"The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

I would just like to take a moment and say that I absolutely hated that hell assignment. Now don't get me wrong, imagining how to punish people for the terrible shit we've all done is great, but it's all just a happy fantasy that ends as soon as you actually think about it. It's great to believe that in this big, confusing universe, there is some form of higher justice beyond it that can really make up for the evil in our world But that's where the fantasy stops. I would absolutely love to believe that some hell exists, but I can't. There is nothing after this. Good and bad people alike will cease to exist. once you die, you retain no memories, no emotions, no thoughts. Nothing. The only thing that remains of you is the rotting pile flesh and stink that used to be called by your name and the memories that you left in others, who also will end up rotting corpses indistinguishable from your own. And the assertion that life has a purpose, or that in turn hell has the purpose of canceling out all of life, is just completely wrong. All of life is just some accident of probability, some mistake that infinitely small chances in the universe brought forth. There is no higher purpose to our existence, except to quietly pass from the universe. And that's not even on an individual level: our entire planet's eventual destination is a fiery death in the heart of the sun. We can only hope that all of life is still on that boiling rock when it happens, and the human race, or any other race of creatures doesn't exist to parasitize and vandalize any other planets with our disgusting presence. "But what's the point of there being a universe if there is no one to observe it? I mean, the universe might as well not exist at all if there's no one there to see it." Exactly. There is no point to the universe. It's just some void with rocks floating in it that got there by some accident of the Higgs field changing states. It's meaningless.

And therein lies the curse of consciousness. To have an organism complex enough to know that it is itself an organism means to have an organism complex enough to know that it itself is pointless. This sensation we experience called thought is just some random mistake in the complexity of our minds that has somehow formed in a way that mimics a transcendence of the physical. We experience it as this higher form of conscious thought, captured in the illusion that this thought actually has any meaning. This consciousness gives us the hallucination that we can actually choose our own actions, our own thoughts, our own opinions, but in reality the only possible thing a conscious mind can do is ponder the fact that it is a conscious mind, and that it is ultimately pointless. And that thought is a terrible, terrible thought. If only humans were still just apes living in the trees, free of the realization that they will die, the people around them will die, and the entire world will end. And I suppose that we as a species have found ways either to regress to that ape-like state or to find some false meaning to our existence in the cosmos. Ignorance, religion, have become rampant in society as people try desperately, terrified, to justify their own lives so they can sleep at night. They sleep, and their minds dream of worlds where they mean something, ignoring the terrible conclusion that their prescribed self-worth is no more that a sleeping pill and a blindfold to cover their afraid and pointless eyes. But so the human mind creates these illusions for itself, trying desperately not realize the true nature of its existence, making and destroying its own purposes and destinations. If it stops, the world will become its own hell, full of people driven insane by the horrifying truth. If it continues, the world will become its own hell, full of people broken into delirious, depressed, psychotic beasts that desperately want to believe they have a purpose. Either way, we all die, and there is no meaning to conscious, and no destination for the dead to go and find it, and the world will turn to the very hell that people still believe could exist.