Klok Philosophy: Existence is futile, there is no meaning to life, and that's perfectly fine.

Cryopod is a bleak story, nihilistic in nature, with the ultimate message of "You can have fun, save the world, and do whatever you please in life, but in the end, nothing matters." This is due to my own beliefs about life. I only have one life. I am an atheist, and I believe neither in Heaven nor Hell.

The great thing about being a nihilistic atheist is the full embracing of chaos. I've had people ask me, once they learned of my philosophical views, "Well if you're an atheist, then there's no meaning to life! Why not just believe in God and pray that he exists so you have at least a chance of ending up in Heaven?"

This question is common, because it comes from an honest, and well-intentioned place. Most people seek to give meaning to their lives, with the thought that in the end, they will probably end up in Heaven or Hell, living forever. (Note that I live in a Christian nation so if you're a Buddhist or something else, just swap out references to Heaven/Hell with whatever your religion believes.)

But the ultimate point of Cryopod is that... forever is a very long time. I doubt most people put much thought into it, but as we see in Cryopod, living for just tens of millions of years is a mind-bogglingly long time. Of course, Cryopod's characters are all imperfect, greedy, vile people, with only the occasional decent person among them. (And even then, I'd question that person's motives.)

But let's take things to the extreme, as I like to do. Let's put ourselves in a variety of situations, and ask ourselves if those things give our lives meaning.

Situation 1: You are a human who dies, and nothing happens after death. You just... vanish from the universe. (This is, I would say, the traditional Atheist viewpoint, but not mine exactly) No Heaven, Hell, or anything else awaits you after you die. Your life was pointless, beyond advancing humanity's interests (perhaps) but all that time you spent learning and living is wasted. Pretty bleak. Maybe there's a better option?

Situation 2: You are a human who, thanks to advances in modern medicine, can now live forever! The first thousand years are great! Human society can't last with people working the way they do now, though, so either humanity finds a way to limit the population, or a way to colonize the stars. Before immortality became a thing, your primary method for job advancement was the retirement of the people above you in a corporation/business, caused by them getting older or moving on to other jobs. In this hypothetical immortal society, however, those people never move on. They might switch jobs, and they may even be fired for misconduct, but nobody will ever retire. People will only move up the ranks slowly, painstakingly, taking far longer than they ever did as mortals.

But forget your job and career for a moment, maybe you're a hippie who lives in the forest. Why even work a job in an immortal society? Perhaps robots will take over the work, so we can all lounge around, eat infinite perfectly grown free food, and simply do whatever our hearts desire. The problem with this is that if you look at societies where people have free living, most people don't turn to intellectual pursuits, they turn to debauchery, violence, rioting, etc.

And, even if those things did not happen, and even if we ended up in a peaceful Star Trek-like society, what about boredom? The characters are very mortal in Star Trek, but if you look at Q, the immortal race of gods, they are bored. They have seen everything there is to see, lived every life, and nothing has meaning for them anymore. With this viewpoint, we can imagine that the only way human society can progress if we become immortal is an ever-increasing path to boredom. Even if it takes tens of millions, or even billions of years, it will happen eventually.

Situation 3: Alright, you're a smart cookie. Obviously the human form is imperfect. But if human mortality and immortality is going to have no meaning, or it will end in boredom or the heat death of the universe, what about being an angel in Heaven? Let's say you're a good person, you live and die and you go to Heaven. I'm not talking about Cryopod's version of 'Heaven', but the legitimate definition of Heaven. White surroundings, living merrily, no pain or sadness, and you get to see God himself! Glorious!

BORING! If you thought life as an immortal human was dull as sin after a few eons of existence, look at life as an angel, as set out by the Bible. No rock music, no drugs, no alcohol, no video games, etc. You sit on a cloud and play a harp all day long, all while singing praise to your creator. I can think of maybe five people in human history who would enjoy this, but the rest of us would be bored out of our minds after just a few weeks, let alone an entire eternity! There is no situation I'd rather place myself in less than being an angel in Heaven!

Situation 4: Hell is another possibility. There are two versions of Hell though, which I will refer to as the "Bible's Hell" (Modern Christian interpretation) and the "Pessimist's Hell".

Bible's Hell: You get lashed and whipped and beaten for all eternity and dumped into the lake of fire over and over to scream suffer and cry forever. Um, unless you're a masochist, this clearly sucks and nobody would want this. I'd have to choose Heaven over this. (And I obviously despise the Christian concept of Heaven, so...)

Pessimist's Hell: This is my realistic interpretation of Hell. If God outlaws rock and roll, video games, prostitutes, and all those fun sins of life, then presumably since the Devil is the opposite of God, those things would be in Hell. If my choice is Pessimist Hell or Heaven, I'll take the former, but all things considered, an immortal human society is still better as you can already do all of those things there. You just can't hang out with Elvis and Michael Jackson as an immortal human, since they're already dead. :(

Situation 5: As a nod to other after-death beliefs, maybe Reincarnation? You die, and based on how you lived your life, you can become another new animal or a new person or something. This is basically the 'mortality void' listed in Situation 1, but now you get to restart over and over.

Variant 1: You keep your memories each time. This makes each new life a novel concept! It would still eventually probably get boring but maybe not. The Earth would eventually die though, and there's the whole Heat Death thing, but it might be cool? The fact I can't remember any past lives tells me this already doesn't exist, but who knows?

Variant 2: You DON'T keep your memories after being reborn. This means you might as well be a totally different person. It's not even you living the new lives, so it isn't worth mentioning.

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So where am I going with this? If you look at all of the above beliefs that I've outlined, you'll come to realize something important: Nothing matters. 

If you're a mortal human, every piece of your life vanishes when you die. 

If you're an immortal human, you will someday, perhaps eons from now, be bored of existence and wish to die anyway.

If you're an angel, your life is boring... forever, from start to end. No hope of not being bored.

If you're enslaved in hell, obviously your life sucks if it's the chains and fire version of Hell, and while it wouldn't suck much in the Pessimist's Hell, it would still be only equivalent to or worse than being an Immortal Human. Eventually there would be no meaning in the debauchery.

I believe that life inherently has no meaning, and we spend our short, mortal existences trying to give it such, but there's no point in doing so. For me, personally, I have developed a sub philosophy of hating to waste my time. 

I wrote a part a few days ago which was lost in a power outage, Part 411b had to be completely rewritten, and it seriously angered me that I had to do so. Unless humans/supercomputers invent mass-immortality in my lifetime (And it is a possibility, mind you!), I have about a hundred years of existence to live, and only seventy if we're looking at average lifespans! Every day is potentially my last. If I spent six hours writing a part, but it gets deleted, and I spend six more hours rewriting it, I have wasted six hours of my life. I will never get that time back.

I don't like doing anything twice in a row. I don't like repeating myself constantly. I don't enjoy playing games multiple times, or watching movies/TV shows over and over again (Okay that's a lie, Avatar TLA is worth watching three times) or really repeating things that eat up my limited mortality and don't grant me immediate or long-term benefits.

Similarly, I am not a fan of the concept of the middle-class lifestyle. I see most people living a life like so:

-Grow up, go to a nice school, then go to a nice college, graduate...

-Aim for a high paying job, probably fail, work minimum wage or close to it for a long while...

-Even if they don't fail, they will work some dream job and within a few years be tired of it, and all that excess money is spent on a lavish lifestyle with no thought for savings and the future...

-Eventually they get older, they may have saved up money for retirement, and now they can quit working and have FUN!

-Except now that they're older, their back hurts, their posture is bad, their energy is low...

-So they sit on a couch and watch TV all day, or play games, or whatever else. They could have done this from the start!

I'm not saying this is everyone's life, to the contrary. I just see this pattern repeated a lot. Some people opt to spend their life seeking spirituality and meaning. As I've argued, this doesn't exist, so it's a waste of time. Some people spend their lives playing video games all day, as I do now, while mixing it up with some other activity.

I see the last type of person, the video game player, get excoriated for wasting their lives away, but I believe everyone is living a wasted life. The difference is, some people do what they enjoy and don't worry about the expectations of others, and therefore they cut out the middleman in their lives.

Those people, in my opinion, are truly living life to its fullest.

Oh, also, Einstein. If you invent something that improves human society immeasurably, then your life wasn't a waste. Good job! Seriously, nice work! Sadly, 95% of people will never accomplish this.

I am a pessimist. Thanks for reading.