The idea that "we don't know what happens after death" is an absurd construct, a desperate attempt to deny biological evidence, a self-perpetuating rhetorical farce born out of fear. Saying that we don't know what happens after death is equivalent to saying that we don't know what happens after an engine stops running or after an electrical circuit is destroyed. The phenomenon ends, the process halts, and yet the fragile and terror-stricken human mind stubbornly insists on pretending there is some "after", some hidden dimension, some fairy tale that makes dissolution seem less definitive.
But reality is brutal in its simplicity: after the suffering of existence, there is nothing. Death does not exist as an experience, because experience is a product of biochemistry, and when biochemistry ceases, the illusion of consciousness ceases with it. No dead being has ever transformed into something else. No corpse has ever shown signs of some fleeting "immortal energy" preparing to transfer elsewhere. What I see is decomposition, I see matter disassembling, I see flesh rotting, the brain liquefying, the eyes losing their illusory spark of life. I see no souls, no spirits, no ascensions or reincarnations. Never has a mouse been reborn as a hawk, never has a hawk risen from its ashes like a phoenix. Every creature follows the same cycle: it is born, it suffers, it perishes, it decays.
The human brain—that same mass of cells and synapses that generates thoughts, hopes, anxieties, and delusions—is no exception to the rule. The brain decomposes. What it believed itself to be, what it dreamed of becoming, what it conjured in its fantasies of an afterlife or an existence beyond death, disappears with it. The idea of an "after" is a delusional byproduct of fear, a deception devised by a mind that refuses to accept its own insignificance. Nothing that existed before the brain's dissolution continues to exist afterward. No "consciousness," no "soul," no metaphysical echo persists beyond death, because the only engine of being is the biochemical activity of the body. When cellular activity ceases, the mind dissolves into nothingness, like a flame extinguished—without smoke, without a trace, without an otherworldly legacy.
And yet, to escape the truth, humans invent parallel dimensions, floating consciousnesses, invisible essences. They cannot accept the end, so they fabricate theories whose sole purpose is to shield their fragile psychology from the unbearable. A man cannot accept vanishing like a dead cat on the side of the road, like a crow decomposing in the mud. And so, stories of immortal souls, wandering spirits, and transcendent consciousnesses are born. The entire concept of an afterlife is nothing more than a collective cognitive disorder, a social pathology that rightfully deserves to be included in psychiatric diagnostic manuals. Humanity suffers from a global-scale psychosis, a denial of reality so ridiculous and nonsensical that, if it were applied to any other phenomenon, it would immediately be classified as insanity. If someone claimed that a car engine possessed a "mechanical spirit" that survived after the engine was destroyed, they would be institutionalized. If someone claimed that a lightbulb possessed a "vital breath" that continued to shine invisibly after the filament burned out, they would be labeled as delusional. And yet, when the same logic is applied to the human mind, it becomes philosophy, religion, culture.
Man tells himself stories to conceal the horror of the truth, because the truth is unbearable: we are nothing but chemical processes, and when the process ends, everything ends. There is no transcendence, no continuation, nothing but the disintegration of flesh and the absolute silence of nonexistence. The only truth is decomposition.
