Recursion

by Blake Crouch

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

I was a very different person at the beginning and end of this book. I started writing it from the darkest place I’d ever known. In fact, some of my early edits were geared at making my characters less pathetic sad sacks. But as the book evolved and I got better, I started to have some clarity on the purpose of pain in our lives. It’s not that any of us want to experience pain, but I came to the conclusion that pain is actually a necessary element of consciousness. When I was a kid and religious, one of the things that scared me about heaven was the idea that it would just be the same all the time. Infinite happiness isn’t really a happy concept. Sameness, whatever that is, is a terrifying proposition. So realizing that the painful moments served to make the good ones stand out really changed my perspective on how I would live my life going forward. This passage is a distillation of that idea.