Not everyone necessarily needs “religion,” but it is also difficult to live only in the world directly before us. We live not only within “what is happening,” but also within:

“What it means,”
“What will happen later,”
“Whether there is somewhere more worth reaching than where we are now.”

So the “other shore” need not actually mean heaven, reincarnation, or an afterlife. It can be a believer’s next life; a scientist’s ultimate truth; “the person who truly understands me” in love; an artist’s unfinished work; an idealist’s imagined better society; or the ordinary person’s “life that will get better someday.” Their contents differ completely, yet they have a similar psychological structure:

Reality → distance → imagination → meaning.

If something is too close, daily necessities, flaws, and trivialities quickly wear it down. But once an appropriate distance is maintained,

There is room for projection and imagination.

This is why “love not yet obtained” can sometimes fascinate more than an actual relationship; why the distance looks more beautiful than it does after arrival; why the future holds hope more readily than the present. What someone truly yearns for

May not even be entirely the concrete object called “love,” but the space beyond reality that love opens. In that space, life is temporarily more than work, meals, sleep, aging, and failure:

It suddenly acquires a larger narrative.

So religion says: “This shore is not everything.” Love says: “This lonely self before me is not everything.” Science too says: “The world you see before you is not the whole world.” Art, philosophy, and ideals are similar. They all open a crack beyond daily life. Religion, science, and love perform a somewhat similar function in human spiritual life:

They let us transcend the present.

Why do people need an “other shore”?

I do not think it is because we are weak, but because we have imagination,

And awareness of time.

Cats and dogs live mainly in the world currently happening.

People, however, remember ten years ago, fear death decades later, imagine places they have never visited, love someone not beside them now, and work for a future they may never see in their lifetime. From the moment we gain this awareness, “reality” is already insufficient. We are destined to build, above reality,

Another world.

Religion calls it heaven. Science calls it the unknown. Love calls it forever. What a person truly needs has never been one fixed belief, but always preserving somewhere—

Where reality cannot exhaust the self.