What Is This Afterlife?

I stumbled across the audio recording of Jonathan Lethem's 'The Afterlife', and decided to read the short story published in the May 18, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. And then almost tore my hair out at the end of it. What exactly am I supposed to take away from this story?

Protagonist R., yup, stylized with a dot, is a sculptor and is at a facility in the afterlife. It has an indoor atrium and watery trenches He and other people kept wandering around, but not bumping into familiar faces. He knew no one. The conversations he head around him seemed random. Different languages dotted his awareness, and speech is fragmented too.

R., a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus to the afterlife. He had no baggage. That the destination was the afterlife was understood, a given. This fact R. couldn’t have explained. He didn’t have to. None of the others on the bus—it was loosely packed, perhaps a third of the seats full—challenged R.’s certainty. They knew as well.

Then I found the article in which Jonathan Lethem said he about ninety percent of this story came to him in a dream. "It was a semi-lucid dream, one in which I experience a kind of meta-commentary layer in which I thought about how much the elements might comprise a short story if I woke up and wrote them down." Okay lor.

I kept seeing the imagery of a mass of moving bodies, a swirl, a flow, and a cohort. All these indicate conformity and how all the individuals became teeming masses to flow as one in this afterlife. R. moved around to try to find "his tribe, his type, his people". I keep imagining this short story as a short indie film. If this is turned into a film, it would be extremely frustrating. There's no beginning and no satisfying ending. Great for film festivals. Hahaha. 

New people had been continuously arriving, that was the only possible explanation. And R. felt he could judge this fact from their posture, from their murmured inquiries, the frisson of excitement in their tone even as they could locate barely an inch of floor to claim for themselves. You’ll get over it, R. wanted to tell them, but didn’t. He supposed he’d become a kind of veteran of this place, in what felt like little more than an hour. (Time was a ridiculous concept.) Hey, you kids, get off my lawn! he almost joked, but it was hardly funny. He felt both sorry for them and irritated that they could have no idea how easy it had once been to circulate. 

At this thought, R. faintly recalled someone, long ago, trying to explain this place to him, the system that prevailed. Of course, he’d paid no attention. You don’t care about that kind of stuff until you’re forced to, mostly. And why should he have cared to listen then? It wouldn’t have done any good. No, be where you are. Be there when you get there. And now he was.