Could the afterlife be even worse than life?

Laughing at death and the unknown

A cinema seat. A silent shot in a church. A priest asking the protagonist why he doesn't commit suicide, and a response that should freeze the blood: "What if what comes next is worse?". The audience laughed. Not everyone, but enough for a scene intended as a drama to mutate into black comedy without anyone asking for it. The film is Escape, a Spanish title that brings Mario Casas to the center of a bottomless duel and has peine a centuries-old discussion: what lies on the other side, and why does no one want to look it in the face?

What trinc is not an academic debate. It is a forum conversation that starts with that anecdote and drifts into the usual territories: hell, purgatory, reincarnation, shadow-conspiring elites, and a humanitarian project in Kenya that appears out of nowhere. The afterlife, it turns out, does not allow for watertight compartments.

Why we laugh at a terrifying question

The most common hypothesis is simple: laughter is an escape valve. One school of thought argues that most people do not think about their own mortality because they were hit by the realization as children—the discovery that they are going to die—and the only way to survive that certainty is to park it. When someone on screen verbalizes what almost no one dares to formulate, the brain doesn't know whether to cry or laugh. And it chooses to laugh.

Some go further, claiming that much of the audience takes their beliefs—whether Heaven or absolute nothingness—for granted without ever questioning them. If the answer to the great beyond is an axiom, the priest's question loses weight and becomes a mere quirk. It is the distance between believing and knowing, and strictly speaking, no one knows.

Heaven, hell, and purgatory: the unverified map

The exchange quickly fills with practical theology. One stance presents the most classic version: hell for those who denied God, heaven and purgatory for those who believed. Another dares to raise the objection many keep silent about: if God is good, why does He leave His flawed creation suffering eternally? The question remains floating, without a response that convinces everyone.

The promise of the Gospel of John—"whoever believes in me will live, even if they die"—also appears against the skepticism of those demanding proof. And a recurring warning: eternity has neither beginning nor end, so what is experienced after death would be identical to what was lived before birth. No one remembers anything from then. The argument is blunt, even if it resolves nothing.

The conspiracy theory: elites planning the afterlife

Here, the matter takes the turn that justifies the place where it is being discussed. If the afterlife exists, the initial premise reasons, it is plausible that the elites—that obsession with power that does not stop even at the grave—have tried to investigate it in secret and design a way to continue ruling in the next plane. We are born into a world with rules already written, and we trinc them without choosing them. Why would the great beyond be any different?

The idea does not stand alone. Enter the red pill: the suspicion that this world is an energy farm, that the incarnated self is an avatar identified with a body that does not belong to it, and that waking up to that reality is more unpleasant than ignorance. Fictions like The Matrix are cited to illustrate this. It is worth remembering that none of this has empirical backing.

Reincarnation, astrology, and the eighth house

The exchange spills over. One participant remembers having the feeling as a child of having lived in a desert in a previous life, a feeling that faded as she grew up. Another contributes a dream in which she saw herself in a mirror with another body and recognized herself under that different physique. And someone brings up sidereal astrology: the eighth house, associated with Scorpio and Pluto, would be the exit and entry gate to the other world.

Against dream testimony and horoscopes, more earthly logic reminds us that all miracles conform to the prior beliefs of those who experience them. No Hindu sees the Virgin Mary. Each culture receives the revelation it was already expecting, which invites one to think that the afterlife looks suspiciously like what everyone was already carrying with them.

We already know hell, according to this conversation

And amidst so much speculation, one participant offers a definition: hell is not a place of fire, but having moments of happiness and losing them. Illness, old age, the death of those we love. Repeating that cycle over and over again. What makes pain unbearable is not its intensity, but its lack of meaning. Dying would be bearable if it served a purpose.

That is why the antiestéticar is not so much about what comes next, but about whether what is here will prolong without reason. The priest's question took for granted that suicide would escape suffering. The protagonist's answer points to the contrary: perhaps there is no escape, even through the back door.

In the end, the only thing clear is what was already known: no one has come back to tell the tale. The laughter in the cinema, the faith of some, the suspicion of others, and the theory that imagines conspiracies beyond the grave are different ways of responding to the same question. With centuries of theology, philosophy, and science behind us, we still do not know if the other side is worse. Or is it that we prefer not to find out?