Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

“—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

“Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.