the basic human sin

Bill Cosby, in his one-man show Himself (1983), advising his kids about his mother who has become a doting grandmother after a life of being a relentless hardass to her son:

That is not the same woman I grew up with! You are looking at an old person who is trying to get into heaven now!

I'll be talking about the bad grammar on my Substack.

Do-over fantasies, a cousin of the above desire to get into heaven (i.e., an end-of-life yearning for a longer, better future), result from a confrontation with mortality mixed with a fantasy-driven desire to right certain wrongs. Beyond that, motivations for such fantasies will vary from altruistic to selfish. Maybe the fantasizing old person feels genuine remorse for having ruined someone else's life. I can at least respect that sort of motivation. But the desire to repair one's own mistakes so as to make one's own life a better one next time around is rooted only in selfishness. I want a better life for ME. There's nothing to admire or respect about that.

Just try to live your best life now. Now is all you have. Even people who believe in reincarnation or rebirth would agree that nothing ever repeats itself exactly, hence the proverb about how history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. So even if you got your do-over wish, it'd go wrong in different ways.

What are the postmortem alternatives to living your best life now?

1. There is no God or afterlife. You die, then—nothing.
2. There is a God, and eternal heaven and hell do exist. The elevator goes up or down, and you get an eternity of whatever's on the roof or in the basement.
3. Afterlife involves reincarnation or rebirth. In Indian thought, the shape of your next life is determined by the momentum of your previous existence, so you won't be starting from Square 1. And if your previous life was one of unwisdom, then your next life will carry that previous unwisdom over—all of your immoderate appetites and personality flaws and stupidity-driven urges and blindness to consequences and susceptibility to temptation. All of it—ported over. You can't shake karmic baggage.
4. Afterlife follows some sort of science-fiction reincarnation scenario. You're miraculously born with the memories of your previous life, so you know what mistakes to avoid. This will make you weirdly old and wise in an infant's body, and as Q and Picard taught us, too overcautious to live a proper youth, to make the mistakes from which you're supposed to learn and grow. The further problem is that, the moment you correct your life's first major mistake, the future before you will be completely different. You won't have the chance to correct any of your other mistakes.
5. More science fiction: Afterlife means getting to choose when to restart your life and at what age. It also means retaining memories of your previous life as a map of your previous mistakes. But this scenario immediately turns into (4), above, the moment you correct your first mistake. Have fun fucking up this new life.

Do-over fantasies lean hard on the lie that you'll get to correct most or all of your real-life mistakes in this new life. But you keep running into that wall: after you correct your first mistake, the life ahead of you will be completely different, so as the above meme/quote says, you will end up just ruining your life differently. Better to learn to live wisely, to profit from the wisdom of those who've gone before instead of pushing against that wisdom and constantly rebelling and resisting. There's nothing noble about rebellion and resistance for resistance's sake. It just looks lazy and childish and shortsighted.

It's like trying to teach proper grammar (see my Substack!) to someone who doesn't really want to learn and who passive-aggressively resists, either by "forgetting" the rules and concepts just taught or by actively and lazily disdaining the in-built constraints in language that channel one's self-expression. The unwillingness to yoke oneself to the discipline of learning, the desire simply to express oneself sloppily and be happy with only that, is an example of the "resistance for resistance's sake" that I'm talking about. Someone people adopt this rebellious disposition early in life and never grow out of it. It's sad to see how stunted they are now, fantasizing about doing their lives over but failing to understand that none of this works without wisdom and effort and self-discipline (which, really, is a child of wisdom).

I'm talking about myself as much as about Certain People I Know. We could all afford to turn inward and work on ourselves. Psychotherapist M. Scott Peck wrote a book a long time ago called The Road Less Traveled (1978). In it, he argued that the fundamental human sin isn't pride but laziness. The spirit (and you can take that term to mean something secular if you want) operates according to the laws of physics: it has its own inertia. And as we all know, an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. That's laziness: spiritual inertia leading to moral and physical inertia. It hardens and crystallizes, eventually becoming an active desire not to grow, an active preference for incuriosity and stagnation. But because the spirit also has its own natural élan and yearnings, this laziness is paradoxically coupled with a desire for things to be different and/or to have been different. Somehow, though, the mind fails to make the connection between (1) being in a situation that needs change and (2) being the agent of that change. I myself have come to this realization only belatedly. Cite your favorite moral story to describe my situation; for me, Aesop's The Grasshopper and the Ants comes to mind. Make the effort early or end up weeping and discontent later. It's trite, but you have to Be the change you wish to see.