Profound Lessons From Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

Thoughts on the best movie of the year

Everything Everywhere All at Once” Is an Unhinged Triumph

What follows is my synopsis of the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (EEAAO). This movie was unbelievable. I would 100% see it again, and I likely will.

FYI: Spoilers Ahead

❤️ Love vs. 😈 Evil

Throughout the movie, we feel the consistent tension between agents of evil and spontaneous breakthroughs into love. In one moment it seems as if everything's damned and the world has gone to shit, and in the next moment it feels like love as broken through the forces of evil. As a result, we feel an ongoing dialectical tension between these two pools. It's both riveting and, dare I say, somewhat stressful.

💪 An Empowering Take on Nihilism

Sure, anyone that watched the film will likely have noticed the theme of meaninglessness, but the way that nihilism was portrayed was different than I've ever seen in film before. Whereas Nihilism in modern film (think Rick & Morty, Bojack Horseman, Fight Club, etc) frame everything bleak and hopeless, this movie gives nihilim a hopeful flavor. The message we get is that

There's no meaning to anything, and thus we should feel empowered by that statement.

During a few different scenes in the movie we get the message " First we thought the earth was the center of the universe, then we discovered that we revolve around the sun, and then we discovered that sun is one of seemingly infinite other stars, among infinite galaxies, and the next breakthrough may show us that our universe of one of many multiverses. Every scientific breakthrough seems to make make us feel smaller and more meaningless. (rough quote). Yet at the same time, love transcends all of this. In this way, love is the most fundamental thing in the universe.

♾ Infinite Choices = Infinite Potential Lives

This film so mind-fuckingly taught me that every choice we make can change the total course of our life. Or as the youtube channel Like Stories of Old puts it "EEAAO is a metaphor for a struggle with the unlived life, with all the roads not taken." Which could be taken as a burden, but I personally got the feeling that every choice we make is of cosmic significance. Every instant of our life is imbued with the profundity of god.

Furthermore, the infinite timelines that the main character experiences seems to suggest that the universe has some grander meaning. One substack publication wrote 

"I don’t think there’s anything more meaningful than realizing that your experience is the human experience, that what happens in your own head is only a fraction of the whole. That the whole exists. I think the awareness of that whole is the opposite of the Nihilism that suffuses Western culture today.” 

which I deeply resonate with. The infinite multiverse seems to elude to a larger whole that our seemingly small lives are orchestrating in service of.

😨 All Evil Stems From Confusion & Fear

There was one scene in the movie that seemed to hit me deeper than all the others. It was this scene when one of the main characters, the father, is at gunpoint and a standstill with dozens of other characters and is protecting his wife that has been involved in a continuous fight with the other villians the whole movie. He says something along the lines of

"Stop fighting, there's no need to fight. I know your confused and scared, I'm confused and scared too. Everything's so uncertain."

The message that I got from this is that the reason there's evil, hatred, war, and violence is because of fear(link my article on fear) and confusion. We're dropped into this universe not knowing what the hell is going on and we're meant to fend for ourselves. No wonder we feel confused and afraid. I'm afraid too, life is terrifying sometimes, I don't know why I was born or what any of this means.

There's a complete humanization of fear. When we deconstruct evil, hatred and violence as stemming directly from fear and confusion then suddenly we can relate with the people that we previously dehumanized as a result of the harmful choices they were making. We can't blame those that are violent. They are the most scared and wounded of us.

At one point in the movie the main character changed her fighting tactic and chooses to hit the deepest wound of every one of the fighters and to transform them / heal them with such a profound love that they all drop and instantly thank her, the one that were about to kill a few seconds before.

Again this furthers the theme that

😄 Being Optimistic Isn't Naive

There's another scene in the movie that really got me. It's when the father and the mother that were married in the first third of the movie meet in an alternate universe. In this universe the mother is a mastered martial artist and movie star and the father (whom she didn't marry in this lifetime), meet again. She goes to make a move on him and he rejects her saying that he can't be hurt again. Then he goes on to say "You know just because I'm optimistic doesn't mean I'm naive. You've chosen to fight by learning martial arts. I've chosen to fight in a similar way except I'm fighting the internal way. I'm fighting against the harshness of the world and choosing to stay optimistic in spite of it." (or something like that).

Power and strength aren't found merely in displays of external brute force. Rather, there are many inner dimensions of power and strength that are equally as viable and require inner fortitude. Even though these types of strength are often overlooked in modern culture, they're equally as important and require different types of training.

The modern battlefield isn't one of physical warfare, but spiritual warfare. Our war is the psychological war, and it's being waged with each and every one of us.

In It's a MAD Information War, Daniel Schmactenberger writes

"Total war between major nation states has not truly reduced; instead, it has transformed into something less physically violent and more psychologically violent. ... With this unprecedented level of persuasive information technology, it should be clear that if governments and media elites misuse their powers, technologies could be created that would be the equivalent of mental imprisonment. This would be digitally enabled brainwashing on a scale that could capture an entire generation of minds, especially if a popular and marketable application is developed to package delivery."

Further writing that the consequence of this psychological warfare could mean:

"These basic systems depend on our sound judgment and mental health, and when we are no longer able to make sense of the world together, they begin to decay. Populations targeted in information war can endure profoundly disorienting cognitive dissonance, emotional volatility, and (in many cases) tendencies towards extremism, moral righteousness, and ultimately physical violence. The impacts are devastating on the relationships, ethics, and conversations (the “spirit”) of our communities."

Which I feel relates to this film on a profound level because the war that the father is fighting is a psychological one and is much more needed in our modern context than the glorified kung fu mastery of the mother.

📱 The Destructive Impact of the Postmodern Digital Ecosystem

With the rise of the internet, we've seen an unprecedented increase in postmodern energy permeating society. By this I mean, the postmodern ethos of relative truth and reducing truth to cultural frameworks.

As the world is developing a more postmodern energy, the feeling that you have your truth and I have my truth, is becoming the norm. The idea that everything has their own relative truth and that we should respect everyone's relative truths not hierarchically valuing any truth over any other truth.

This has given us what Ken Wilber calls aperspectival madness, or in other words, a chaotic overabundance of equally true perspectives. And I believe this is one of the causes of the Meaning Crisis and the endemic of depression and mental health issues in the modern world in tandem with the rise of technology.

Furthermore Hanzi Freinacht writes

"Only now, in the age of internet and social media, are we approaching a time which can truly be described as postmodern"

Which I believe is showing up in the way that, due to the internet and social media, every life path is equally viable and that there are a million different careers, identities and paths that we could have took (exposed to us by the millions of influencers garnering attention on social media platforms), and yet we have to live with this single path that we took that seems so much more lame and boring than all the other one's we're seeing online each and every day.

Furthermore, I second Hanzi's claim that

"you relate to more profound and universal aspects of reality and existence, which is also increasingly necessary in a globalized internet age."

What I think he means by this is that the only way that we can breakthrough this postmodern internet mess is by not only developing ourselves to be able to take more perspectives of people from more cultures, but also if we can find greater degrees of meaning in life by relating to reality and existence on a deeper level.

Have you watched this movie? What did you think?