The freedom to exist: Anubistic reflections for the Day of the Dead
The fate of humans is to become food for worms. For the Day of the Dead the Prophet wonders whether we get there having lived, or having merely existed for a long time.
by The Prophet — 2026-11-02
1 We have already discussed Anubistic life and death in the Sacred Tome.
2 We have seen that the fate of humans is to become food for worms.
3 We have discussed how accepting this condition frees humans from superstition, lets them live to the full and saves them time to devote to something useful.
4 We also introduced the concept of “Anubistic Quality of Life”, which leads you to focus your time on living fully, on not letting anyone bust your balls and, if possible, on not busting them yourself.
5 Today, on the occasion of the Day of the Dead, the doddering old fool wise and enlightened Prophet would like to offer a deeper reflection that starts from a quotation.
6 “There is no reason why you should think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long, he has existed long.”
7 Thus Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, invites us to tell apart two things we too often confuse: living and lasting.
Passing through time
8 Life, in its biological dimension, is a natural phenomenon.
9 We are born, we grow, we age and we die.
10 Time passes regardless of our will, and our body inevitably follows its course.
11 But can we really say that the mere passing of time is living?
12 A man who has spent eighty years giving up on thinking for himself, on choosing, on deciding about his own life: has he really lived eighty years?
13 Or has he merely passed through time?
14 Anubistically speaking, he may have spent eighty years getting ready to become food for worms, without even treating himself to the satisfaction of living before being eaten.
A value that never comes again
15 Heidegger adds an incomprehensible fundamental element to this reflection: Being-towards-death.
16 Awareness of death is not necessarily a sentence to anguish or despair.
17 On the contrary, it can become what gives life back its meaning.
18 It is precisely because our existence is limited that every choice takes on a value that never comes again.
19 Lost time cannot be recovered, and a life put off cannot be lived after retirement later.
20 And yet one element is still missing: Kierkegaard writes that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”.
21 Freedom puts before us an endless number of possibilities, but it also loads us with the weight of choosing.
22 Being free means being able to make mistakes, being able to fail, being able to give up the comforting certainties that others would like to impose on us.
23 So freedom can be frightening.
24 It is much easier to hand your decisions over to your brother-in-law others, to accept ready-packaged truths, to follow pre-set paths.
25 That way you seem to free yourself from the anguish of choosing, but you risk giving up your own authentic existence at the same time.
The bridge between them
26 This is where Anubism finds, in the freedom to be and to exist, the foundation of a true life.
27 Not because freedom guarantees happiness, wisdom or personal fulfilment.
28 But because without freedom you lose the possibility of deciding for yourself what your life means.
29 To be means to recognise yourself as an individual.
30 To exist means being able to turn that individuality into choices, actions, experiences and responsibilities.
31 Freedom is the bridge between these two dimensions.
32 Death, then, takes on a meaning different from the one traditionally given to it.
33 It is not only the end of biological life.
34 It is the final limit before which we are called to ask ourselves what we have done with the time we were granted.
35 What matters is not only how long we have lived, but how much of our life has truly been ours.
36 And here the Prophet wishes to recall a fundamental Anubistic truth: the dead have at least one advantage over the living, in that they no longer have to put up with people who presume to teach them how to live.
37 Unfortunately, to reach this state of absolute tranquillity, you have to die first.
38 Which is a not inconsiderable drawback.
39 On this Day of the Dead, then, we can remember those who are no longer with us, but we can also put a question to ourselves, who are still alive:
40 Are we really living our existence, or are we simply letting time go by?
41 Because death is inevitable.
42 Giving up freedom, on the other hand, isn't always.
43 And perhaps the most authentic way to honour life, on the very day we remember death, is to claim the freedom to be what we are and to build, for as long as we can, our own existence.
44 May Anubis help you win and defend your freedom, because only those who are free can hope to live fully.
45 And remember that, in the end, we will all become food for worms.
46 But let's at least try not to get there after spending our whole lives letting influencers other people eat our brains.
47 May Anubis be with you.
48 The doddering old fool enlightened Prophet