The problem is you're seeing it as punishment, when instead it's a necessary journey on the path of enlightenment.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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"Being born into North Korea your next life is part of your path to Enlightenment"
💀
I mean sure, maybe I lead the revolution against Kim fatty boi
Or you know, you could get lucky and be the fat kid they station in front of the fake grocery store for American journalists
The good news is you are born in to the ruling Kim dynasty in North Korea. You are raised in privilege and luxury. The bad news is your patron's successor deems you a threat and you are purged at age 18.
Next up ....
You are a sea scallop off the coast of N.K.
I am pretty sure you can only get enlightened as a human being, so being reborn as something else definitely won't help.
The Egg by Andy Weir
A short horror story:
You die.
You meet "god".
God says: "Next life, you're born as one of the victims of Epstein Island"
💀
So in other words, you're a pretty girl with a rough home life so you end up getting trafficked.
Not to sound like a dick, but most endings to that story wind up far, far worse than winding up on a Caribbean (or wherever TF it is) island with a bunch of rich dudes. I think most wind up strung out, OD'd, battered, on their own with a couple kids and no real means to support themselves and no skills to speak of, aside from turning tricks nobody wants because they're so messed up. Except for more messed up dudes.
Not to minimise anyone's suffering, but I'd say the far more likely outcome of winding up in a crack house is far worse. Most of those women and girls would probably kill to wind up on a billionaire's island. A slave in luxury lives a bit better than a slave in poverty.
Make it the Middle East and it gets far worse. Some time in second or third grade, a bunch of older women grab you, drag you into an abandoned building, strip you, and maim you so you can't ever really experience pleasure, because pleasure is reserved for males. You get an infection and die without ever having really lived, or you don't and you're a sex slave but you don't get anything out of it. Or you get something out of it but it's so hard to reach climax that you do more and more depraved stuff (and with more partners) to get there and some of these people like it rough, so you go through hell chasing that dragon. And most of these guys know it so they're actively working to keep you from getting there.
...
Generally speaking, if you're reading this, if you're online, with an electronic device from this decade, and you own it, you're in the 1%, at least worldwide. You're one of the lucky ones. Whatever human you get reincarnated as is likely to be much worse regardless of whether you're a girl, or a Muslim, or in the Middle East, or trafficked by billionaires. You could be starving and malnourished — in Africa, or in Detroit.
If you liked that blurp and want more, Exurb1a wrote several (vaguely connected) books on the matter. I cannot tell you anything more without spoiling it.
The Fifth Science, The Prince of Milk, Geometry for Ocelots, Logic Beach: Part I
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Thankfully there's absolutely no evidence of reincarnation and even if it did exist, we clearly don't remember past lives so I consider that not the same person anyways.
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[off topic]
In 'The Sandman' stories by Neil Gaiman there's a scene where a 12,000 year old wizard is finally killed.
When he meets Death, he boasts that he had a pretty great run.
Death tells him that he got what everyone gets, a single lifetime.
Since no one can remember their past lives, I would say that it wouldn't much matter what we are next, or what we were before. All those things, what if you were those before? You could have been someone horrifically tortured to death in the Middle Ages/Dark Ages, but you wouldn't remember it now. So, it wouldn't much matter what you are in the next life.
Since there's no tracking from life to life, there's no purpose to it. Nothing is gained. Like if you were mean to a specific kind of person in one life, and you became one of those people (say, a Muslim, or an overweight person) in your next life. I mean so what? It's not like you learn your lesson, having gone from a bigot of privilege to the victim of said biogtry. Everyone has it rough somewhere. And no one gets out alive.
I used to know a guy in middle school who at one point, believed that there was a kind of active memory reincarnation. You don't remember while alive, but between lives you remember it all, so you choose or you are assigned a future life depending on what you need to learn to reach enlightenment. In that future life, your memory is wiped, but when you're done living that life, you have all the previous life memories and you keep doing that until you figure out what you need to in order to reach enlightenment. I don't think it was Buddhism or Taoism or any of those Eastern religions. It sounded made up. I don't recall the name. And he never really got involved with it, he was just telling me about it and I never quite forgot.
Somebody else already posted Andy Weir's "The Egg" in this comment section so I'll just pull this excerpt from it instead of linking the whole thing again.
“Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
~~suicide~~ reroll
FTFY
What do you mean? I could just kill myself until I'm born into a rich family, that would be awesome!
That would depend on reincarnation rules. if rerolling isint pure rng and its based in your karma level killing yourself self would lower your score.
Someone will come up with a strat to reroll into something obscure like a wood louse and farm so much positive karma with an exploit that it won't matter how negative you were.
Love this mindset. Break the game! break the game!
Monkey's paw - you are now Elon's umpteenth child who's only purpose is to serve as a bullet shield.
Problem is you'd forget your plan the next life
Universe is trolling us
Well, if I forget everything in the next life, that won't be me any more. In a sense, I would be permanently gone regardless of whether it's technically the same soul.
How do explain this.
Say you had a trumatic childhood experience and repress all your memories before age 12. Did you "die" at age 12? Were your "reborn" at age 12?
"You" is like this camera that records things. If you swap out the SD card, is it still the same camera?
Your "soul" is the camera, the SD card is your brain.
Get what I'm saying?
Repressed memories from trauma still leave subconscious changes in behaviour, though.
If I lost all my memories until the age of 12 and no trace of any habit or thought remained, then yes. Whoever I used to be died.
I am my brain and the memories it contains. I am the SD card.
I don't like the idea that "memory = identity"
Memory is part of you, but doen't solely define you.
If someone made an identical clone of you, like every atom and molecule, even the neurons. Is that "you"? Did you split into 2?
If we then destroy the original, are "you" still "alive". I mean someone has the exact same memories, same atoms.
That's just Ship of Theseus and can't be defined.
I'm not made of the same atoms and molecules as I was a decade ago. Some of them might be still around, but it's mostly completely new particles. Am I still the same person I was a decade ago? If not, how come I can claim ownership of stuff some other guy with the same name bought back then?
I think I've read that on the quantum level you actually can't make the exact same configuration of particles and energy levels in two places at the same time. Trying to create a copy of an object (or, in general, any configuration of particles) would inevitably cause the original to cease to exist. But it's also mostly a thought experiment, as we can't do that with more than a few quantum particles at a time.
So far, as best as humanity is able to tell, your memories are you. If we ever get to Star Trek style teleportation, maybe we can define that more rigourously.
Quick edit: I am quite enjoying this debate, though - interesting to hear other people's takes on identity, soul and all that stuff.
I tend to agree with people like Wittgenstein, Bohm, Engels, and Benoist, that identities are ultimately socially constructed. Aristotle believed identifies are physically real, so that a tree or a ship physically has an identity of "tree" or a "ship." But then naturally you run into the Ship of Theseus paradox, but many other kinds of paradoxes of the same sort like Water-H2O paradox or the teletransportation paradox, where it becomes ambiguous as to when this physical identity would actually come into existence and when it goes away.
The authors that I cited basically argue that identities are all socially constructed. "Things" don't actually have physical existence. They are human creations.
One analogy I like to make is that they're kind of like a trend line on a graph. Technically, the trend line doesn't add any new information, it just provides a simplified visual representation of the overall data trend of the data, but all that information is already held within the original dataset.
Human brains have limited processing capacity. We cannot hold all of nature in our head at once, so we simplify it down to simplified representations of overall patterns that are relevant and important to us. We might call that rough collection of stuff over there a "tree" or a "ship." The label "tree" or "ship" represents an overly simplified concept of some relevant properties of interest about that stuff over there, but if you go analyze that stuff very closely, you may find that the label actually is rather ambiguous and doesn't capture the fully complexities of that stuff.
Indeed, if we could somehow hold all of nature in our heads simultaneously, we would not need to divide the world into "things" at all. We would just fully comprehend how it all interacts as a single woven unified whole, and the introduction of any "thing," any identity, would just be redundant information.
Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.
— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”
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Shelly Kagan has the best reasoning about souls I've seen so far, he makes a pretty compelling case that we have no soul. I recommend this playlist to everyone, it's so good :
What if reincarnation was just a religious misinterpretation of the concept that all your matter will be recycled infinitely into the environment as compost, then grass, trees, salmon, bears, beetles, mushrooms and bacteria etc, all at the same time.
Under the principle that you are the universe experiencing itself subjectively, recycling yourself now or later makes little difference on your endless journey other than being a wasted opportunity for experienceing it all. A human has an amazing opportunity to experience thought, music, wine, chocolate, love and all the other things in the way a mushroom likely doesn't.
Buddhism states that you're reborn based on what you helped create in your last life. So if you were an asshole and caused a lot of suffering, then you're going to experience that suffering as the other side.
I must've accidentally kicked a puppy or something... what did I do my past life do deserve this suffering?
Who says you get reincarnated right away? It could be a 1000 years between your death and rebirth!
That's how I set it up in my silly comedy Isekai, Maizy's Tails (it's free to read on the web if you care... Just search it, it'll be the first link): After death souls need to be "aged" at least 1000 years before they can be put in a new body. The gods think it's a multiversal rule but the MC figures out a workaround 😁
It actually opens with the gods bidding on souls from Earth... A world that ended about a million years prior to the auction (because that's how long it took to sort and categorize them all) 🤣
Depends on what kinda reincarnation your talking about and how it works/memory of past life's etc.
I like the thought that I get reincarnated into everyone ever existed and live those life's to learn as much as possible.
Some teachings say that being born as a human is as random as a blind sea turtle swimming from the ocean bottom to the top and hitting his head against a floating cork.
Why the fuck is my life so weird.
Like what are the odds I'm a second child born during One Child Policy... and managed to survive till birth? (cuz forced abortions were a thing)
So bizzare... so unreal...
What are the chance to having been emigrated?
60 Million Chinese moved overseas out of 1.4 Billion... 4.28% chance?
Having legal status is another subsection of that population, a lot of people allegedly migrate without official permission and is undocumented, I know a lot of classmates that supposedly have parents that migrated without permission.
Okay maybe it's not that rare, the "good" parts is isbalanced out by the fact that I'm a pleb... with shitty parents... yay god trolled me. Can't have too many good thing in life. Think you're safe?
bad thing happens
Citizenship Status? Think you have freedom now?
Heheheh 2024 US election happens
what the fuck
this universe is just trolling me
haha heres a good thing...
SIKE
mom: "Hey I love you very much do you know that?"
5 minutes later
mother: "YOU LITTLE SHIT"
... 🙃 what the fuck...
I wonder where my sould would be if CCP just aborted me...
fuck this shit... GIMME NORWAY PLS
Even if reincarnation is real, it really wouldn't be you living as a cockcroach.
Oh?
Please tell us what it IS then, since maybe you’ve gone to the other side and made it back in any significant way like exactly no one in this world has.
Let's assume it's real. Do you identify yourself with any of your past lives?
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Oh, I watched a Korean dorama about that, the name is Death’s Game (2023). Wasn’t very good to my taste, but the idea is quite interesting.
unironically, the only reason i havent killed myself by now is the fact that all afterlife nonsense is clearly copium-bullshit. this is the only life we get so shit has to get really bad before existence is worse than non-existence
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