Nothing Matters, So Be Kind

How Everything Everywhere All At Once Taught Me Perspective

Source: Agustin R. Michel on Dribbble

In recent years, I’ve gone through something of a spiritual awakening. I was raised Orthodox, and for the longest time I followed the doctrines of that religion blindly, ending every day with two prayers and going to church on a weekly basis. I confessed my sins, if only to myself, felt shame when shame was called for, and trusted that God would make everything all right.

At a certain point, though it took much longer to admit it, I kind of stopped believing. There were just so many things that didn’t add up. If God had a plan for everyone, what if His plan for me came in contradiction with His plan for someone else? Who would win? And if God was supposed to be perfect, how come he screwed up so bad when he made Lucifer? These and further questions and logical fallacies became obvious. Still, I ignored them for as long as I could. But the seed of doubt was there, and it was growing quickly.

At the end of college, I started dating this girl who subscribed to a weird philosophy. To her, nothing mattered. The universe was totally random, there was not and had never been a cosmic plan, and the one true god was called not Yahweh, but Chaos.¹ This was so weird to me, and my curiosity quickly progressed from “So you really don’t believe in anything?” to “How can you live like this?” Outwardly, I was aghast. But that seed? By this time, it’d had plenty of time to grow. It was nearly ripe for harvest.

It wasn’t long before I finally admitted it. What she was saying made sense. A lot more sense than what I had been taught.

Well, that girl is now my wife, and I have since become a convert to her philosophy. A caveat, though. When first presented to me, this idea that “nothing matters” was very closely tied to the idea that “life is not worth living”. This was a natural end point for her, but I could never accept it. It never felt like the right conclusion to me.

Over the following four years, our philosophy matured. We began to understand that “nothing matters” doesn’t necessarily mean nothing matters. At some point, we were able to reconcile this belief with the idea of a calling, the idea of making a life you want to live, the idea that such a life can be worth something, if only to ourselves.

One of my first posts here concerned this very subject, so early readers might remember it’s been on my mind for a while. In recent months, though, nothing matters has morphed into more than just a belief. I have begun to recognise it as a state of mind that should be sought. We’ll get back to this.

First, what do I mean by “nothing matters”?

The Bagel and The Googly Eye

Before we get into that, though, I need to tell you about a movie.

Ages ago, I heard about this great sci-fi, multiverse flick called Everything Everywhere All At Once. It had everything a nerd like me could want in a movie: mind-bending science to justify the existence of a multiverse, badass action sequences based on iconic Chinese martial arts cinema, and superstar Michelle Yeoh in the main role. To top it off, it was made by A24, perhaps my favourite film studio. I was so excited to see it, but I wanted to do it right, so I waited for the film’s release in theaters here in Romania. When it arrived, I somehow missed it, and promptly forgot all about it until a few weeks ago, when I saw it had been added to Netflix.

Two days ago, I finally watched it. And a truer, more all-encompassing expression of my entire philosophy of life in a piece of media I have never seen.

Here is where I’m going to disappoint you. Because to make you understand what I mean by “nothing matters”, I’ll need to spoil the entire movie.

If you haven’t seen it but plan to, it might be best to hold off on reading the rest of this essay until then.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO, for short) begins with Evelyn, our main character played by Michelle Yeoh, stressfully preparing for an IRS audit. She and her husband left China together twenty years before, and now they run a laundromat. The business, to put it mildly, is struggling, and so are they: the husband, Waymond, is trying to get Evelyn’s attention in order to talk about a possible divorce, and their daughter, Joy, a depressed young woman who’s had enough of her mother’s traditional Asian domineering, is dating Becky, an American girl whom her family does not approve of. Things are not looking bright.

And they’re about to get way darker, fast.

As Evelyn and Waymond enter the elevator of the IRS building, the latter begins to spasm, and Alpha Waymond, a version of him from a different universe, takes over his body and informs Evelyn that she has been chosen to become the saviour of the multiverse, which is threatened by a multidimensional, omnipotent deity called Jobu Tupaki. Tupaki, we are told, is building something, and though nobody knows what, it’s supposed to have the power to end reality. So Alpha Waymond becomes Evelyn’s mentor, teaching her to connect her consciousness to those of her myriad selves from other universes in order to gain access to their skills and memories, a process called verse-jumping.

Some of these other Evelyns are pretty awesome—among others, a blind opera singer and a martial arts movie star (a nod to Yeoh’s own career)—and as she explores these different possibilities, our Evelyn becomes more and more dissatisfied with her current life.

Throughout the first half of the film, Evelyn uses her newfound skills to fight a slew of enemies, including the IRS auditor herself (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), and Jobu Tupaki, who, we are shocked to discover, is actually the Alpha version of her daughter Joy. In the Alpha universe, Evelyn was a mad genius who experimented on her own daughter, in the process shattering her mind and turning her into a depressed multiversal God. As mothers sometimes do.

Back on the main story thread, things seem pretty hopeless, as Evelyn’s first encounter with Jobu does not go well at all. This, after all, is an omnipotent being, and even with her all-new repertoire, Evelyn soon finds herself no match for her. Dismayed, Evelyn asks Alpha Waymond why, of all the versions of her, he chose this one, seeing as she’s such a failure. But this, says Waymond, is exactly why. For as a result of her getting so many things wrong, our Evelyn’s universe is connected to so many others where things went right, so that she boasts a bigger potential arsenal than any other Evelyn. Her many failures are her greatest strength. Remember this idea.

After the fight, Jobu Tupaki exits scene, leaving behind regular, one-dimensional Joy.

This, I suppose, is where I should introduce Gong Gong. He’s Evelyn’s father, an old-fashioned, hard-of-hearing, wheelchair-bound Chinese man, whom much of the conflict between Evelyn and her daughter is based on, as she will not let Joy introduce her girlfriend Becky to him, believing that Gong Gong will disapprove. So far in the movie, Gong Gong has been little more than a background character, but as Jobu takes off and leaves Joy in control of her body again, the Alpha version of Gong Gong takes over the old man’s body, and, in beautifully cliché Machiavellian fashion, tries to persuade Evelyn to kill her daughter.

From IMDb:

Gong Gong : [about Jobu Topaki]  Quickly, while she is distracted.

Evelyn Wang : No.

Gong Gong : It's only protocol. It gives her one less universe to access. How do you expect to defeat her in every universe if you can't even kill her in one?

Evelyn Wang : She's your granddaughter.

Gong Gong : [sadly]  How do you think I feel? But it is a sacrifice necessary to win the war.

This is where Evelyn makes her first important choice. She firmly refuses Alpha Gong Gong and, after making short work of a couple of his goons, decides that the only way to fight Jobu Tupaki is on her terms: by becoming like her. So in a twist worthy of the best Shounen anime, Evelyn betrays the Alphas and uses the gear Alpha Waymond provided her at the start of the film to frantically jump from universe to universe, in a bid to split her mind the way her own Alpha version did Alpha Joy’s, thus creating Jobu.

Just when it looks like Evelyn will be successful, she collapses, her mind seemingly fried.

You’ll soon see where I’m going with this, I promise.

It turns out that, far from being out of commission, Evelyn was taken by Jobu on a psychedelic multiversal romp, presented through a time lapse that takes the viewer’s own head for a spin, before they arrive at their destination, a white cathedral-like building, where Jobu reveals her master plan.

Not only was she not driven mad by Alpha Evelyn’s experiments, but Jobu Tupaki was vastly improved. Suddenly able to see every universe unfold in real time, she acquired a new perspective. She realised that, since everything happens everywhere and all at once, no choice we ever make actually has any weight. For every path where you go left, there is a universe where you went right. Thus, she arrived at what she calls “the truth.” What’s that truth? Nothing. Matters.

Because she could find no reason to continue living after having this epiphany, she decided to put an end to the universe, or at least to herself, by placing everything that exists onto an “Everything Bagel”. As she puts it,

I got bored one day - and I put everything on a bagel. Everything. All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on craigslist. Sesame. Poppy seed. Salt. And it collapsed in on itself. 'Cause, you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this.

The Everything Bagel

All this time, Jobu wasn’t trying to kill Evelyn. She was searching the multiverse for a version of her mother who could understand “the truth”, and whom she could share her existential hopelessness with. She built the Everything Bagel to allow herself and this ideal Evelyn to truly, universally, die.

At first, Evelyn is persuaded. After all, she comes from a universe where nothing went right, so ending it all must seem pretty tempting. While still on Bagel-world with Jobu, Evelyn simultaneously enters a universe much like the one she came from (the original one, where she’s also just waking up from her collapse), and starts behaving rudely to her loved ones. She gets drunk and smashes a window of her laundromat, angrily signs Waymond’s divorce papers, and, back in her original world, resumes fighting Alpha Gong Gong’s minions to the death.

Seemingly in agreement with what Jobu predicted, all her struggles are in vain. The more goons she defeats, the more endless Gong Gong’s manpower seems to be. In the universe where she’s still in the laundromat, the IRS auditor has called the police, and she is being hauled in. Dismayed by all this, Evelyn seemingly takes up Jobu Tupaki’s offer and steps closer to the Bagel.

That’s when Waymond, the movie’s white knight, once again comes to the rescue. He says:

Please! Please! Can we... can we just stop fighting?

Welp. Didn’t expect that in an action movie, did you?

Remember when I said that, although the philosophy of “nothing matters” appealed to me from the start, I could never get behind the conclusion that life is not worth living?

That’s because I’m not like Jobu. Jobu is a nihilist. Me, I’m more like Waymond. I’ll let him continue:

I know you are all fighting because you are scared and confused. I'm confused too. All day, I don't know what the heck is going on. But somehow, this feels like it's all my fault. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything. I don't know. The only thing I do know... is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind - especially when we don't know what's going on.

So Waymond agrees with Jobu, up to a point. They both realize that on a cosmic scale, nothing we do matters. They agree that humans are small, insignificant beings, and the more perspective you get, the more you’ll feel “like an even smaller piece of shit.” But while Jobu sees this as the main reason why life isn’t worth living, Waymond says, well, it’s actually not that important. After all, we’re all pieces of shit. We’re in this together.

If Jobu is a nihilist, what is Waymond? After a bunch of research on the topic, it seems like the closest philosophy to his would be absurdism, a system of thought made popular by Albert Camus, mostly through his essay The Myth of Syssiphus. Absurdism, to put it very broadly and in layman’s terms (this being far from my area of expertise), posits that life is meaningless and absurd. But unlike their brethren the nihilists, absurdists don’t see this as a reason to dispair. Instead, this perspective leads them to the conclusion that everything we generally consider important in life—making money, furthering our careers, earning the respect of our peers—is objectively meaningless. We are the ones who’ve imbued all this stuff with the overwhelming weight it now seems to have. The fact that we worry about these ephemeral, illusory things is solely our mistake.

So what should we do instead?

Be kind, Waymond tells his wife.

And when Evelyn complains that, in the universes where she and Waymond did not elope, where she remained in China while Waymond left for America, Evelyn became a kung fu master and movie star, and Waymond a handsome, dressed-to-the-nines CEO, Waymond replies with what is probably the most breathtaking line in the entire movie.

And this, folks, is when EEAAO fully transitions from nihilism to absurdism.

These very words trigger an epiphany of her own in Evelyn, who realises that violence is not the way to end a conflict that began with violence.

That googly eye business we started with? Here’s where it comes into play. The googly eye is a plastic sticker in the shape of an eye with a black iris that Evelyn found at the start of the movie and dismissed as clutter. It reappears now, and Evelyn sticks it to her forehead. You might have seen this image in promotional media for the film.

In the universe where she was fighting Alpha Gong Gong, Evelyn begins instead to shoot googly eyes left and right. Upon being hit with one, the goons starts behaving nicely to each other. They hug, they reconcile, they reach nirvana together.

And back in the laundromat universe, Evelyn sees Waymond for the first time in what feels like a lifetime. This scene, you need to see for yourself.

They embrace, and everything seems right again. But there is still the matter of Joy, who has remained stuck in nihilism.

Why, Joy asks back in the laundromat-verse, would Evelyn choose such a mundane universe as this one when she could literally be anywhere, everywhere all at once?

“Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes sense,” Joy says, referring back to their multiverse-hopping conversation about how the more universes you jump through, the more you see, and the more you realize how insignificant human beings are.

“Then I will cherish these few specks of time,” Evelyn replies, to which I fell back on my bed, clapping like an idiot.

The movie ends where it began, with the family (Gong Gong included, and newly illuminated about Joy’s girlfriend’s existence) settled around a table, happily putting their documents in order. The grumpy IRS auditor has afforded them one more chance to do their taxes.

The Good Side of the Coin

Source: Reddit

To my understanding, the bagel and the googly eye represent two sides of the same coin. They’re two opposing perspectives, stemming from the same basic idea. The bagel is the yin—the dark, nihilistic, pessimistic view of the world, while the googly eye is the yang—its lighter, kinder sibling.

They both begin from the premise that life has no inherent purpose.

What the nihilist fails (or refuses) to grasp is that, even though there’s no objective meaning to anything, that doesn’t stop us from creating our own subjective meanings. It doesn’t stop us from deciding what’s important to us.

Throughout the movie, Evelyn progresses through three different states of mind. She starts off pessimistic, her outlook on life limited to regret and anxious expectation of the IRS audit. Next comes nihilism, when she realises that, no matter where in the multiverse she goes, she will not be able to escape her own smallness, her own inability to make a truly right choice. But then, her husband Waymond intervenes and breaks the cycle, introducing love.

Love, the quintessential difference between Joy’s nihilism and her father’s version of absurdism.

Love, the right choice.

You see, this realization of Evelyn’s is something I’ve experienced as well. The realization that the beautiful, organised, sensible scaffolding that holds up our world—our pre-planned journey from our baby bedrooms to kindergarten to primary school to high school to uni to getting married and having kids and getting a car and having a flourishing career—is all made up.

It’s all fake.

When we lose sleep over a raise we didn’t get, or a grade that was lower than we expected, we waste precious time and energy on something that’s only important because another human once taught us it was.

“Nothing matters” is a powerful tool. When we’re caught in the whirlwind of daily life, it reminds us of the simple truth that most things we worry about are made up. That it is we who ultimately decide what matters to us. Our smallness is our strength (see? I do come back to things!).

Chasing The Elusive Nothing

To me, “nothing matters” has become more than just a statement, more than just a philosophical and ethical position. I’ve begun to recognise it as a state of mind akin to that arrived at through mindful meditation.

So how do we arrive at this state of mind? How do we recognize it, and keep ourselves in there?

The way I see it, perspective is everything. We have to be able to draw back and examine our situation. Identify our feelings, and their likely causes.

If we are feeling miserable, for truthfully that is when we need this kind of exercise the most, we should ask ourselves what is making us feel that way. Very often, the wellspring of our feelings is something arbitrary, something imposed on us, hinted at or merely indirectly suggested to us by society.

It could be something related to our work: how we’re not earning as much as we should be by now, or how we’re forty and still don’t have our dream job, or how we haven’t got that promotion even though we’ve worked so hard for the past two years.

Or maybe something about our outward appearance: how we’re not slim enough, how we’re not tall enough, not busty enough, not strong enough, not muscular enough, no thicc enough, not smart-looking enough, not rich-looking enough. How we still like to wear T-shirts even though we’re way past puberty.

It might be something concerning our very place in society. Somebody asking why we still don’t have kids, or live in a studio apartment even though we can afford a two-bedroom, or why we don’t have a car, or why we didn’t marry the rich older man when we had the chance.

How we came to harbor these beliefs is not really the point. They may have been inculcated in us by our parents, our teachers, our friends, or social media.

The point—of the movie, and this essay, finally—is that none of this shit matters. None of it matters because it’s not integral to being human. It’s not palpable. It’s synthetic. It’s not real. It’s superficial. It’s not a matter of life or death.

It’s just fluff.

So what is it that actually matters?

To Evelyn? Her family. The fact that she didn’t get to live as an opera singer or a martial arts star didn’t weigh squat for her in the end, as long as she could be with the people she loved.

To me?

My wife.

My cat.

My parents.

My sister.

Coffee.

Literature.

Great food.

Other cats.

Dogs.

The smell of flowers on the street in the morning.

Video games.

Listening to my body.

Taking care of my body.

Saying sorry.

Baseball caps.

Owning up to my mistakes.

Hugging and being hugged.

My writing practice.

Craft beer.

Whiskey of all kinds.

T-shirts.

Being honest, especially when it hurts.

Dress suits.

This newsletter.

You get the gist.

To you? It’s not my place to say. Plenty of people are making millions off of doing that. And I think that’s something only you can know.

What I can tell you is this:

Whenever I’m feeling lousy, “nothing matters” helps remind me to step back. Analyze my situation. And remember that, since everything’s made up, nothing’s that important, except when I decide it is.

But there’s an even simpler way to put it.

My friends, you’re going to die one day. Do you really want to waste this precious little life worrying about a promotion or what old uncle Bill is saying about you?

—A.

Actually, you know what else is important? Feeding some hungry kids. So why don’t you and I both do that, by following this link?²

1. Our conversations in the beginning resembled those between Nate Fisher and his girlfriend Brenda Chenowith from Six Feet Under. Remember them?

2. To learn more about my donation proposal, please read this post.