Everything Everywhere All at Once, Regret, and Possibilities
How to not live in the gap
Paula and I have been sick with flu symptoms for more than a week now and it has been miserable. We did three Covid tests and they were all negative, but we felt just at sick. However, this provided an opportunity for us to rest, take care of each other, get some decluttering done in the bedroom and even cleaning when we felt up to it. On the couch one evening we found that we had not watched a multi-Oscar winning movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is an extraordinary movie that stars Michelle Yeoh (as Evelyn Quan Wang), Ke Huy Quan (as Waymond Wang), Jamie Lee Curtis (as Deirdre Beaubeirdre), Stephanie Hsu (as Joy Wang), and James Hong as (Gong Gong). Michelle Yeoh has been a favorite of mine since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon back in 2000. Ke Huy Quan is a Vietnamese-American and returned from a long hiatus as a child actor in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies. Other than these main characters, all I knew about the film was that it was a bizarre, sci-fi, comedy about the multiverse, but it was much more than what I was expecting. At the end it left me teary eyed and full hearted.
Light spoilers here, so if you have not watched it, you can do so on Prime Video.
When a movie shines the spotlight on a protagonist, it usually points out the extraordinary features of the character, their super strength, their special insights, their extraordinary intelligence, but these heroes are chosen because they fall terribly short from these traits. Evelyn and Waymond are Chinese immigrants who live upstairs from a laundry mat they own, a business under IRS scrutiny. Deirdre Beaubeirdre is the IRS agent who is in charged of their audit and the couple bring in a pile of receipts to justify their expenses to the auditor. The stacks of paper tell a story of regret and failed dreams since they show business deductions such as singing lessons that the couple has no way of claiming as exemptions. Evelyn’s life is full of these unfulfilled dreams. Waymond also has aspirations, but for some spark of romance in a relationship growing further apart each day, to the point that he needs to file divorce papers. Their young adult daughter, Joy, seeks their approval of her relationship with her girlfriend, a taboo subject in an immigrant/asian family. All of this is brought to a head when another version of Waymond (Alpha Waymond) enters Waymond’s body to tell Evelyn of the impending doom of the universe and that she was chosen to sort things out
This makes for a mind blowing premise, but the added nuance is to show how the Evelyn of the failed marriage, audited business, distressed daughter, and constantly disapproving father, could ever be capable of saving the multiverse. Through Alpha Waymond’s guidance, she is able to do what she can and occupy the body, memories, and experiences of her other selves to draw from their experiences.
A side note on the multiverse. This is an idea that goes back to Ancient Greek philosophy with Anaximander in the 6th century BCE. He believed that an infinite possible worlds existed, either co-existent or successive with our own. Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist, postulated what is called “superposition” in that a quantum system can exist in multiple states. In other words, something can be here and not here, dead and alive, such as Schrödinger’s cat. When someone makes a decision, the timeline is split between the road they took and the road they did not take. This leads to other possibilities, ad infinitum.
When Evelyn can inhabit the body of other Evelyns—famous kung fu film star Evelyn or Chinese opera singer Evelyn there is a sense of deep remorse. It is to wonder what your life could have been if you made such choices. What if I went to school to be an engineer? What if our family was stuck in Vietnam? What if I went to college somewhere else? This regret causes Evelyn difficulties in returning to her own present and to deal with crises, big and small. It is this type of thinking that gives us the most disappointment, regret, and anxiety in our lives and causes us to be the least happy with where we are, the present.
The present is where the most important things are. The present is where the people who we love are and what needs to be tended to the most. The paradox is that when Evelyn has pulled from this type of fascination with the what ifs of the past, then she is able to use the experiences of her past selves to save the present.
It is not only kung fu Evelyn or opera singer Evelyn that she benefits from, but also the Evelyn who suffered a tragic injury as a child, the Evelyn who got a lame job, the Evelyn who lived as a person with hot-dog fingers (yes, you read it correctly). If we see that our lives are a series missed train rides, then what happened when we failed to make it? Well, we made other decisions, met other people, developed new skills, learned something else. Not only do the bad experiences make us the person who we are today, but there were many, many more good experiences that came from that which can give our present meaning. The good is always asymmetrical to the bad. So, often the trauma from the past keeps us stuck on the past, ruminating on what happened. Even though this is important, too many people cannot use what came out of these experiences for their own benefit. To be clear, I’m not calling any of these bad experiences good. But I’m saying that they can be used for something great. This is what Evelyn does. When she moves away from lingering over what could be, she uses all the experiences of those alternatives timelines to help her in her present. Even though we cannot draw from other realities, there are always experiences that I can draw from for my present circumstances.
Sometimes a solution requires an engineer’s mind, and so I don’t have any problems looking at architectural plans and schematics to solve a problem. This might not mean I need to go back to school to be an engineer, but I can imagine a way forward without living in regret that I did not choose that route. There are many skills, experiences, lessons learned, that all of retained. This is often a result of not achieving one’s goal, but through failure. When we fail successfully, we can learn something about why we did not achieve the outcome we wanted and become more than resilient; we become antifragile, as Nicholas Taleb would say.
What if we taught our young people how to set goals, and learn from what happens when goals are not achieved, rather than coddling them by either not allowing them to reach for what they desire or giving them what they desire so they don’t have to learn from their experiences? When we prevent people from learning from their mistakes, we rob them of the greatest gift that life can offer.
Recently, Paula and I have been going through the book The Gap and the Gain by organizational psychologist, Benjamin Hardy, and business coach, Dan Sullivan. Too often we live in the “gap” of scarcity. It is the life, dreams, tasks, and goals that we have not met, rather than realizing the “gains” we’ve achieved even when we did not reach what we set out to accomplish. In this way, we can still create momentum in setting other goals and become successful. This does not deny the trauma, difficulties, and struggles of past events, but instead reframes it in ways in which can work in our favor. The past does not exist. The future is an opportunity for growth. Gap thinking is about living in the scarcity of the past, while gain thinking is about seeing the abundance of the future. It can show us what is truly available as a resource to us if we spend time to savor what we have all gained in this moment.
In the end, Everything Everywhere All at Once is not only a movie about being kind or being more accepting to others, but also about how the multiverse of possibilities exists in all of us and it is these possibilities that allow us to become who are and will be. As we see in the movie, to deny any of these possibilities, and what we can gain from them, is on a dangerous road to meaninglessness, heartbreak, and eventual destruction, for ourselves and all humankind.
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I stumbled upon this DVD at B&N for $5. I was smart enough to buy it but not yet smart enough to carve out a time to watch it! Love this idea of possibilities making us who we are and will be.