You may as well get comfortable: the stories play out over long time scales. You may choose to monitor the video screen showing your grandson, an aspiring playwright, deep in thought on a park bench, scribbling notes for a scene. You’ll be able to follow him for years to track his success. In the meantime, waitresses drift by you with carts of sandwiches and coffee, and you only need to leave to sleep at night. When you return in the morning, you swipe your membership card at the security gate and choose a nice seat for the day.

But here’s the rub: everyone’s membership card expires at a different time, and expiration means no more entry into the video lounge. Those who are excluded mill around outside the building, grousing and kicking at the dirt. Weren’t we good? they ask. Why should we be locked out while others watch?

They, too, want to discover how their contributions guide the course of the world, want to see their grandchildren develop, want to witness the proud future of their family name. They grieve and commiserate with one another.

But they don’t know the full story. Locked outside, they miss seeing their organizations lose members. They miss watching their favorite people melt away with cancer. They miss seeing the aspiring playwright amount to nothing and do not have to watch his solitary death as he tries to drive himself to the hospital but draws his last ragged breath on the roadside. They miss the drift of social mores, their great-great-grandchildren changing religions, their lines of genetic descent petering out. They don’t have to watch as Moses and Jesus and Muhammad go the way of Osiris and Zeus and Thor.

Meanwhile, they kick the dirt and protest. They don’t understand they’ve been blessed with insulation from the future, while the sinners are cursed in the blue-green glow of the televisions to witness every moment of it.

Incentive

Even with the aid of our modern deductive skills, it is impossible to imagine our own death. It is not because we lack insight, but because the concept of death is made up. There is no such thing. This will become clear to you at some point, when you get into a situation that you think should kill you—say, a severe car crash. You’ll be surprised to realize that it didn’t hurt. The witnesses around you will laugh and help you up and brush off the glass and explain the situation.

The situation is that the people around you are Actors. Your interactions with other people were almost entirely scripted from their point of view. Your “afterlife,” if you want to call it that, is your initiation to the game.

We realize this moment of disclosure will be hard on you. For God’s sake, you will think as you pick yourself up from the car wreck, what about my lover? What was our relationship based on? Were all the nighttime whispers fabrications? Rehearsed lines? And all my friends: Actors? My parents: pretending?