How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

I have a thing for my operating system. There. I said it.

for some reason my reaction to crying has always been like this. It’s hard for me to watch and just generally stresses me out so much that my initial response is to get mad, and then of course I feel like a monster, which is immediately followed by guilt, oh, the guilt. I feel guilty, I feel like a terrible person. I am a terrible person.

Sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth, I’ll look in the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed. I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I’m not even particularly good at being myself.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

The workweek was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death.

time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge.

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.