I hope the reason nobody has responded to this yet is that they're giving this wonderful article the attention it deserves. I have a lot of thoughts about it,

I hope the reason nobody has responded to this yet is that they're giving this wonderful article the attention it deserves. I have a lot of thoughts about it, and this is one of the cases where I wish comment sections here weren't so ephemeral and stayed up long enough to be worth spending more time on it. All of us are facing a personal apocalypse. We all build an entire universe in our minds based on what our senses take in and that world is going to evaporate when you die, and the rest of the world will continue on just fine without us. For a lot of people, it feels better, for some reason, to think that we are so important that the rest of the universe will also cease to exist when we die. Aside from dreams of the world ending, another way to sort of assuage that dread that we all carry around with the knowledge of our own mortality is to lean into the intuitive belief that we are somehow non-physical entities that are merely contained in these physical bodies temporarily, and that some day we'll be released and go back into our true form. These two ideas often go together, but don't always. The neo-platonists, for example, believed in eternal non-physical bodies ascending to some kind of divinity after death, but didn't really have an 'end-of-the-world' prophecy. A lot of people reading an essay about this will think about this as an object lesson in gullibility and people failing to use reason, but there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind -- maybe it's a super-powerful AI escaping, or climate doom, or nuclear war, or whatever, and at the same time believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death, from mind-uploading, or life extension or something similar. Transumanism, extropianism, "effective altruism", a lot of those modern techno-utopian philosophies are just millenarian doomsday cults with a "scientific" technological gloss. I don't think there's anything especially "wrong" about the religion this essay is about. It's no crazier than Christianity was, which was also a religion built around a prophet whose apocalypse didn't arrive and who died unexpectedly. They had to build an (at times beautiful, at times ridiculous) tower of philosophical abstractions to retroactively make any of it make sense to them. On a completely unrelated tangent: If you read https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ the subreddit for die hard Gamestop "investors", there's a lot of similarity between the way they talk about the "mother of all short squeezes" and the way the doomsday cults talk about the end of the world. There's a religious fervor to it that's sort of based around the idea that the modern economy is a house of cards and will completely collapse because of people shorting a retail video game store.