But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

Something that’s only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.

This is a book about being wrong, and my faith in wrongness is greater than my faith in the Beatles’ unassailability.

I don’t believe all art is the same. I wouldn’t be a critic if I did.

everyone concedes we have the potential to be subjectively wrong about anything, as long as we don’t explicitly name whatever that something is.

How do we know we’re not currently living in our own version of the year 1599?

“there is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years”).

think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the multiverse theory is correct. I think it’s extraordinarily likely that my colleagues who say the multiverse concept is crazy are right. But I’m not willing to say the multiverse idea is wrong, because there is no basis for that statement. I understand the discomfort with the idea, but I nevertheless allow it as a real possibility. Because it is a real possibility.”

(and if someone else did so, my contradictory inclination would be to immediately disagree).

in the future—our theories will not start with space and time. They will start with something more fundamental. What that fundamental thing is—we still don’t know.

A philosopher can simultaneously forward an argument’s impregnable logic and its potential negation within the same sentence; a scientist can’t do that.

would mirror the reaction of a seventeenth-century shepherd who had just been told we live in a heliocentric universe: “Oh.”

For one thing, learning you’re not real doesn’t feel any different from the way you felt before.

Well, fine. I give up. Pour me a drink. Simulate me, don’t simulate me—it’s all equally hopeless. We’re just here, and there’s nowhere else to be.

Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it.

We want a pain-free world where everyone is the same, even if they are not. That can’t happen if we’re still keeping score.

I was an interesting version of a normal person. That lasted twenty-six years. The second half started when I moved to New York, where I became an uninteresting version of an abnormal person.

As a consequence, the United States is a safe place for those who want to criticize the government but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomfiting. Some would argue that this trade-off is worth it. Time may prove otherwise.

And that would certainly be the end of everything (or at least something that will feel like everything to those who live through the collapse).

Since our interior thoughts are (ultimately) arbitrary and meaningless, we might as well think whatever we prefer thinking.