How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his very worst moment, over and over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it, too.

it’s true: 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.

Ever catch yourself in the middle of saying something you know you’ll regret? Something so mean you know you should stop immediately but some part of your brain kicks in and won’t let you stop?

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.

We sat there for some indefinite and unmeasured period of time realizing our error, our wrongheaded assumption, marveling at what we had learned: time travel takes time.