her beautiful curves, and a gorgeous face that looked at him majestically, like a leashed dragon that chose to stay leashed knowing full well it could break away if it wanted, He had been raised by a woman like her, taught at school and at the office by women like her, slept with women like her. He couldn’t stop staring. 

She gave him a smile that said she knew what he was thinking. “Welcome to the After Life Processing Center. I am your Guide, here to help you with your soul-processing today.”

Her words brought him back to the reason he was here. Here, and not in his plush Mercedes with its white leather heated seats, top of the line stereo system, every upgrade the website had available. Here and not reporting to work at 2 am for the third time this week because his asshole of a boss had decided he needed the numbers for the deal crunched THAT night.

“Do you guys have a repair process for irreparably damaged souls? I don’t think I did a day of any activity that one might claim was beneficial to mine.”

P154 was surprised by the note of humility and regret it heard in Jip’s voice – not what it was expecting in a valedictorian, Harvard summa cum laude and Harvard MBA graduate with 8 years at the most prestigious investment bank. Most people would look at him and call him successful, accomplished, yet here he was talking about his irreparably damaged soul. If not in life, in death he was clearly more insightful than most.

“Souls don’t ‘damage’ per se – every life lived has a lesson to learn, so there’s nothing to repair.”

He looked at her for a second longer, then looked around at the cavernous room and giant screen. “So then what am I doing here? Does this process involve watching a training video of some sort?”

“Not exactly. While there’s a lot to learn from one life lived, there’s even more to learn from three. So this is an opportunity for you to see two more lives you could have led. The screen here shows your Life Graph – on the y axis, is your accumulated happiness and on the x axis is your accumulated wealth – and each of the 2.5 millions lines on this graph represent a potential life you could have led, had you made different choices. The one in yellow here is the one you did live.”

A short line at the bottom of the chart, inching a third of the way to the end, glowed yellow in a sea of blue lines flowing in every direction up and to the right.

“Wait, after the millions I earned this lifetime, are you saying that’s still only a third of how rich I could have been?”

P154 pulled out the stock paragraph from topic #3 on the HSS manual’s FAQ list – the Wealth Abstraction.

“Wealth doesn’t represent money alone. It represents anything you earned through hard work – whether it’s money, a skill, a body of work.”

“So, hang on. After all that, THAT is where I landed? That’s the life I lived?” He guffawed a bit maniacally. “That just figures – bust my ass for the most prestigious degrees and jobs, and I get to near 0% on happiness and only 33% on wealth! What in the holy hell did I do wrong? WHAT?? WHY AM I BOTTOM OF THE PILE AFTER DOING EVERY SINGLE THING IN MY LIFE RIGHT???”

Dragon lady listened to his outburst calmly. Fires of hell at her feet couldn’t have fazed her, let alone a raging suited monkey. As he paced up and down the room in anger, he caught a reflection of himself and the Dragon lady, and spotted her dainty calves merging into the floor right where he had expected the Louboutin heels. He was ranting to an ethereal being! The absurdity of it jolted him out of his anger.

“I seriously don’t get it,” he continued more calmly. “I accomplished everything that I was supposed to. Graduating at the top of my class every single time, getting into the top schools, helping to run businesses efficiently that contribute to the growth of the economy – aren’t the smartest people in our society supposed to do exactly these things?”

Dragon lady gave him a small smile and tilted her head ever so slightly. “Do you learn more from doing what you’re supposed to do, or from what you want to do? When you always meet others’ expectations, all you learn is how to MEET expectations. When you do what you WANT to, you learn something new, something no one else has thought, seen, been before. And isn’t THAT the real way to contribute to society, learning, creating and sharing something new?”

Jip was speechless. Did he never think anything new? He went back over his entire life, searching for something, anything that was novel, a pursuit of something deep enough that went to a place no one else had. Studying ethics and philosophy, business case studies, analyzing companies to invest in – all of these tread on covered ground, known territory. Was there not a single moment of something new?  

He came up empty handed. He looked back at the Dragon lady.

She gave him a kind look, “The good news is, even though the you in this life didn’t, the yous in plenty of other lives succeeded. Would you like to take a look at some of them?” She pointed expansively to the life graph.

He looked up once more. “Yes I do. But before we go there, if I am to understand the point of this, this “soul processing” exercise, it would seem purpose of each soul is to maximize wealth in the form of something tangible, something new, and also maximize happiness? I get the point of the former, but what’s the point of the latter?”

Dragon lady gave him a disappointed look. “Come now Jip, you’ve studied enough business case studies and worked with the most successful companies long enough to know the answer to this.”

He paused for a second, before it dawned on him.”…because happier employees are more productive.”

“Bingo. Alright, so let’s get started. What’s the first life you’d like to replay? You can give me any criteria you wish”

Jip stared at the Life Graph more carefully this time. His yellow line seemed to be a part of a thick branch of blues that went sideways and not very far. 

“Is this whole branch of lives where I made some of the same choices? Harvard, Banking?” 

“Yes, with some minor changes in your love life and promotion rates”

“Ok. I want nothing to do with those. How about this branch that seems to go straight up to the top? Can I pick one of them?”

“Sure. One of these was your highest accumulated happiness, though you did not earn as much wealth in it – would you like to see that?”

At his nod, P154 hit play and stepped back to observe. It had a pretty good idea of what was coming. With the high achievers, there was always a fork in the road, an “exit” branch for them early in life that took them on a completely different path that made them much happier. And sure enough, here it came…

“Delilah!” He gasped. “I stayed with Delilah? Wait, did I transfer back to my state college just to be with her? But, my Harvard degree! What job prospects could I possibly have with a state college degree?”

The reel fast forwarded to his state college graduation, there  Jip was, giving the valedictorian speech – after all, the setting had changed, not the person. He joined the local bank and skyrocketed through the organization while also having 3 kids in quick succession. Jip couldn’t believe his eyes – he was letting his middle daughter braid his hair as the youngest burped on his pristine white shirt, and on screen, this carefree version of him he was laughing – LAUGHING – though the whole ordeal. He couldn’t fathom how all of this added up to his highest happiness score.

The reel sped through more scenes of domestic harmony, but slowed on a moment in his office at the bank – branch manager, top of the food chain in the office – as he looked out towards what he knew was East. East was where New York was, and countless times as a kid he had gazed in that direction, feeling sure that a great life awaited him there. On screen, Jip hung his head and muttered to himself, “I could have been so much more out there.”

The reel sped back up again through his kids’ marriages and towards his 85th birthday surrounded by countless grand kids who were in awe of their grandpa’s ability to do three digit multiplications in his head.

As it wrapped, Jip was silent, until he heard Dragon lady ask softly “So did you agree with him? Were you that much more out there?”

Two days ago, Jip would have said yes. He had a penthouse in Manhattan, a Mercedes that most millionaires couldn’t afford, a dizzying track record at work, a gorgeous if slightly shallow girlfriend who worked as an editor for a prestigious magazine. 

But for a long time now, he had felt trapped in a cage of his own making. He had needed that dizzying ascent to keep up the payments on his mortgage and car and girlfriend. He had needed that lifestyle to keep up the illusion of success he had so painstakingly built up over the years. But after the third call to work at 2 am that week, as he got into the car, set his navigation to the office, and started driving through the deserted streets of New York, Jip felt an unbelievable rage come to the surface inside him. Years of servitude to bosses he didn’t respect for a cause he didn’t covet were roiling through him. A missed exit that accidentally led him onto the Brooklyn Bridge and added 10 minutes to his driving time felt like the final straw from the fates. He had screeched to a halt in the middle of the bridge, refusing to go any further on this detour. Before his rational brain had processed it, he had been out of the car, and on the edge of the bridge, staring into the icy cold waters of the East River.

When reason returned, he turned to climb down back towards his car, but his sleep-deprived body and ice-coated railing finished what his rage-filled brain had started. His last thought before he hit the ice cold waters of the Hudson River had been “Well, I guess Joe’s not getting his numbers tonight”.

He looked up at the Dragon Lady. “No. I was not that much more out there.”

Dragon lady seemed to understand what led Jip to that answer, and didn’t press for more. “How about your second life to watch then?”

“Before I pick that, could I ask, how many of my lives did I… end in such despair?”

A bunch of lines on the screen glowed white – nearly a third of those along the bottom branch lit up. 

Curiously, one line that had steadily marched diagonally up and right nearly to the edge of the screen also lit up.

“That line there – does that mean I was extremely happy and extremely wealthy, and still chose to end my life?”

“That’s right. Would you like to find out what happened?”

At his intense nod, P154 played it. It didn’t usually have the chance to review each lifetime for every soul, and rarely did souls ask to filter by lives that ended in suicide – why watch a movie you KNOW had a sad ending? – so P154 was just as curious as Jip to see this unfold.

Jip’s early years sped by – and they both watched as Jip once more graduated high school as valedictorian, but this time let Delilah go to pursue his education at Harvard. It sped through until it slowed at a moment in his junior year. He wrinkled his eyebrows in confusion as it slowed down to his econometrics class. He scarcely remembered any of his classes that year – he’d been doggedly shuttling to Boston or New York constantly to network his way into the most prestigious job he could lay his hands on. 

On screen, he was starting to eye one of his classmates – Maya, this gorgeous Bangladeshi girl – who happened to be sitting in the seat ahead of him. A memory niggled at him briefly – he did remember her, but he remembered her sitting across the class. He had not been able to catch her after class the first few times, after which he’d given up. But in this world, she was right there, and he managed to strike up a conversation. She seemed skeptical of his intellect at first, but one coffee-turned-3-hour conversation about the viability of Universal Basic Income, they were hooked on each other. He missed his train to New York that day, and with it, a shot at the prestigious banking job that had eventually come to define him.

However, it hardly mattered – Maya had forever changed the track of his life, gotten him interested not only in the concepts of economics, but also in the larger picture it painted of society, and the meaningful work it represented despite the pitiful pay. While his relationship with Maya only lasted through college, Jip inherited her love for economics with a gusto, and the LifeVideo sped through several years of academic accomplishments, worldwide recognition of his economic policy recommendations, and eventually a Nobel prize with Maya for their findings on the link between income disparity and productivity growth in societies.

“I finally understand why my millions had only been a third of the wealth of this life. But, what I still don’t understand is why I would still take my own life?”

Dragon lady gave him a brief look and continued watching the screen, her body language gently conveying “patience, little one.”

The video sped through to the month before his 80th birthday, and an older but surprisingly fit Jip walking out of a doctor’s office in a daze. The prognosis was still ringing in his ears – stage IV pancreatic cancer, 6-9 months to live, poor quality of life going forward.

Fast forward to the birthday a week later, his whole family celebrating him, unaware of the prognosis. Late that night, once the last stragglers had left and Jip closed the door on a silent house, he walked over quietly to his study. He pulled out the doctor’s report, his will and his letter to his kids, placed them on the desk with a brief kiss and a mumbled goodbye. He walked over to his favorite armchair, took the measured number of sleeping pills and peacefully passed into the night.

The next morning, his son would come and find the note – it simply read, “I have lived so fully that I cannot find it in my soul to live in servitude to a disease I do not relish and a treatment plan I do not covet for my remaining days. So I say my goodbyes here to you all – thank you for fulfilling me.” 

Jip stared at the words on the page until they faded, the room turned yellow and his body started moving towards the door that Dragon lady had opened in the corner.

She seemed all business now, notepad in hand. “I have three questions before you leave today. Would you replace your life with any of the lives you saw today?”

“I probably should say the second one but it would depend on whether I could keep my memories of my current life in the next one or not.”

“That’s my second question – would you want to? And if you could?”

“If I could keep my memories, then I wouldn’t replace my life at all. I think the grief and rage associated with the life I did live would teach me more than the content comfort of the other two. I want to do better next time, and I need to channel those emotions to get there”

P154 looked up in surprise. Not often did humans ask to keep their memories of miserable lives intact. There was something in this soul that had led it to that Nobel prize in the first place. He’d do something impressive in his next life too, no doubt.

“Third question: what experience from your current life would you want to experience again in your next life?”

Silence. For 2 minutes. P154 was almost about to repeat the question when Jip looked up and said “nothing”, and disappeared out the door.

Continue to Chapter 5: The Denial of Death Paradox →