The Eternal Beta Test: Agnosticism in the Age of Death-Denial Tech and Trauma Theology
Sunday, April 13, 2025. This is for my late son, Daniel Gordon Hamilton, who always wanted to know.
If the first half of the 20th century was about surviving fascism and fluoride, the 21st is about surviving the death of meaning.
Not death itself—no, we’ve got cryogenic startups for that—but the death of the idea that anything really matters when your data plan renews automatically.
Enter agnosticism: the only spiritual posture brave enough to say, “I’m not buying it, but I’m not mocking it either.”
A cognitive shrug dressed in tweed. A worldview perfectly calibrated for a civilization that can no longer distinguish between sacred truth and a productivity hack.
Silicon Valley and the Gospel of Never Die™
Let’s talk about the cult of immortality in Levi’s.
Silicon Valley—the Vatican of techno-gnosticism—has been quietly building a new theology, one that doesn’t need God, just good venture capital.
Peter Thiel wants to live forever. Ray Kurzweil wants to upload consciousness to the cloud. Sam Altman wants you to believe the singularity will gently shepherd your soul into a better body, one with abs and perfect recall.
This is not faith. This is faith’s emotionally avoidant twin.
Eternal life, yes—but please remove the pesky moral obligations, the sermons, the beggars, and the mystery.
Just give us the clean interface. The neat API. The eternal onboarding loop.
And if agnostics look indecisive in this context, it’s only because they still remember how to grieve.
They haven’t bought the subscription model of immortality yet. They still suspect that death means something, and that maybe not everything is hackable. They’re not unsure because they’re weak. They’re unsure because they're sane.
Agnostics might be the only ones who’ve read the Terms and Conditions—and paused at the part about “eternal simulated consciousness” and said: “Wait. Who signed off on this?”
Trauma is the New Metaphysics
Now pivot, if you will, from the labs of Palo Alto to the therapy rooms of Brooklyn.
We have replaced the soul with the nervous system, and sin with dysregulation.
The self is now a bundle of attachment wounds, inner child exiles, and cortisol spikes.
Your past lives are your formative relationships.
Your ex is your shadow work.
And instead of priests, you now confess to your therapist, or worse, to your followers in a Reel with a soft piano track.
We no longer ask what is true. We ask what is validating.
And here’s the twist: agnosticism is threatening not just to religion, but to therapy culture. Because it doesn’t offer resolution. It doesn’t brand your pain. It doesn’t monetize your mystery.
Agnostics in 2025 are surrounded by people who either want to optimize death away or therapize the existential into a diagnosis.
And yet they persist in their quiet refusal to decide. They don’t need a label. They don’t need to be “on a journey.” They’re just standing still, staring into the abyss, and refusing to turn it into a TED Talk.
Belief as Branding, Doubt as Resistance
What the agnostic posture suggests—what terrifies both influencers and intellectuals—is that maybe not everything is supposed to be fixed. That uncertainty isn’t a bug, but a feature of consciousness. That living in the question isn’t failure—it’s fidelity to reality.
Because let’s face it: in a narcissistic culture, belief is no longer about the divine.
It’s about you. Your aesthetic. Your moral alignment. Your curated vibe. Your morning ritual. Atheists have long since turned their disbelief into an identity—Darwin fish and all. Christians turned faith into merch millennia ago. But agnostics… what do they sell?
Nothing. And in a world where everything is for sale, that makes them dangerous.
Faith Is Dead. Long Live the Algorithm.
If God is dead, then surely He was killed by bad Wi-Fi and lifestyle branding.
Modern faith, such as it is, has been demoted to a personal aesthetic—an accessory for your LinkedIn bio or your hinge profile.
We no longer practice belief. We curate it.
Today, we don’t believe in God.
We believe in yoga, kombucha, and whatever podcast has the courage to misquote Carl Jung. The spiritual impulse hasn’t gone away—it’s just been filtered, monetized, and cross-posted. Churches may be empty, but Instagram tarot readers are fully booked.
We can now “believe in energy,” follow moon cycles, keep a gratitude journal, and still feel absolutely no obligation to surrender our egos to anything larger than our daily planner. It's faith without metaphysics, morality without commandments, and spirituality without inconvenience.
Call it God-as-a-Service (GaaS). Subscription-based transcendence. Cancel anytime.
And yet… lurking behind this glossy, endlessly-optimized simulacrum of belief is the ancient thing itself: mortality.
The quiet tick of the cosmic clock.
And this is where the whole system falters. Because you can monetize attention, but you can't algorithmically suppress the void forever. Not without consequences.
Agnostics, ironically, may be the only ones honest enough to stop pretending we’ve figured it all out.
FOMO and the Afterlife: Why Heaven Lost to Brunch
Fear of missing out used to mean not getting invited to the cool party.
Now it means not getting reincarnated with your soulmate in the fourth density of Lemurian consciousness because you didn’t do enough inner child work by the solstice.
Our cultural theology has shifted.
The new afterlife isn’t heaven. It’s the perfectly optimized life that you could be living, if only you had better habits, more confidence, and a six-figure spiritual mentor. Eternal reward? Try “hot girl walk with affirmations and cold-pressed penance.”
In this economy, FOMO doesn’t stop at death—it extends into it.
We envy people who seem spiritually complete. We fear wasting our lives with the wrong belief system, the wrong brand of mindfulness, the wrong YouTube guru. We are less afraid of hell than we are of not self-actualizing by 40.
This is why agnosticism appears neurotic in the data.
It’s not because agnostics are naturally indecisive. It’s because they’re surrounded by performative certainty. They live in a world where everyone is pretending to have found the answer—and doing so with better lighting.
But agnostics are the spiritual equivalent of the friend who stays in the car after the cult seminar and says, “I don’t know, man. That guy didn’t blink once. Something felt off.”
In a world terrified of making the wrong eternal choice, choosing nothing—honestly—might be the only choice with integrity.
Part 3: The Funeral Selfie and the End of Mystery
Here’s the final act of the play: death has been aestheticized. It is no longer sacred. It is content.
The funeral selfie—yes, it's real—isn't just a tasteless meme.
It's a symbol. It marks the moment when the last mystery in human life—death itself—was pulled into the public eye and asked to perform.
Mourners pose with coffins. Ashes are turned into jewelry. Grief is now a branding opportunity for your emotional depth.
What does this have to do with faith?
Everything.
When death becomes a prop, belief becomes unnecessary. Why contemplate the abyss when you can just filter it? Why turn to a priest when your follower count offers real-time moral feedback?
In this context, agnosticism isn’t just the refusal to choose a religion. It’s the refusal to reduce death to a marketing opportunity.
It’s a protest against the monetization of mystery. It's standing at the edge of the canyon and not recording a TikTok.
Just staring. Maybe crying. Definitely not hashtagging it #growth.
Agnostics are modern-day monks, except instead of vows of silence, they’ve taken vows of epistemic restraint. They don’t know. And they’re not going to lie to themselves about it just to make everyone else feel more comfortable.
Faith, FOMO, and the Funeral Selfie: How Belief Became a Branding Exercise in a Culture Afraid to Die
The study by Moise & Saroglou (2024) examined over 330 adults across the UK, sorted into three groups: Christians, atheists, and agnostics.
Using the Big Five Inventory, Frost’s indecisiveness scale, Schwartz’s maximization scale, and a self-enhancement battery (how positively people rated themselves on traits like intelligence, prosociality, etc.), the researchers sketched a psychological portrait of the modern agnostic.
And it’s not flattering—but it is fascinating.
Agnostics scored:
Higher in Neuroticism than both Christians and atheists.
Higher in Indecisiveness—the strongest single predictor of agnostic identity.
Higher in “Maximizing”—meaning they expend more energy trying to find the “best” option across life domains (career, belief system, even leisure).
Lower in Positive Affect than Christians, and
Less Self-Enhancing—meaning they didn’t rate themselves as “better than average” like the other two groups.
In other words, the agnostics were more anxious, less certain, more searching, and less self-congratulatory.
Which is, perhaps, exactly what makes them believable.
Complementary research supports the idea that religious conviction (even when irrational) can act as a buffer against anxiety and death-related rumination (Vail et al., 2010). Terror Management Theory suggests that cultural worldviews—particularly religious ones—help
The Final Heresy: Admitting You Don’t Know
There’s something radical, almost punk, about admitting we don’t know what happens after we die—and resisting the pressure to pretend otherwise.
In an age where your brand is your soul and your soul is monetized, to be agnostic is to quietly opt out of the metaphysical rat race.
You can’t market agnosticism.
You can’t NFT it.
You can’t filter it.
It’s not confident enough for Twitter, not tortured enough for TikTok, and not hashtag-optimized for Instagram.
It's the last unpolished thing left in a world that's shellacked in self-certainty.
Maybe that’s the point.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCE
Moise, K., & Saroglou, V. (2024). Agnosticism as a distinct type of nonbelief: The role of indecisiveness, maximization, and low self-enhancement. Self & Identity. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/selfidentity2024
Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1178
Frost, R. O., & Shows, D. L. (1993). The nature and measurement of compulsive indecisiveness. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31(7), 683–692. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(93)90121-A
Vail, K. E., Arndt, J., Cox, C. R., Goldenberg, J. L., & Pyszczynski, T. (2010). Exploring the existential function of religion: The effect of religious fundamentalism and mortality salience on faith-based medical refusals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 334–350. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017426
Norenzayan, A., & Hansen, I. G. (2006). Belief in supernatural agents in the face of death. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(2), 174–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167205280251
Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I., Hirsh, J. B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural markers of religious conviction. Psychological Science, 20(3), 385–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02305.x
Bering, J. M. (2006). The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(5), 453–498. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X06009101
Sedikides, C., & Gebauer, J. E. (2010). Religiosity as self-enhancement: A meta-analysis of the relation between socially desirable responding and religiosity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 17–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868309351002
Pew Research Center. (2021). The future of world religions: Population growth projections, 2010-2050. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projection-table/