Who Knows

In the end, we live our lives afraid — afraid of what comes after, afraid of never seeing the faces we once loved again. We cling to rituals, to prayers, to religions that promise reunion, but beneath it all, the fear gnaws at us: what if there is nothing? What if the silence is final, and every embrace, every memory, every bond, dissolves into nothingness the moment we close our eyes for the last time?

We walk through existence as prisoners of this fear. We obey laws, commandments, codes — written long ago by hands that turned to dust centuries before ours ever touched this earth. Rules dictated by people who once declared they spoke for God, or for reason, or for justice. But those voices are gone. Their bones rot in the soil, yet their words still bind us, invisible chains passed down through generations. We call it “civilization,” but perhaps it is only the long shadow of the dead still telling the living how to move, how to breathe, how to exist.

Psychology says we fear the unknown because the brain craves order — the illusion of control. Religion promises that fear has meaning, that the afterlife is a continuation instead of an ending. Philosophy strips away the comfort: Kierkegaard calls it the sickness unto death, Heidegger says we are beings-toward-death, forever defined by our impending end. All point to the same truth — our fear of what comes after is the foundation of everything we do before.

We are afraid of eternity, afraid of oblivion, afraid of vanishing. And so we build laws, rituals, systems, and stories to keep us occupied, to give us something to follow while the clock ticks away. But no matter how tightly we cling to these structures, we cannot escape the silence that waits. We may spend our lives pretending we know what we’re doing, pretending there is order and direction — but deep down, we are lost. We are ruled by the words of the dead, while stumbling blind toward our own deaths.

Maybe that is the most unbearable truth: not that we are alone, not even that we are forgotten, but that we never truly knew what we were doing in the first place. We only followed the rules of ghosts, fearing the darkness that will one day claim us, just as it claimed them.

And still, the silence waits. Always.