Dear Everyone,
Well. It's certainly been a weird one.
There is a popular hypothesis that you and I are part of a simulation, that we are not "living" in the strictest biological sense, but are artificial intelligences running in some kind of software. This idea has a lot of adherents and a fair number of compelling arguments behind it, but the whole thing sounded kind of goofy to me for a long time. Then I lived through 2020.
This past year was like a staggering, drunken distant relative that battered its way through the front door, slopped Four Loko all over the rug, shouted some things about UFO conspiracies and the gold standard, and now appears to be mercifully passing out in the carport after weeing itself. It's upended everything. It's caused a lot of collateral damage. And it has, it bears repeating, been weird as hell.
I've heard people say things like "you can't make this stuff up" a lot this year, but the thing is, not only can you, I almost feel like you'd have to. Nothing as insane and farcical and interminable as this year, nothing with the sheer body count, nothing that includes not one but two stories involving Philadelphia-area landscaping companies just happens, surely.
At this point a plague of hamsters would surprise no one, so giving the simulation hypothesis serious consideration doesn’t seem like that much of a leap. So I started thinking about it. Imagine that you and I are someone else's program code, and that the utter lunacy of the past several months was someone's design. Imagine that whoever booted up this application watched me type these words and is now watching you read them. Are they smirking? Wincing? Watching with a sympathetic but knowing smile?
Thinking about all of this reminds me of the single best book dedication I have ever read, one that I discovered somewhere around, oh, maybe the fourth year of 2020. It reads: ”Dedicated to my fictional characters: I'm so, so sorry."
Because that's how you write a story, whether the fiction is printed or interactive. You create people who you love, and then you do bad (and sometimes crazy) things to them to make them grow. You throw a divorce at them, or an evil space wizard, or a plague of hamsters, and you watch how they change. It's how stories work because it's how life works. We don't grow from contentment. We invent coats because it's cold out.
And that's where we come to the only thing about this year that seemed to go according to expectations. No matter what unexpected twist the news brought, and it brought plenty, absolutely no one's reactions to those twists surprised me.
This year amplified a lot of questionable character, it’s true. The vicious dug deeper into their vice and declared it virtue. The corrupt found ways to profit. The loud got even louder. But the rest?
Those who could, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work. The industrious fired up sewing machines and 3D printers like their grandparents once fired up victory gardens and war bond drives. The kind cast their kindness out into the darkness like a searchlight. The honest hollered for reform. And I don't want to get started on the sacrifices of healthcare workers, service workers, and teachers, because we don't have enough printer ink on hand to send out a six page letter this year. Suffice it to say that we owe them all big. I continue to draw my hope and strength from them. They, and you, are my handle on the world, the one thing I can nearly always count on. By your fruits, I know you.
Don’t get me wrong, whether this is a simulation or not, I still have a long list of questions for its designer. But either way, for better or worse, it’s my home, and I’m grateful you’ll be here with me when floofy rodents start raining from the sky.
Here’s hoping for a more restful 2021.
