Once Upon A Time

The world was terrible.

That’s something I didn’t appreciate for a long time, and I’m still not sure it’s something I really grasp. It’s one thing to see a statistic. It’s another thing entirely to sit and to try to imagine what those numbers are trying to say — what horror is tracked by the size of some zeros — and beyond this, it’s a wholly different thing to have lived through all that past sorrow and suffering.

Apparently, for hundreds, and thousands, and thousands, of years the child mortality rate was about 48% — on average. Some societies had it worse, and some had it slightly better, but mostly every other child was dying. 

I can’t imagine how sad that would have been. To watch helplessly as every second child was ripped from the world. I’m not a parent, and I’m not very old, but I’m older than billions of children will ever be. Because the past took them before their time, before they could even reach my not very advanced age. Twenty-two, almost twenty-three, years old. A brief cosmic flash. An almost nothing amount of life, and it’s a decade more than any of them got.

But that was once upon a time. 

Global morality is now at an average of 4.3%. Some countries have it much better, and some have it much worse. But everyone is doing better than before. The world is much better. A lot of stories get to have a happy ending now.

I wasn’t built to really grasp any of what I just said. I can’t appreciate how the world closed its eyes for but a second, and when they opened again my parents didn’t have to worry about losing me. I can’t see all the people saved by dividing one simple number by ten. But still, I can feel some of it — the weight of the words, the significance of the story — by taking a little time out of my day to really read between the lines. To sit and think about the pathway traced by a downward line on a graph.

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When I write something it feels, in some way, like carving a statue out of a block of marble. There are all these possible contours I could create, but as you remove a tiny bit of stone the potentiality of the work narrows. By choosing one word, one sentence, one order to place the paragraphs, you deny all the other possibilities that could have been. Eventually you’ve removed enough, and you’re left with the final shape — and then you press publish.

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Once upon a time, three billion years ago, the first steps of life emerged on a tiny rock caught in the gravity well of a slightly less tiny ten thousand degree sun. 

I often assume that things are as they were.

I suppose this is just the way the brain was set up to work. But it’s a trick of the light. It’s not the truth.

I lived through the advent of the smartphone, and an explosion of affordability for personal computing. Now there’s more RAM in my pocket than the giant Apple computer I played games on as a little kid. The world blinked and suddenly everyone was connected at every second of every day. 

And I just kind of assumed this is how things always had been. Empirically I knew it wasn’t true, but I never really thought about the transition I lived through, just because it happened slowly enough to make me believe nothing had really changed. 

Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t that mean something more?

I can’t tell if I’m reading too much between the lines, but when you start really thinking about the world we find ourselves in, it’s hard not to think it’s a fantasy tale.

Because once upon a time it was just rock being smashed together by cosmic force. Then we took our first steps out of the sludge and onto the savannah — and then we brought child mortality down to 4.3%.

Once upon a time.

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A narrative is myopic. It’s the carving of shape from stone — focusing some features in a way that necessitates the absence of what might have been. I could tell you a tale about my day, and in that time you’ll never get back, you could have heard about somebody else’s. 

To grasp the truth of our world, the whole truth, would require moving beyond this. You’d need to see everything, all at once, across all time. I don’t know how to do that — so I have to read between the lines if I want to figure out where we’re all heading. I can’t just track the throughline of every atom until I found its conclusion. I can only see the carved out version of reality I make for myself.

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Once upon a time people hated some other people so much they tried to reorder the world just to keep someone like me from being born. Some numbers on a piece of paper can’t really capture just what that looks like. What that means.

We just assume that the shape of everything is the only one that could have been. Maybe that is true, because there’s no true randomness. But if that’s true then there was never any other way, and when I think about the billions of children who had to die I feel pain in a place I can’t quite describe. 

It shouldn’t have had to be like that.

But the point is that things aren’t as they always were. Once upon a time there was horror everywhere you turned in the world. And the world is still full of monsters, but there’s a lot more hope in it too. 

But it didn’t have to be this way. We could all have been born just a few decades earlier.

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There’s this distance I feel now, not always, but more often than a year ago, and I worry this makes me wrong somehow. I keep viewing the world with this fairytail breadth — like everything is just a collection of words on a page.

I’m seeing the world like that block of marble. Every day we carve a new groove into it — and the shape of the universe becomes fixed into a once upon a time. 

I’m worried that we’re carving something horrific into the stone. That our energy and our atoms will be eaten by a superintelligence, as it tries to grasp some truth we sent it searching for. Or that our happy ending was a blip — that tomorrow the world will close its eyes again, and when they reopen every second child has to die. 

Normally all of that seems implausible — because things will be as they always were, as is the way of the world. Tomorrow looks like today, and the sun always rises. 

But something strange gave my brain a mallet and a chisel, and now I can’t stop myself from seeing tomorrow as an unfinished stone statue. I’m getting closer to understanding what it’s like to see that pure, untouched, block of marble. We could carve almost anything into that — into the shape of the future — and that’s kind of horrifying.

Because once upon a time it was now. And that now was terrible. And then it got better, and we came into the present now. Tomorrow a new now will be shaped by the choices all of us make today — and I’m staring out my window with worry that tomorrow will bring what was once back upon us.

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Once upon a time two people fell in love. There’s decades of time captured in that one sentence. Once upon a time one of those lovers died a tragic death — from heartbreak or plague. That’s happened a billion times over. And all the nuance and all the scale of such a story is lost on me — on all of us.

My brain wasn’t meant for any of this. I’m moving too far away from everything.

But it’s with distance you appreciate the scale. And it’s with nearsightedness you learn what each tiny groove really means. The closeness I have to my family and friends lets me glimpse, with the distance of statistics and abstraction, the true horrors of the Holocaust or our historic rates of child mortality. 

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There’s something so alive about my life. So totalizing indescribable about it. How do you express the phenomenal aspect of simply being conscious?

I can’t see that deeply brilliant aspect in a statistic. It’s too dissociated from that feeling of aliveness. Only the person who lived it could feel it.

And so many people die every day. From the local level, from the eyes of the story, that’s unbearable. And somehow the fact that it’s happening so much makes it more okay. Watching the protagonist die is heart wrenching. Watching a planet explode is meaningless. 

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Once upon a time.

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There was a point to all of this, but I don’t know how to properly convey it — at the very least I don’t know how to tell if I’m succeeding. I need you to read between the lines, so you can really see it. 

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Once upon a time I sat at my desk, looking out at the rain, and I worried for the future. I can see where my words, here, and now, are going — but I can’t see where the rest of me is. Across all of history all those people who got to make it past 15 have worried about the same thing, in a sense. 

Some people think of these horrible futures as implausible. The world is stable — the now is stable, even the once upon a time is stable — it’s all fixed in place. Fixed in time.

And sure, the future is too — probably. But two centuries ago every second child died. Twenty years ago you couldn’t play the crossword and listen to music on the same pocket-sized screen.

The real world is a block of marble. If you actually knew what was to come, you could see exactly what that solid shape meant. 

Don’t you see how that stone really could take any form?

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What does it mean to be conscious? It’s to live in a story, of a sorts. More adaptable, more cohesive — more concrete and more comprehensive — but still, just some stories.

I built one around myself, just by opening my eyes every day.

Sometimes I run into another tale, and it conflicts with everything the narrative had revealed to me thus far. Of course it does. That narrative is myopic — because all stories have to be. They’re all just a piece of the marble block.

I don’t think any of us should assume we grasp the full nature of the world’s previous chapters, or even the current page, and especially the remaining words, just because we happened to be the main character of our own personal tiny tale.

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Once upon a time the world was terrible.

And I think it’s important to remember that.

A hundred billion humans lived across time — across all those onces. There’s something incomprehensible in that.

We should remember that too.

In the logic of a story things are finite and fixed. There is a pathway to the last page, but it can never be changed.

Once upon a time the last line was set in ink before you even began reading.

That’s probably true of our world too.

But we’re the authors of this story, even if we’re characters in it too.

We should try to make sure it’s a good one.

Make sure it isn’t reaching its conclusion. At least not too soon, or too abruptly. We should make sure it doesn’t repeat any of those incomprehensibly horrible past plot points.

Because for now, that ever-present and ever-brief time, we’re the ones with the pen and paper.

We’re the ones carving away tiny shapes into the stone.

The ones dividing a simple number by ten.

Once Upon A Time