There is no afterlife, and deep down most people already know this but can't handle it. Your consciousness isn't some magical soul floating around, it's literally just neurobiological processes firing in your brain. When your brain stops, you stop. Period. We're complex meat computers and when the hardware fails there's no software backup to the cloud. Philosophers love dancing around this with ontological gymnastics and vitalist cope about consciousness transcending the physical, but it's all just elaborate denial. Science tells us we came from inanimate matter and we'll return to it. Freud was right that the aim of all life is death, a return to that inorganic state we borrowed ourselves from for a cosmically brief moment. In 4.5 billion years the sun dies and takes all trace of human thought with it, and the universe won't even notice we were here. No part of "you" persists because there is no "you" separate from the physical processes that generate the illusion of selfhood. Extinction isn't a doorway to something else, it's just the lights going out forever. Every spiritual framework or philosophical system that promises otherwise is just folk psychology and primitive theory we cling to because accepting annihilation is psychologically unbearable. But unbearable doesn't mean untrue.