All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

If you were to travel back in time to yesterday, the Earth would be in a different place in space. Even if you travel back in time one second, the Earth below your feet can move nearly half a kilometer. In one second. The reason every movie about time travel is nonsense is that the Earth moves, constantly, always. You travel back one day, you don’t end up in the same location—you end up in the gaping vacuum of outer space. Marty McFly didn’t appear thirty years earlier in his hometown of Hill Valley, California. His tricked-out DeLorean materialized in the endless empty blackness of the cosmos with the Earth approximately 350,000,000,000 miles away.

Time travel doesn’t just require traveling back in time. It also requires traveling back to a pinpoint-specific location in space. Otherwise, just like with regular old everyday teleportation, you could end up stuck inside something.

If you were to teleport even a few inches in any direction, your body would be embedded in a solid object. One inch, you’re wounded. Two inches, you’re maimed. Three inches, you’re dead. Every second of the day, we’re all three inches from being dead.

July 11, 1965, was the pivot of history even if nobody knew it yet.

when you invent a new technology, you also invent the accident of that technology.

When you invent the car, you also invent the car accident. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. When you invent nuclear fission, you also invent the nuclear meltdown.

Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence.

seriously, three-dimensional traffic sucks. Whatever the cool factor of a flying car, it’s mitigated by the gridlock hovering twenty stories above every street.

This is probably more true than we care to think about.

Most of us now work in labs imagining, designing, and building the next cool innovation in entertainment. It’s the only thing you really need in a world where almost nothing is asked of you.

I remember, as a kid, when I first understood that only half of every tree is visible, that the roots in the soil are equal to the branches in the sky, that a whole other half is underground. It took me a lot longer, well into adulthood, to realize people are like that too.

Bland friendliness is easier than spending even one joule of energy formulating an opinion on someone fundamentally irrelevant to you.

When you jump off a cliff, falling can look a whole lot like flying, for a while anyway.

Whereas it turns out my specialty is disappointment and ruin.

Life is defined mostly by how you handle failure.

that’s the magic trick of creating life—it takes every bad decision you ever made and makes them necessary footsteps on the treacherous path that brought you home.

WE MUST SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY, OTHERWISE HOW CAN WE HELP THEM TO STOP BEING FOOLS?

the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else’s dreams.

Part of the problem is this world is basically a cesspool of misogyny, male entitlement, and deeply demented gender constructs accepted as casual fact by outrageously large swaths of the human population.

Here, when my hair grows too long I apparently have to pay another grown-up to cut it with scissors, like a day-care craft.

And for $75 - $200 a pop, too.

Right before he turned five he announced he hated birthday cake . . .” “At which point you should’ve used corporal punishment till he came to his senses,” says Greta. “How can a human being not like birthday cake?”

Time travel isn’t just going back in time—it’s also leaping vast distances of space and landing in a hyperspecific location so you don’t materialize inside something. Either the time traveler must be immaterial or the location must be empty at a molecular level, because one stray particle in your brain could kill you.

your belief system is how you actually spend your time every day.

If you believe in a bunch of stuff but never act on those beliefs, they don’t matter.

“I don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now. That’s all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It’s always open to revision. Yesterday’s fact is today’s question and tomorrow has an answer we don’t know yet.

I’m not some genius. I’m a rip-off artist and sooner or later they’ll figure it out.” “That’s how everybody feels,” she says.

We all feel like frauds. That’s the secret of life. Everybody’s winging it.”

Do you know what Jung said about coincidence? He said just because we can’t see the destination, it doesn’t mean that no road goes there.”

You may not think you’re a genius. You may think you’re a fraud, a bandit, a world-killing monster. But you’re all we have.”

“You’re a very hard person to make your mind up about,” she says. “Yeah,” I say, “I feel that way about me too.”

I know there is a better version of this world because I lived there and saw its wonders undreamt of. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a much worse version of this world standing in the yard hoping someone leaves the back door unlocked.

I learn something about success I never did in a lifetime as my father’s son. You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant past, the failure ends. That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.

time travel is very bad at fixing mistakes. What it’s very good at is creating even worse mistakes.