This timeline is the only one we have access to, and it’s got to be enough.Īs a species, we’ve long been haunted by spirit realms and ghostly domains. Regardless of whether we can prove that the multiverse exists, the idea of it can distract us from doing the work we need to do to make this world better. Like the Capgras patient, we risk becoming detached from the world we can see and touch. Who doesn’t want to imagine a different world?īut it can also be a dangerous way of imagining the cosmos. It’s probably no coincidence that the idea has become so popular during an era of pandemic, climate change and political turmoil, when so many of us have felt helpless and trapped. It’s easy to see the appeal of the multiverse, even as metaphor: the notion that we’re surrounded by a multitude of parallel selves, one of which might be living in a better timeline than the one we’re stuck in. Apparently many of us have this sense that, as Waymond Wang, played by Ke Huy Quan, says in the movie, “something is off.” Now five years and one pandemic later, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a film about the idea that there are multiple universes, each containing a different version of you, swept the Oscars and struck a chord. “The gains we’d made in social equity and humanizing people - I thought these gains would result in a different world,” she said. She explained that the racism she’d witnessed felt like a detour from the way she’d assumed history would unfold. Traci Blackmon, a Christian minister and civil rights activist who was active in protests at Ferguson, Mo., and counterprotests at Charlottesville, Va., tweeted about this feeling in 2018: “I believe I am trapped in an alternative universe.” At the time, I reached out to her to ask her about it. 9, 2016, “I think we landed in the wrong timeline.” For some, this sensation was occasioned by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election - as it was for Arthur Darvill, known for his role in the British television series “Doctor Who,” who tweeted on Nov. It seems many of us have come to feel there are multiple realities and we’re stuck in the wrong one. But in this case, the patient believed that the whole world - everything she could observe of it - was a duplicate, a fake. First defined a century ago, Capgras typically describes a person’s belief that someone close to him or her - a spouse or a child - has been replaced with a duplicate impostor. The woman was diagnosed with a variation of Capgras syndrome. “She described then that the world outside the ward had been destroyed,” reported the doctors in Exeter, England, who wrote a report about the case in a 2019 issue of the journal Neurology and Neurosurgery. Outside, the future had already arrived, and it was not a good one. The ward to which she’d been committed was unstuck in time, she told her doctors. She insisted she was trapped in the wrong timeline. She was showing signs of depression, but it was clear that something more was amiss.
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