Recursion

by Blake Crouch

You’re thirty-eight years old, which is like ninety in academia. One morning in the not-too-distant future, you’re going to wake up and realize your best days are behind you.

Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

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.