On Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

Sum is about what happens when you die. David Eagleman provides 40 short, & engaging stories, all exploring different possibilities for life after death.

While each story can be as short as 3-5 pages long, they are all unique in their angle and theory. Stories which draw on science or CS have at least a tangential undergirding to truth, making them seem plausible to the reader.

I’m going to go over a few of the stories and sections of the book I found interesting.

Chapter 1 - Sum

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. (3)

Chapter 3 - Circle of Friends

The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive. (9)

This afterlife limits you to interact with only the people you remember. No more crowds, lines, or strangers - everyone you see or come across is an acquaintance. You’ll never get to experience what you never tried while alive - which makes this afterlife feel limiting and constricting. You wish you’d have struck up conversation with strangers on the subway, in parks, and while getting coffee at your favorite local shop. I don’t like to try and extrapolate too much to the real world while reading books, but in this case, the message is literal: speak and engage with more people while you’re alive.

Chapter 8 - Metamorphosis

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. (23)

In this story, the afterlife consists of a waiting room. Departed souls wait for their third death, mingling and striking up conversation with those around them until Callers announce their name, and they move on to the next stage of the afterlife.

And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be. (25)

The drawback of course is that they lose control over their life narrative - the longer they wait there (and some, such as the founding fathers, have been waiting for 250+ years) the more their life details change. They have no control over how long they wait or what they are remembered for.

Chapter 23 - Will-o’-the-Wisp

In this afterlife, you have access to a vast array of monitors watching every aspect of the world unfold. You can view anything, and see everything.

In theory, you could choose to watch anything: the private activities of single people in their apartments, the unfolding plans of saboteurs, the detailed progress of battlefields. But, instead, we all watch for one thing: evidence of our residual influence in the world, the ripples left in our wake. You follow the successes of an organization you started or led. You watch appreciative people read the books you donated to your local religious group. You watch an irrepressible girl with pink shoes climbing the maple tree you planted. These are your fingerprints left on the world; you may be gone, but your mark remains. And you can watch it all.

Only the catch is that everyone’s access to view these monitors expires at a different time. When this happens, the souls of the afterlife protest and loiter outside, wondering in angst why their access was revoked.

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. (61)

They’re blessed because they don’t have to watch the ripples they’ve left on the world fade and disappear. They don’t have to watch their progeny die out, and their family lineage falter and amount to nothing.

Chapter 37 - Blueprints

In this Afterlife, you get to view the underlying code, which runs the universe.

At first we may be shocked to watch ourselves represented as a giant collection of numbers. As we go about our normal business in the afterlife, in our mind’s eye we can see the massive landscape of numbers, stretching to sight’s limit in all directions. This set of numbers represents every aspect of our lives. Across its vast plains we spot islands of sevens, jungles of threes, branching rivers of zeros. The size and richness are breathtaking. (101)

This underlying code adds determinism to processes which you previously thought was governed by chance and almost magical, like love.

As you interact with a lover, you can see her numbers as well, and her interactions with yours. She endearingly sticks out her bottom lip for attention, and your numbers cascade into acrobatics. Digits flip their values like waterfalls. As a result, your eyes lock on to hers, and amorous words form on your lips and travel from your throat in air-compression waves. As she processes the words, her numbers flip, waves of change rippling through her system. She returns your affection, as dictated by the state of her numbers. (101)

Living in this afterlife shows you that nothing is mere chance, everything is predetermined by the numbers, and code of our universe.

After watching enough code, a new notion of agency and responsibility dawns. You watch and understand all the signals that lead to a driver stomping on her brakes as her numbers are changed by the numbers of the cat walking in front of the wheels; you can even see the code of the fleas that leap off when the cat leaps. Whether the cat is struck or not struck, you now understand, was not in anyone’s control; it was all in the numbers, married together in a gorgeous inevitability. But we also come to understand that the network of numbers is so dense that it transcends simple notions of cause and effect. We become open to the wisdom of the flow of the patterns. (102)

The two main leaders of this afterlife, the Rewarders and the Punishers can’t decide if knowledge of the underlying code is more a punishment or a gift. It’s a punishment in the sense that it dulls a lot of the chance beauty of life, showing you that daily life is really the expression of the underlying code and mechanics of our universe. Everything is deterministic and nothing is truly left to chance.

The secret codes of life—whether presented as a gift or a burden—go totally unappreciated. And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal. (103)

Chapter 38 - Subjunctive

The last afterlife story I’m going to present is one in which you coexist with multiple versions of yourself. Each version of you in the afterlife represents a version of what you could have been.

You meet more successful versions of yourself, more fit, talented, and confident versions. You meet the person you could’ve become if you’d have left your hometown sooner, started a new venture, or pivoted to a different career.

But soon you fall victim to intimidation. These yous are not really you, they are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open for them and allowed their lives to splash out in colorful new directions. Such success cannot be explained away by a better genetic hand; instead, they played your cards better. In their parallel lives, they made better decisions, avoided moral lapses, did not give up on love so easily. They worked harder than you did to correct their mistakes and apologized more often. (104)

At the beginning it might seem kind of cool to hang around all these more successful and interesting versions of yourself, but eventually you feel a sense of resentment and insecurity, wishing you’d done more with your life. You try and hang around the less successful versions of yourself, but they too aren’t your type, as you can’t sympathize with their position, you think they should’ve worked harder.

The torture of this afterlife is clear, the more you fall short of your potential and the less you make use of the cards at your disposal the more successful versions of yourself you will meet in the afterlife.

the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with. (105)

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, while I don’t fully believe any one of the individual afterlife stories described in Sum, I think that the themes it brings up and the ways in which people suffer in these various afterlife stories are worth exploring to improve the way we live in the present. David’s prose is beautiful, and the stories are short and digestible, which makes this a very easy and entertaining read.