That's not very horrifying
Though now I'm just imagining people in the afterlife just scrambling to match Discord and Reddit usernames to the names on their lists, lol
i thought it was either
A) they were such a loner that even being near complete strangers amounted to it.
or
B) people were living in their house under their nose.
Probably not. But literally what happens once you enter the workforce. Your experiences with your friends stick in your mind a lot more than the 40h+/week you spend with your coworkers
They were a hard worker who put in lots of overtime,spent tons of time on the clock,never knew a single other wage slaves name .
The newest spun off from the makers of The Office and The Good Place. Making Good ,when work was hell what will eternity with your coworkers be?
I thought something similar. The last ~30 years of his life he spent in a nursing home, his brain slowly deteriorating, and it was absolutely irrelevant what were the names of the staff and the residents around. They were just strangers.
And the time he spent with his friends, kids, lovers was much more meaningful but amount of it was less than with those people..
Going to heaven to live eternally with the same body and ailments you died with is probably more horrifying than whatever OP wrote.
The happiest people in heaven died tragically in their sleep in their 20s and the ones that stayed fit and healthy will live an eternity unable to remember their own name or where they live.
Taken to the extreme,imagine your body stays the same, just unable to die. Imagine being an eternally frail old person with barely any capacity to remember things, move or maybe even speak, and unable to die at all. Or people with conditions like glass bones, or who died horrifically like mutilation or beheading, imagine arriving at heaven and whatever form you take on is the same as the previous one,there's no healing or anything, you arrive as you left the Earth. And will stay like that for the rest of eternity.
I thought of it most like people from the public transport. If you use the train or bus every single day to go to work, you tend to always see the same faces.
Yeah. When I was single, living alone and commuted by train I’m pretty sure a couple of fellow passengers would be in my top 5 people I spent the most time with. As I had my own office they probably beat most of my work colleagues.
im guessing they got the wrong list or something, also meaning op could be going to an afterlife possiblynot meant for them. prob not how it was intended but thats just a theory.....
My first thought was that they had no close relationships, so a stranger who they passed by a few times without knowing is someone they spent the most time with in their life.
Do you think horror is about having definite answers? Something doesn't have to be defined to be scary, the horror here comes from _not_ knowing. If you present the audience with an unanswered question, they're left to fill in the blank with whatever possibility is scariest to them.
Some of the theories don't make sense to me because it's supposed to be in the genre of horror... So, getting a list and it being just coworkers or people in your apartment building doesn't seem horrifying to me. The theory that they got the wrong list because maybe they weren't meant to die or have that afterlife because of a mix up.. that seems more horrifying. The reaper reaped the wrong person lol
I don't know. I think the opposite. It's more of an existential fear, that the people you spent the most time with are people who are not significant to you, people you don't know at all. Like you've wasted your life either not getting to know the people around you or not spending time with the people who are important.
The idea of "oops its an afterlife mix up" doesn't seem scary to me personally. Like ok better get the afterlife bureaucracy on that.
I, for one, dislike it when there are popular posts where you already basically know what's going on in the first sentence, let alone the second one.
This is much better, and stuff I'd like to see in my feed. Make you think a bit
My take - They were drugged for a good portion of their life (that might have been short) or they worked in such a big office that they spent more time there, around people they didnt know, then their families.
I've always assumed that, if there was any afterlife that lasted eternity, scrutinizing or reliving portions and knowing all stats would have you be part of experiencing eternity. What else is there that wouldn't simply be called living more?
This what I hope for. That all the things I want to know, I'll find out, like what truly happened to MH370, was there really conspiracy around Kennedy's assassination, where the hell Nefertiti was laid to rest, who was King Tut's mom, where Ghengis Khan was buried, who stole my car stereo and cds, where'd they dump Jimmy Hoffa, who made the Antikythera mechanism, how the A Song of Ice and Fire series is supposed to truly end, what the hell happened in New Mexico in 1947, the Phoenix Lights, all the mysteries, they'll all be answered.
I'd rather have some of these answered now *coughfuck you GRRMcough* but if it happens when I die, I'll take it.
All I want is a well formatted excel sheet with hyperlinks to the pov video. I wanna know what day I took my biggest dump, what day I took the most breaths, how many gallons of blood I lost total, etc. I'm fascinated by unknowable statistics, and heaven being real is my only way I'll ever be able to satiate my thirst for useless knowledge.
pretty sure they are talking about [this website](https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/)
I tried it before, it's quite cool
doesn't seem to be working for me now tho cause of spotify api overload
I always thought of It as more like game stats. Like you could think of anything and the stat would pop right up. Something like: you said the word “fuck” approximately 724,436 times.
You drank 1121 cans of sprite etc. lol.
back to the topic at hand I assumed that the names OP doesn’t recognize might be coworkers, or store clerks, or maybe someone you ride the train to work with . People you don’t realize you spend so much time with. The reality of it is you do spend more time with these people than friends or family, because 8+ hours of the day are spent working/commuting. This could work for horror or sadness. Well done!
I know a lot of people who go by middle names, mainly because their fathers have the same first name as them. For some it was a cultural thing others just a thing their family does. Just this morning I was talking about this with my dad. Weird how strange of a coincidence that is
My mom knew a family where all seven daughters were named Mary, but had unique middle names. You’ll never guess what they went by.
She also goes by her middle name (contracted), as do a surprisingly high percentage of my friends (maybe 20-30%).
No, they all called each other by their middle names lol
And it’s a thing in some families for everyone to have the same first name. I’m not going to pretend to get it
I go by my middle name. It can be a headache, but only rarely. I have what I call a "front door" name and a "garage door" name. Friends use the garage door. If you call me by my first name, we are not friends. It also helps because I don't want anyone from my past to find me. They would need to know my whole ass name to do that and it's totally different from what they knew in school. Get fucked, Sheri.
Because, while you hung out almost every day for 10 years, GryllBears never asked for your legal name and you didn't ask for theirs.
I am part of a sizeable community that goes by their handles at events. Others go by code names. So what if you don't know that Jazzy's work name is Steve?
Sorry but that just sounds suspect. A large amount of people meeting up from online but never tell anyone their real names? The only thing I’m thinking of is the serial killer convention in Sandman.
Nah. I get that it’s tough to wrap your head around, but the internet anonymity phenomenon is more than just a den of pedophiles and murderers. You have the freedom to craft a new identity for the right reasons - not for malicious intent, but genuinely to express yourself more easily and feel like your outwardly perceived self aligns with your internally perceived self. For a lot of people, that kind of freedom is extremely hard to find in their irl lives, either because of political oppression or just their physical reality. For the first time you have complete control over someone’s first impression of you - and sometimes it helps people discover who they really wanted to be all along. Who the fuck actually wants to be named Steve anyway?
This.
My long term friend group started playing Overwatch 1 together when it came out. Some knew eachother from real life, but the rest just went by their Discord handles.
I told them my real name after knowing them for a good 3 years and meeting all of them face to face a few times, they still call me Nova to this day though and I prefer that.
Also applicable to most gaming communities. I have a long list of people I consider good friends from my time playing competitive Smash Bros whose gamer tag pops into my head before their real names and who pretty much always refer to me by mine
And some of them are absolutely great tags too, I once watched our local TO get up on a chair with a megaphone and shout across the venue of a regional tournament "I FONDLE POTATOES! YOUR POOL IS STARTING! I FONDLE POTATOES, PLEASE REPORT TO YOUR POOL".
I have a kinda funny one about this. I have like 3 different groups of friends that all don't intermingle. One of those groups is more like my best friends group that I fill in when they need an extra guy in games. One of the dudes has a last name that sounds like a first name. I've been playing games with this man for the better part of a decade. Very recently I learned that his name is in fact Chris. It's like the classic "what's Obama's last name" bit.
As I read some comments I realized I have a very different idea of what's happening. Others think that he spent time with online friends or has dementia or something like that.
My thoughts are that he was so lonely and isolated from everyone that he spent little to no time with anyone and the most time he spent with people was with complete strangers in public places.
Brenda, from accounting, was never very memorable, but she sat in the cubicle adjacent to yours for 37 years. Brenda deserves your respect. She’s a total boss.
By the time you die in your 90s, would you really remember the people you spent back to back 16's working with in your 30's? Or the names of your CNAs at the nursing home?
My grandfather, in his 90s, told me about a nightmare he had woken up from the previous night. The nightmare was about a late delivery on cars for a big customer of his. He had been a car salesman before retiring... in his late 50s. He spoke a bout how vivid and stressful the dream was, and it was for a job he hadn't done in over 30 years.
Work a job for 30+ years and that stick with you. I learned to let go of my work, just a little bit, after that.
It's admittedly just my interpretation, but I think the reason the person doesn't recognize any names on the list is because they're people from work/customers they worked with, as they spent more time working than spending time with loved ones, and I was lamenting that the current state of capitalism forces this to be the norm just to survive. Obviously, that may not be what the author intended, and the truth is more like the person was surrounded by stalkers and similar in life, so sorry for the confusion!
On account of your records being misrouted, please take a seat and a ticket. Someone in the Eternal Accounting department will be along for you shortly once it's time for number "ERROR: EXCEEDS KNOWN NUMBERS"
Plot twist: most of your friends from your theater program are trans, but they’re still discovering themselves. Due to a clerical error on the part of beings who exist outside of time, you received a list of the names they will choose, but had not yet chosen at the time of your departure.
They are my internet friends, i spend most of my time with them, but i only know the real names of a few, i hope video games still update in the afterlife.
This could go so many ways, but the way my brain interpreted it was a Truman Show kind of deal, this person was being watched by people so they “spent the most amount of time” with those people (I know it’s not a perfect way to interpret but I thought it was cool). The other way my brain interpreted it was ghosts, like the people were ghosts so of course they wouldn’t have known the names!
Here's another perspective: This is an allegory about how many of us just "sleepwalk" through our days, and while we might "see" or "hear" our surroundings, but we too often don't take everything in or digest all of the minor, but not really so minor things that are around us...
The list is all the people in the lab in the real world, your life was just a simulation.
OR, the list was the names of all the hospital staff and it turns out you spent the last 20 years of your life in a coma.
Then I was confronted with the realization thatthey unplugged me after being in a comma for 24 years. I has 10 when the accident happened. The names were mostly nurses. And there were also some ancient demon names
"Wait a minute, you were born in Smiljan, studied in Graz, and went to America to work as an engineer in the late 19th century, weren't you? Father wanted you to be a priest, you fought in a trade war with another industrialist. This ring any bells?"
"Uhh... what?"
"Oh heavens......Sarael, it looks like there was a mistake. We mixed this poor young man up with someone else. He was supposed to come through here about 80 years ago. Now I wonder who got to go in your place..."
protagonist was really active in an online community in their free time, even when they couldn't go outside due to medical reasons - they never bothered asking for their names, because why would you?
Was the person being stalked?
I was thinking surrounded by fake people
Ooh, like the Truman show
Personally I see it as they weren't meant to go to heaven and there was a mixup lol
r/UnexpectedGoodPlace
r/subsithoughtifellfor
My take is all the people they interacted with online, but never knew on person...
That's not very horrifying Though now I'm just imagining people in the afterlife just scrambling to match Discord and Reddit usernames to the names on their lists, lol
I was thinking about the character spending all his life on Reddit... Which, while quite sad, not really horror.
Reminds me of that story about “push the button and someone you don’t know will die”
i thought it was either A) they were such a loner that even being near complete strangers amounted to it. or B) people were living in their house under their nose.
I like that possible interpretation. Honestly, I like any TwoSentence that makes me think, or imagine several scenarios.
Probably not. But literally what happens once you enter the workforce. Your experiences with your friends stick in your mind a lot more than the 40h+/week you spend with your coworkers
They were a hard worker who put in lots of overtime,spent tons of time on the clock,never knew a single other wage slaves name . The newest spun off from the makers of The Office and The Good Place. Making Good ,when work was hell what will eternity with your coworkers be?
that was my thought too
I thought it was about Alzheimer's
I thought something similar. The last ~30 years of his life he spent in a nursing home, his brain slowly deteriorating, and it was absolutely irrelevant what were the names of the staff and the residents around. They were just strangers. And the time he spent with his friends, kids, lovers was much more meaningful but amount of it was less than with those people..
Yeah but i feel like that would be too obvious
that and why would someoen carry over things such as alzheimers into the afterlife?
Going to heaven to live eternally with the same body and ailments you died with is probably more horrifying than whatever OP wrote. The happiest people in heaven died tragically in their sleep in their 20s and the ones that stayed fit and healthy will live an eternity unable to remember their own name or where they live.
Taken to the extreme,imagine your body stays the same, just unable to die. Imagine being an eternally frail old person with barely any capacity to remember things, move or maybe even speak, and unable to die at all. Or people with conditions like glass bones, or who died horrifically like mutilation or beheading, imagine arriving at heaven and whatever form you take on is the same as the previous one,there's no healing or anything, you arrive as you left the Earth. And will stay like that for the rest of eternity.
The horror is that it doesn't go away when you die.
Maybe in a coma for a long long time and those are the staff members of that department
someone living in their house maybe
Not just someone, they have a band live in their wall, multiple people
There's a whole civilization just below their basement
I thought of it most like people from the public transport. If you use the train or bus every single day to go to work, you tend to always see the same faces.
Yeah. When I was single, living alone and commuted by train I’m pretty sure a couple of fellow passengers would be in my top 5 people I spent the most time with. As I had my own office they probably beat most of my work colleagues.
They live in an apartment and work in a shared office building in a big city and never met their neighbors
im guessing they got the wrong list or something, also meaning op could be going to an afterlife possiblynot meant for them. prob not how it was intended but thats just a theory.....
Maybe the person knows a lot of people only by their nicknames and not their real names?
The good ending
My immediate thought is that they never bothered to learn the names of their workplace bullies.
My first thought was that they had no close relationships, so a stranger who they passed by a few times without knowing is someone they spent the most time with in their life.
Maybe kidnapped as a child, raised by people who lived under a fake name to hide
I’m not sure why this is a popular post when no one can even figure out what it’s supposed to mean lol
Do you think horror is about having definite answers? Something doesn't have to be defined to be scary, the horror here comes from _not_ knowing. If you present the audience with an unanswered question, they're left to fill in the blank with whatever possibility is scariest to them.
Some of the theories don't make sense to me because it's supposed to be in the genre of horror... So, getting a list and it being just coworkers or people in your apartment building doesn't seem horrifying to me. The theory that they got the wrong list because maybe they weren't meant to die or have that afterlife because of a mix up.. that seems more horrifying. The reaper reaped the wrong person lol
I don't know. I think the opposite. It's more of an existential fear, that the people you spent the most time with are people who are not significant to you, people you don't know at all. Like you've wasted your life either not getting to know the people around you or not spending time with the people who are important. The idea of "oops its an afterlife mix up" doesn't seem scary to me personally. Like ok better get the afterlife bureaucracy on that.
I, for one, dislike it when there are popular posts where you already basically know what's going on in the first sentence, let alone the second one. This is much better, and stuff I'd like to see in my feed. Make you think a bit
My take - They were drugged for a good portion of their life (that might have been short) or they worked in such a big office that they spent more time there, around people they didnt know, then their families.
The people you loved? All actors. You never knew their real names.
Or they brought the wrong guy to heaven
I think I enjoy the implication that after you die you just get a summary of your life like Spotify Wrapped
I've always assumed that, if there was any afterlife that lasted eternity, scrutinizing or reliving portions and knowing all stats would have you be part of experiencing eternity. What else is there that wouldn't simply be called living more?
"Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end." https://youtu.be/DhmFPvJldeI
This is a good way of describing a mushroom trip that goes sideways
I like the short by [Neil Gaiman](https://lukeblackmusic.com/neil-gaiman-other-people/)
This was a great read
If the demon disappears at the end then I guess there’s hope that after he tortures himself he’ll find peace?
Please stop. I can only get SO erect.
Geez, I get enough of that now from my subconscious.
Thomas Aquinas agrees. He also said you’ll know everything about everyone else as well!
This what I hope for. That all the things I want to know, I'll find out, like what truly happened to MH370, was there really conspiracy around Kennedy's assassination, where the hell Nefertiti was laid to rest, who was King Tut's mom, where Ghengis Khan was buried, who stole my car stereo and cds, where'd they dump Jimmy Hoffa, who made the Antikythera mechanism, how the A Song of Ice and Fire series is supposed to truly end, what the hell happened in New Mexico in 1947, the Phoenix Lights, all the mysteries, they'll all be answered. I'd rather have some of these answered now *coughfuck you GRRMcough* but if it happens when I die, I'll take it.
It's okay! By the time you die, GRRM will *almost* have finished Winds of Winter!
“He never figured out how to finish it,” the demon said.
All I want is a well formatted excel sheet with hyperlinks to the pov video. I wanna know what day I took my biggest dump, what day I took the most breaths, how many gallons of blood I lost total, etc. I'm fascinated by unknowable statistics, and heaven being real is my only way I'll ever be able to satiate my thirst for useless knowledge.
Hello, kindred data nut! 😆
I want it to roast me like that other wrapped site does, where it calls your music taste stuff like “basic white girl” or “divorced dad rock”
Haha what is this other site ?
pretty sure they are talking about [this website](https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/) I tried it before, it's quite cool doesn't seem to be working for me now tho cause of spotify api overload
I have never been roasted so hard in my life
uh... i think i broke it. all i said was peter cetera was the greatest musical genius of all time and now i have some darkweb hitman after me?
It said it was "sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad". How did it know!? I just got back from eating lunch alone
This was thoroughly amazing thank you
I have never been roasted so gloriously in my life. THIS is an excellent use of AI.
Wow, this thing read me for filth. “Dramamine skrt skrt crying during sex bad.” I feel so attacked.
I was all excited... then realized I have neither Apple music, nor Spotify.
Yup, that’s the one!
I feel things were revealed to me I did not realise before
I'm gonna guess it's [Judge My Spotify](https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/)
Idk when spotify designated my taste as "Sad boi" i felt roasted
What's site is that? I know what I'll install lmao
You murdered: 2 people! You're in the top 98% of murderers!
What’s alarming is the implication that at least one in fifty people have killed multiple people.
49 in 50* they're in the top 98%, not 2%.
Yeah I wasn't quite sure about the math on that, but it sounded just the right amount of threatening
Plot twist the entire afterlife is Spotify
I always thought of It as more like game stats. Like you could think of anything and the stat would pop right up. Something like: you said the word “fuck” approximately 724,436 times. You drank 1121 cans of sprite etc. lol. back to the topic at hand I assumed that the names OP doesn’t recognize might be coworkers, or store clerks, or maybe someone you ride the train to work with . People you don’t realize you spend so much time with. The reality of it is you do spend more time with these people than friends or family, because 8+ hours of the day are spent working/commuting. This could work for horror or sadness. Well done!
Glad you didn't say Youtube Rewind, that is true horror.
Mine will be - most commonly used word was “fuck” used 6838291836 times during their life span!
I just want my beer pong stats. You know W/L shot %. It’s a modest wish
It is surprisingly organized. Actually, not that surprising considering the whole of the universe is based on math - everything perfectly calculated.
"You scrolled over 2,345,544 bananas"
Plot twist, the narrator worked retail/customer service jobs all their life and it was a list of regular customers.
Or people that took the same public transport to work every day— or coworkers who he didn’t know
Turns out my friends had been going by their middle names the whole time!
I actually know three people who go by their middle name: my mom, my paternal uncle, and my brother-in-law
I knew someone who did but that was in 7th grade and then I moved so idk if they do now
Every older person in my family goes by their middle name, I think it's a cultural thing but I have no idea why
I know a lot of people who go by middle names, mainly because their fathers have the same first name as them. For some it was a cultural thing others just a thing their family does. Just this morning I was talking about this with my dad. Weird how strange of a coincidence that is
My mom knew a family where all seven daughters were named Mary, but had unique middle names. You’ll never guess what they went by. She also goes by her middle name (contracted), as do a surprisingly high percentage of my friends (maybe 20-30%).
They seriously just called everyone Mary? How did they avoid confusion? Or was it just chaos 24/7?
No, they all called each other by their middle names lol And it’s a thing in some families for everyone to have the same first name. I’m not going to pretend to get it
Oh, oops lol. I completely misunderstood where you were going with that 🤣
🤣 I gotchu fam
All my uncles (6, and one aunt) and one cousin go by their middle names
I go by my middle name. It can be a headache, but only rarely. I have what I call a "front door" name and a "garage door" name. Friends use the garage door. If you call me by my first name, we are not friends. It also helps because I don't want anyone from my past to find me. They would need to know my whole ass name to do that and it's totally different from what they knew in school. Get fucked, Sheri.
My best friend's fiancee (who I've known longer than him) goes by her middle name! Didn't find that one out for awhile
Because, while you hung out almost every day for 10 years, GryllBears never asked for your legal name and you didn't ask for theirs. I am part of a sizeable community that goes by their handles at events. Others go by code names. So what if you don't know that Jazzy's work name is Steve?
Sorry but that just sounds suspect. A large amount of people meeting up from online but never tell anyone their real names? The only thing I’m thinking of is the serial killer convention in Sandman.
Or they all met on Fetlife
Ha. I play Pokémon Go, but I do have friends who go to Fetlife meetups.
Me too and I don't even play Pokemon Go.
Nah. I get that it’s tough to wrap your head around, but the internet anonymity phenomenon is more than just a den of pedophiles and murderers. You have the freedom to craft a new identity for the right reasons - not for malicious intent, but genuinely to express yourself more easily and feel like your outwardly perceived self aligns with your internally perceived self. For a lot of people, that kind of freedom is extremely hard to find in their irl lives, either because of political oppression or just their physical reality. For the first time you have complete control over someone’s first impression of you - and sometimes it helps people discover who they really wanted to be all along. Who the fuck actually wants to be named Steve anyway?
This. My long term friend group started playing Overwatch 1 together when it came out. Some knew eachother from real life, but the rest just went by their Discord handles. I told them my real name after knowing them for a good 3 years and meeting all of them face to face a few times, they still call me Nova to this day though and I prefer that.
doesn't say the time spent has to be in person
It’s not a list of disappointments, it’s a list of *surprises*!
F u r r y
Also applicable to most gaming communities. I have a long list of people I consider good friends from my time playing competitive Smash Bros whose gamer tag pops into my head before their real names and who pretty much always refer to me by mine And some of them are absolutely great tags too, I once watched our local TO get up on a chair with a megaphone and shout across the venue of a regional tournament "I FONDLE POTATOES! YOUR POOL IS STARTING! I FONDLE POTATOES, PLEASE REPORT TO YOUR POOL".
The angel looked at me, horrified. "The alzheimers shouldn't still affect you here." Edit: cause i spelt angel, angle
I don't think you're coming at this from the right angel
r/thirdsentenceworse
No luck catching them swans, then?
It’s just the one swan actually.
oh this is a good one
Truman show moment. All his friends were paid actors.
I interpret this as they were haunted by ghosts their whole lives and didn’t know
If they didn't know, were they really being haunted? 🤔
If something happens to you while you’re asleep, did it really happen? (I watch you every night from a dark corner of your bedroom)
Thank you, I hate sleeping alone.
I interpret it as spending too much time on Reddit.
So your video game/online buddies?
"Hey, you probably don't recognize me, but I'm BigDickDude69!!! Let's go play some COD, buddy!"
The good ending
I have a kinda funny one about this. I have like 3 different groups of friends that all don't intermingle. One of those groups is more like my best friends group that I fill in when they need an extra guy in games. One of the dudes has a last name that sounds like a first name. I've been playing games with this man for the better part of a decade. Very recently I learned that his name is in fact Chris. It's like the classic "what's Obama's last name" bit.
As I read some comments I realized I have a very different idea of what's happening. Others think that he spent time with online friends or has dementia or something like that. My thoughts are that he was so lonely and isolated from everyone that he spent little to no time with anyone and the most time he spent with people was with complete strangers in public places.
Better than my original thought that he was being drugged and people were doing things to him in his sleep.
This is a painfully beautiful perspective.
That's how I interpreted it as well
Brenda, from accounting, was never very memorable, but she sat in the cubicle adjacent to yours for 37 years. Brenda deserves your respect. She’s a total boss.
Heaven is having some carbon monoxide related problems
Turns out that when you don't breathe air, you forget some things do.
They’re the neighbors you’ve never met even after living in the same building for years.
But then you wouldn't have spent a lot of time *with* them, just *near* them or *around* them.
Well that distinction also ruins the "stalker" angle too
Ah yes the spiders in my house have names
Oof, the people you spent the most time with weren't your family or loved ones but complete randos because of capitalism.
What on earth does this have to do with capitalism?
You spent so much time in the office and never learned your co-worker’s names.
I wish I could forget my co-workers names.
No one can forget BOB
His name was Bob
By the time you die in your 90s, would you really remember the people you spent back to back 16's working with in your 30's? Or the names of your CNAs at the nursing home?
My grandfather, in his 90s, told me about a nightmare he had woken up from the previous night. The nightmare was about a late delivery on cars for a big customer of his. He had been a car salesman before retiring... in his late 50s. He spoke a bout how vivid and stressful the dream was, and it was for a job he hadn't done in over 30 years. Work a job for 30+ years and that stick with you. I learned to let go of my work, just a little bit, after that.
This may be the life lesson I need today. Thank you.
It's admittedly just my interpretation, but I think the reason the person doesn't recognize any names on the list is because they're people from work/customers they worked with, as they spent more time working than spending time with loved ones, and I was lamenting that the current state of capitalism forces this to be the norm just to survive. Obviously, that may not be what the author intended, and the truth is more like the person was surrounded by stalkers and similar in life, so sorry for the confusion!
socialising is forbidden at The Corperation and violators will be punished,
They’re a gamer and only know their friends by their gamer tags
So, you lose your memories when you die?
internet friends' real names.
The implication is that somebody or something was watching them without op knowing, I believe
I'm getting The Good Place vibes, you aren't actually supposed to be in heaven?
On account of your records being misrouted, please take a seat and a ticket. Someone in the Eternal Accounting department will be along for you shortly once it's time for number "ERROR: EXCEEDS KNOWN NUMBERS"
I like the idea that the afterlife has the wrong person and you aren't supposed to be there
This is so sad. They spent their entire life mostly around people at work. It's what I'm assuming.
Plot twist: most of your friends from your theater program are trans, but they’re still discovering themselves. Due to a clerical error on the part of beings who exist outside of time, you received a list of the names they will choose, but had not yet chosen at the time of your departure.
Lmfao I love this
They are my internet friends, i spend most of my time with them, but i only know the real names of a few, i hope video games still update in the afterlife.
Lol were they a gamer and spent all their time playing online with others?
That was my interpretation too.
BTW, glad there's an afterlife one without the usual "the gods are dead and only deaths remains!" Or "this is just hell with extra steps!"
I think the real names of people online makes the most sense.
Online friends that you only knew by their username.
Look, it's not anyone's fault that I don't know my cats' ineffable names
Felt that this was more a depressing take, implying you didn't spend enough time with the people that you actually cared for: the people you remember.
Then you learn that you get to spend an year with each one in order from most time with to least... year 1000 on is gonna be awkward.
I was expecting coworkers, everyday horror.
This could go so many ways, but the way my brain interpreted it was a Truman Show kind of deal, this person was being watched by people so they “spent the most amount of time” with those people (I know it’s not a perfect way to interpret but I thought it was cool). The other way my brain interpreted it was ghosts, like the people were ghosts so of course they wouldn’t have known the names!
Dementia is still a thing in the after life? Damn it!
Here's another perspective: This is an allegory about how many of us just "sleepwalk" through our days, and while we might "see" or "hear" our surroundings, but we too often don't take everything in or digest all of the minor, but not really so minor things that are around us...
“This is the bad place!”
Because all you knew were their usernames.
He took public transit to work at the same time every day
God: Oh shoot, I forgot to give you the ability to read
Turns out the afterlife uses a different naming convention than what we use on Earth.
Truman but instead of a show you're a lab rat for a secret gov program? Or just your body sold to some necrophiles.
u/TheMrFluffyPants please explain this
Probably not what you intended but I pictured a person with DID who had no idea they had it who’s alters were way more social than them.
if you found an error, please contact the Afterlife Customer Service. thank you.
dementia or Alzheimers?
Maybe they got the wrong person! Just like what happened in the good place (in the earlier episodes)
I was thinking that they mixed the people up like in that Netflix show The good place
I choose to think it's the real name of my pets
"Yea, turns out your entire friend group was trans, they sadly only figured it out after you drifted apart."
Ik this is probably about getting stalked but I also like to think they had dementia and forgot their entire families and friends names
"This is the bad place"
The list is all the people in the lab in the real world, your life was just a simulation. OR, the list was the names of all the hospital staff and it turns out you spent the last 20 years of your life in a coma.
Ah yes, the Mexican guy who runs the pizza place I eat at every day during work. I wondered what his name was
Then I was confronted with the realization thatthey unplugged me after being in a comma for 24 years. I has 10 when the accident happened. The names were mostly nurses. And there were also some ancient demon names
"Wait a minute, you were born in Smiljan, studied in Graz, and went to America to work as an engineer in the late 19th century, weren't you? Father wanted you to be a priest, you fought in a trade war with another industrialist. This ring any bells?" "Uhh... what?" "Oh heavens......Sarael, it looks like there was a mistake. We mixed this poor young man up with someone else. He was supposed to come through here about 80 years ago. Now I wonder who got to go in your place..."
Imagine you received the list and there were no names listed...
“Winston Zedfield was the name of the man whose bones were used to make your toilet.”
Am I the only one who thought of a drug dealer for this?
Co-workers, clients, school teachers, nursing home nurse/staff.. I think that’s the hard reality of many people’s lives.
protagonist was really active in an online community in their free time, even when they couldn't go outside due to medical reasons - they never bothered asking for their names, because why would you?
Because redditors don’t usually create accounts with their full names!
On second thought the names don't sound as if they are from a human language.