Today Matters
Some thoughts on a movie - Everything Everywhere All At Once - and the multiverse worldview at its center - and your choice of dinner tonight
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View:
Today matters.
I don’t mean that in an inspirational speech sort of way, I’m not planning on a Tony Robbins-type speaking tour entitled “Today Matters” … though I think one could imagine worse things. (Just out of curiosity, how much would you pay for a Mike Sherman “Today Matters” conference?). What I mean is “Today Matters” in an actual, real, reality is a real thing and the lives we live and the choices we make in it actually matter sort of way. Today matters, life isn’t meaningless, we have choices that carry real weight.
Regular readers of The Embassy (that vast cohort of wise and insightful people) will know that I believe we are in a big, eternal story and that we have a real part to play in that story. Today is in that story. It matters. I have also talked about the power of story. We are drawn to grand, sweeping epics because we are in one and our hearts find that echo in those stories.
All of that comes to my mind as I reflect on the excellent and enjoyable movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. First, my review of the movie. It is good. I enjoyed it. You probably will enjoy it. It is inventive and surprising and different and heart warming. So that’s the review. Hopefully, I didn’t give anything away.
I want to (briefly) talk about the premise of the movie, and I actually may give some things away, but I don’t think anything I say will be a real spoiler. The movie is pretty unpredictable - one of those where you just sign up for the ride and let yourself enjoy the story without trying to figure everything out or make everything work. And the ride is worth it. There are a couple of reviews linked below and I look forward to the ‘Do You Like Apples’ take when it comes out (see recommendations).
The premise is the multiverse (or one take on it). In this (despair-inducing) understanding of the multiverse, there are an infinite number of universes - and every time we have a choice, the universe splits. In one universe, you go to Applebee’s, in another, you go to O’Charley’s, in another you stay home and have leftovers … you probably can already feel the despair building. So all choices are made, all paths are taken - the right choice and the wrong choices are all made (in some universe). And so, do any choices you make matter since you (is it you? another version of you split off from this one?) will be making all of them anyway?
At the heart of the movie is a woman who is living a life that isn’t especially happy or fulfilling or ‘important’. She discovers, however, that this version of her is somehow key to the survival of all the universes. That she, in the middle of this setting where nothing seems to matter, matters on a level she couldn’t possibly know. The multiverse angle helps move the story along in a way I won’t reveal here, but the story is meaningful and endearing because it repudiates the actual multiverse worldview. Instead of nothing mattering, we find a person whose life, in a way that unifies and gives meaning to all the possible universes, matters. Somehow, in a way that repudiates the implications of many worlds, all the worlds come together and give meaning to everything.
This is the most real aspect of the story. In the movie, the wife matters, the husband matters, the daughter matters … and reality hangs in the balance of actual choices made by actual, unique people. This is what life is really like.
A while back I had a root canal. This relates, trust me. My (seemingly throw-away) conversation with the oral surgeon may illustrate what I am trying to say here. My surgeon, after his initial greeting and as I reclined in his examination chair and before he hopped into another room to check on another patient, asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a pastor and he seemed genuinely interested … and then asked me for an “inspirational nugget” (that is a direct quote). It remains, to this day, the only “inspirational nugget” request on my resume. When he came back into the room, he asked for his nugget. Not being completely sure he was serious, I wasn’t exactly razor focused on his request and I missed the “inspirational nugget” lecture in seminary (also, I was about to have a root canal). I thought for a second and replied, “today matters.” He genuinely seemed to love the response - and, sufficiently inspired, proceeded to my root canal (which, to be fair, probably mattered more to me than to him). It was an off-hand reply. I don’t know if it was divinely inspired, but I believe my doctor thought about it, because he mentioned it a couple of times. In fact, he asked me for more (see a fuller response below that I gave via email that evening). It seemed he needed to be reminded that today matters. As we all do, I think, from time to time. His life and experiences, judging from what I saw in his office, appeared outwardly successful and full - enviable, perhaps. But, in the midst of all the root canals, he needed to hear that this day, this moment, this root canal, wasn’t lost in a sea of meaninglessness.
For those of you who think of yourselves as living an obscure life that doesn’t really matter all that much, I have a couple of inspirational nuggets for you as well (but not in a Tony Robbins sort of way). You are wrong about your life not mattering. I know life can feel that way at times, I know - especially if we take our cues from our wider culture - it can seem like all the important people are doing important things and there you are, unnoticed and unimportant and powerless to make a difference. It can feel that way, but that feeling doesn’t reflect reality very well. Sometimes that feeling, I think, can reflect our brokenness and the brokenness of the universe around us and our inability to fix either of those fully. Sometimes it might be an escape - away from the weight of this story or of our choices. There might be something there, but it doesn’t give us a true picture of reality.
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Luke 12:6-7)
All of that matters. You matter and your life and choices and relationships matter. The gospel says you matter enough to God that He, at great pains, provided redemption. Beyond that, we are invited into this larger story. And that is where you come in. Live that story out, starting today, which matters. You will fall down, but the falling down matters. The world will still be broken, but the brokenness is not meaningless. There aren’t an infinite number of you making all the possible choices of your life. You can’t see all the mattering - or, perhaps, you sometimes you only can see it through the eyes of faith - but it is there. There is you, in this story, living today, making this choice. Today matters.
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Links:
Here is a review and explainer of the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once (with spoilers).
Here is another review of the same movie from a different angle (also with spoilers).
A pretty good overview of the various “many worlds” viewpoints.
Here is a more recent video, based on string theory, positing the existence of 10^272000 universes, none of which could be ours. (? … I know)
Take(s):
First take -
A portion of my reply to the oral surgeon’s request for more “inspirational nuggets”:
Dr. XXXXXX,
Thanks for my root canal. It was my best one ever. You and your team put me at ease with your relaxed and relational style. You also, not that I would know, appear to know what you are doing. (You have my permission to use that for promotional purposes.)
Today you asked me for an inspirational nugget and I riffed “today matters” without a ton of thought. You seemed to like it and asked for a list of similar inspirational nuggets. I don’t know if these are that … but, in the spirit of today matters, I didn’t want to let your request go. I spent about 10 minutes on this, so it is possible it could be improved a little - anyway, here goes:
Today Matters -
We can minimize our lives by telling ourselves that ‘today doesn’t matter’ or ‘it is just another day’. We don’t know all the ways today matters, but it always does. By living as though today doesn’t matter, we’ll be making today matter in all the wrong ways.
Tomorrow Matters -
But tomorrow matters in ways that can surprise us, beyond financial planning and healthy living and other good things that point toward the future. Tomorrow matters in ways that influence everyday choices and habits that seem small today.
Relationships Matter -
My Christian faith promises redemption and transformation toward more love, joy, kindness, peace … but those are always expressed in a relationship. It is impossible to grow in kindness without being in a relationship with (often unkind) people.
Redemption Matters -
Implicit in the promise of redemption is that we all need it. We all fall short of who we aspire to be and who we need to be. The Christian faith is not self-help, it is all about God’s way of redemption offered to all people.
Love Matters -
The Christian description of love costs something. Love isn’t a feeling, it is self-sacrificing actions for others (because we love them). Jesus described it this way, “Greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” He then went and demonstrated.
Second Take:
The multiverse view is based on some results in quantum physics taken to an (I think incorrect) extreme and the observed nature of our universe (seemingly inexplicably fine-tuned for human life). If you don’t care why the theory of the multiverse exists, this take probably isn’t for you. If you know more than I do about this, this take probably isn’t for you either. Even though most people are no longer reading, here is a brief and insufficient explanation for where the many worlds theory comes from. (See the links for a couple of videos diving into this).
First, there is uncertainty in the quantum world which, in some settings, can be mathematically explained as all possible paths of a quantum particle are taken. There is a range of probabilities, described in a mathematical equation, that describes the quantum world - and one interpretation is that all of the possibilities occur. That isn’t a good explanation, but without going deeper, which probably won’t help, that is good enough for today. So each of these possibilities is happening in a different universe, we just see this one. All the possibilities are occurring somewhere
Second, our universe seems extraordinarily well tuned for our lives - well beyond what could be reasonably expected. In a single, randomly occurring universe, we have no right to expect that we stumbled into the only possible one we could live in. There are over 50 physical constants (that we know of) and if any of them were only slightly different, life as we know it would not exist. One way around this is that there are many universes, we are in this one because it is the only one we could be in … but ours exists only because a zillion of them exist. (“If there were an infinite number of monkeys hammering away at an infinite number of typewriters - eventually, one of them, purely by chance, would reproduce the works of Shakespeare because all possibilities would be eventually produced.”)
It is also true to say that, by everyone’s admission, none of the many worlds interpretations seem to be scientifically testable or falsifiable. You students of science may conclude that they are not really science, per se - just ideas some scientists have.
None of these scenarios seem persuasive to me. They seem to rule out, a priori, a universe intentionally made by a personal God (fashioned in a way we don’t completely understand, and may never completely understand) to include us as actual persons in relationship with God and others. As you know that is my view - that is the basis of the story I believe we are in.
That is also the basis for the proposition that today matters. Without that basis, I’m not sure I see a convincing foundation for that proposition. In other words, as Ross Douthat notes in his review (link above) -
The movie takes the concept of the multiverse to dark, despairing places, and I found that journey horribly persuasive, and the love-is-all-you-need message at the end not enough of a path back.
What Douthat finds persuasive is the “dark, despairing” notion that if everything is happening somewhere, nothing ultimately matters here.