If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

There’s no point in cleaning up the sewage until you’ve fixed the broken pipe.

The most effective manipulation always comes with the illusion of choice; it feels less like a whip and more like quenching a thirst.

Why are you wearing pants? Think and then give me your best answer.” “Uh, because everyone gets mad if you walk around with your dick out?” “Right. And why do those people get mad?” “Because … it’s not the thing you’re supposed to do.” “In other words, they get mad because unspecified other people expect them to get mad. So you wear pants because other people expect you to, and those people expect you to because other people expect them to expect you to. Our personalities are just like water in mud puddles, filling in the holes of other people’s expectations.”

We all made choices and here we are, all still alive, all able to make more choices. That’s the best you’re going to get, the chance to keep trying. If it turns out it’s all an illusion or a dream or whatever, so what? Your choices are your choices, they’re the only thing that’s real because they’re the only part you can control.” “Are you sure? That we can control them, I mean?” “I’m sure that if I’m wrong, then nothing matters anyway.”

I wondered who invented walls and what he was ashamed of. Probably began with a guy hanging curtains up around his corner of the tent, like, “I don’t want you to see what I’m doing over here.” Soon, everything was walls and shame, in our houses, in our minds. The guy was probably just jerking off. What, like he’s the only one? Now everybody else is ashamed to do it, because walls and shame isolate us, make us think we’re unique in our vices. Thanks, wall guy.

The devil is real, but he doesn’t turn up in a red suit with hooves. You have to imagine him as like a disease that you get—you pass it on and you don’t even know it. Educated people don’t call it the devil; they call it trauma. It rewires your brain and tries to spread itself down to the next generation and the one after that, the pain rolling down through time.

1. Everybody Calm the Fuck Down Humans act like assholes when they’re scared. Anybody who’s trying to keep you scared all the time just wants to breed more assholes into the world. Don’t let them do it. Exactly 100 percent of religious apocalypse predictions have turned out to be hilariously wrong. The odds that the next one will be true seem pretty low. If you truly think you’ve somehow stumbled across a superior way to live, there is only one way to spread the word: Live that superior life and let others see how cool, happy, and successful you are. They’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to imitate it. If they choose not to, just calm the fuck down and let them. 2. You Don’t Have All the Answers (and That’s Okay) Every human believes in some kind of simplified Grand Theory of Everything that explains existence. The problem is that there are multiple competing theories. In fact, there are about seven billion of them, one for every human on earth. Admit that the odds are pretty slim that you alone have it exactly right. Uncertainty is scary. It is also impossible to eliminate uncertainty from the universe, so you need to learn to just cope with it instead of trying to pretend you know everything. If you embrace a Grand Theory of Everything that gives you permission to treat other people like shit, it’s likely that you started with the urge to treat people like shit and just worked backward to form your theory. Open your eyes, dude: They’re not heretics, they’re your n...