>>111940668you only get the sweet, sweet release of nothingness after death when you achieve enlightenment and escape from the cycle of samsara
until then you just keep reincarnating over and over, sometimes as a monster, sometimes as a ghost, sometimes as a god, sometimes as an animal, and sometimes as a human. but only humans can achieve enlightenment and once you are enlightened you are beyond all things in this world including reincarnation, and can die whenever it suits you.
which is a religious allegory for how humans spend their whole lives reinventing themselves thinking every time that they've finally got it all figured out and everything will be fine forever, a belief which eventually betrays them and prompts yet another reinvention of self. The root of human angst, Buddha concluded, is wanting to know the unknowable (trying to predict the future by overthinking) and a per-disposition towards unhealthy amounts of excess (both excess indulgence and excess abstinence, pleasure and pain, pride and shame, humans keep latching onto one end of an extreme and trying to fix their entire life with it) so the secret to enlightenment is to not think unless you have an immediate problem that warrants thinking about, try to avoid excesses in favor of the middle path, and try to be kind to other people since we're social animals and its better for our mental health than being cruel and/or selfish. he also realized that for many people this would be a very very very difficult change to make when you've grown up surrounded by society's expectations 
