How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

Maybe every teacher and pupil at this school was pretending something. Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

millions of humans and other animals lived and fought and procreated and went, bewildered, to their fast graves, the tree had always been the tree.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.