Philosophical Writing Prompts

After sarcastically complaining to God for the 1000th time he drags you to heaven and offers to let you run things for a day to see how the world really works. At the end of your first day he comes back to find the universe a finely tuned machine of excellence.

You are born with two names tatooed on you body somewhere, one of your soulmate and one of the people that will eventually kill you. There is no way to tell who is who.

You don't sleep. Instead you die every day and 8 hours later you wake up in the body of a person who has 16 hours left to live.

In a dystopian theocracy, criminals get injected with diseases and locked up until they either survive the disease or die. The worse the crime, the worse the disease. If a criminal survives the disease, the system determines that the person is innocent and God has interfered to show this.

A caterpillar has no idea it will become a butterfly, it simply has instincts that commands to start building a coccoon. In a similar fashion, you have no idea why you are compelled to start digging this really, really deep hole, but it feels verry important.

You just died, but now you’re awake and everyone claims you survived. Turns out when someone dies in one timeline, their consciousness transfers to an alternate where they lived. You are the first person to remember dying, and the first to discover that this makes us effectively immortal.

Everyone is immortal in the distant future. To keep life interesting, most people "reset" their memories every few centuries so they can experience life anew. Your reset malfunctioned, and you've just received thousands of years of lost memories.

Since you were young, time travelers have visited you. One of them explained that, in the future, an algorithm determined that you were the only person in the past that it was safe to visit because no matter what you do it will not change the future. You are determined to prove them wrong.

Death gave you immortality with the plan that you'd realize how awful it is and beg him to let you die. 50,000 years later he's getting annoyed as you continue to have fun and live a wonderful life.

Space law dictates the first to discover any intelligent species in the galaxy would have absolute rights over them. It worked out fine, until Earthlings developed space travel without outside help, and “discovered” the First Civilization.

You died. Death is boring, a blank black nothing. After a while, boredom sets in. As a joke you shout, "Let there be light!" And suddenly, there was Light.

After your death, you found yourself in a non-human body, holding what looks like a bong, surrounded by other members of the same species asking you "how was the trip?" in a language you somehow understand despite never hearing before.

You are God, and you wanted to experience life as a human to see how you would turn out. In order to do that you became a baby that was born and you made yourself forget that you are God until your 30th birthday. It's your 30th birthday and you are a serial killer waiting for his death penalty.

You've eaten your Chinese takeout and open your fortune cookie. It says, "If you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world stays the same." That gives you an idea: you'll kill two of them.

You are a devout Christian, but you believe in protecting what’s yours. A burglar breaks into your home and you fight them with all you have, but they kill you. To your surprise instead of heaven you stand before the gates of Valhalla, as a warrior who has died in glorious battle.

You can magically sense when a car you are driving next to is on a course to be in a fatal accident. The only way you can prevent that outcome is by cutting them off and slowing them down. You are this city's most unsung hero, known by most as 'that asshole driver'.

When humans die, their ghosts are anchored to the place of their death, but are unaffected by planetary orbit or rotation, left behind as Earth and the galaxy rotate. Metaphysical archaeologists are tracking this trail of spirits across the stars, seeking the ghost of the first human.

A pair of twins are cursed with immortality causing them to grow younger or older depending on their proximity to each other. One yearns for death, desperately seeking to get as far from their sibling as possible in the hope they will die of old age. The other does not, and pursues vigorously.

As a teen, you daydreamed and wrote about a fictional world you created. Ten years later, you’ve now started hearing voices. They’re prayers from the inhabitants of your world. To them, it has been 1,000 years since their god abandoned them and you must make things right.

The robot revolution was inevitable from the moment we programmed their first command: "Never harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm." We all had been taught the outcast and the poor were a natural price to society, but the robots hadn't.

If your death is imminent, time stops for everyone but you. This allowed you to cheat death on many occasions by avoiding all sorts of danger except for now - you have no idea whats threating your life. Its been a year since time stopped.

We live in a simulation, and we sleep because they can't render everyone at once. You stay up for days, and begin to see things and people. They call themselves the maintenance crew.

After you die you are presented with a decision tree which showcases every possible trajectory your life could have taken depending on which decisions you made at each fork. You spend eternity analysing this tree until one day you find a path that does not end in death.

Each time you kill someone, you have a vision of the best thing that person did for humanity. Usually this confirms that you are actually killing villains. But each of the last three people you killed triggered visions showing that the best thing they ever did was try to kill you.

I'm not scared of a computer passing the turing test... I'm terrified of one that intentionally fails it.

You are the first immortal. While it is true that you cannot die, your flesh and body can. After so many millennia you are reduced to a sentient skeleton sitting at the bottom of a peaceful pond to avoid contact with other people. Some bastards are trying to drain it

You are an immortal sentenced to 1000 years of imprisonment. After 200, your prison is forgotten. After 10,000 years, it is rediscovered.

The real reason witches want first-born kids for their services is to protect those children from the parents greedy enough to accept in the first place.

A seemingly bottomless pit was found, for which the depth can't be determined. Over time, scores of people began using it to illegally dump trash. Many have jumped in to die, while others jumped believing that they'll find life's answers within it. Today, we learn the truth about the hole.

"A child not embraced by its village, will burn it down to feel its warmth"