All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

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

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.

Death is slippery. Our minds can’t latch onto it. Over time, you learn to accommodate the gap in your life that the loss opens up. Like a black hole, you know it’s there because it’s the spot from which no light escapes.

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

her much attention because she gave off a standoffish asexual vibe that I appreciated only

day in the gallery with the simulation of the

The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

It’s amazing how much damage one penis can do.

It just wasn’t a rebellious world. Maybe that sounds lame and not, like, punk rock enough, except punk rock never happened in my world. Punk rock wasn’t required.

Do you understand? I’m in the same world you’re in. The world you think you’ve always been in. Dull, vapid, charmless, barely evolved from the 1965 I just left. I know you think it’s changed a lot since then, because of iPhones and drone strikes and 3D printers and, I don’t know, gluten-free pretzels. But to me that stuff feels like the early 1970s.

Something I’ve realized about doctors here—they mostly have no idea what’s going on in your body unless it precisely lines up with standard presentation. Anything just a little bit off course and they’re clueless.

Like everyone, she carries around a suitcase of troubles everywhere she goes, but she leaves it unlocked, for anyone to rifle through if they care enough to be curious.

All this crap about alternate realities and time-travel contradictions and consciousness transferring, you don’t actually know anything. You’re speaking with authority because it’s calming to feel in control of the unknowable.

According to Greta, your belief system is how you actually spend your time every day. She doesn’t mean that to be judgmental. She wants people to be more self-aware. Fundamentally, she believes in action. 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.

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

I’m sorry this isn’t a time-travel romp. I was expecting causal loops and reality fluctuations and branching dimensions and scientifically questionable solutions to ornate space-time paradoxes. I wasn’t expecting actual human pain. I didn’t ask to question the foundations of my sanity.

Your brain is very good at managing cognitive dissonance. Arguably, it’s your brain’s main purpose. Your senses absorb a calamitous frenzy of information every moment you’re conscious, and your brain has to streamline it all into coherence so that you can function. It lets you focus, shunts unnecessary stimuli to the periphery, and parses huge gulps of perceptual data with dazzling heuristic tricks.

You love someone for fifty years and then they die. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have. How do you keep five decades of love from souring into a snakebite that makes your own heart the threat, drawing the poison up and down the length of you?

According to her, reality isn’t concrete. It’s loose and gelatinous, like the crème brûlée she was midway through. The surface is crystalline, but it’s just a hard, thin crust that keeps the soft insides held in place. When pierced, it cracks into jagged shards as the innards spill out.

This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life.

That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.

I want there to be nothing in me that isn’t light and pure and good. But of course that’s not real. That’s what happens when you’re a statue in a city square, stripped of any human adornment that can’t be cast in bronze.

That’s what love can do for you, if you let it—build a person out of all your broken pieces. It doesn’t matter if the stitches show. The stitches, the scars, just prove you earned it.

Maybe no idea is ever lost. Maybe it just waits somewhere in the swirl for somebody else to think it.

She wants every person on the planet free to feel what she feels, curled up in an armchair on a sunny afternoon reading a novel written in another age—to have no cares.

She will become our driving political operator. You might not think a career in academia would prepare her for that, but it turns out that academics are goddamn crazy and getting anything done in the university environment is so convoluted and asinine and theatrical that my mom will find actual politics to be kind of relaxing in comparison.

this. Is it possible to think outside the box of your ideology? Or is ideology the box and you just have to work at opening it?