Ted Chiang's "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" from Exhalation
I loved this short story. It's science fiction that brings empowerment through the idea that we always have a choice as to which path we take. Chiang has quickly become one of my favorite authors.
What follows are some of my notes and thoughts from the story.
There are countless decisions laid out ahead of us. Therefore, there never is certainty of anything. We continually have to choose and live in the consequences of our choices, whatever they may be:
Teresa paused for a minute. Eventually she said, “I guess what I’d like to find out is that a version of me married Andrew and then divorced him because he wasn’t the right guy for me. What I’m afraid of finding out is that a version of me married him and is now blissfully happy. Is that petty of me?”
There are also points about decision-making and identity. Are we by nature good, bad, or neither? One of my favorite lines from Harry Potter is when Sirius tells Harry that both light and dark live inside everyone. It's for us to decide, and the actions we take are what matter. It's like a spectrum:
"Not canceled out, but it’s an indicator of the type of person I am. If all of my paraselves had punctured his tires, that would indicate something significant about my personality. That’s something Sharon would need to know about.” Jorge hadn’t told his wife about what he’d done; he’d been too ashamed. “But the fact that they didn’t means that I’m fundamentally not a violent person, so telling Sharon about what happened would give her the wrong idea."
Some of our success is beyond our control. Circumstances outside of ourselves also factor in:
“The thing is, the design that got all the attention wasn’t one she made after I activated the prism; it’s one from before. Those exact same earrings are for sale in my store in this branch, but no one’s buying them here. She’s making money for something we did before our branches diverged, but I’m not. And I resented her for it. Why is she so lucky and I’m not?” Nat saw some others nodding in sympathy.
Nat used to be like Vinessa, always blaming someone else for her problems. For years she believed it was her parents’ fault that she was arrested for breaking and entering, because if they hadn’t changed the locks on their house, she wouldn’t have had to break in to find something she could sell for drug money. It had taken a long time for Nat to take responsibility for the things she did. Clearly Vinessa hadn’t gotten there yet, and maybe it was because in Dana she had found someone willing to accept the blame. Dana had done something shitty to Vinessa, no doubt about it, but that was years ago. If Vinessa hadn’t gotten her act together by now, it was her own fault, not Dana’s.
On the moral weight of our choices:
Experts tried to explain that human decision-making was a classical rather than quantum phenomenon, so the act of making a choice didn’t by itself cause new branches to split; it was quantum phenomena that generated new branches, and your choices in those branches were as meaningful as they ever were. Despite such efforts, many people became convinced that prisms nullified the moral weight of their actions.
Edgar Allan Poe had used the phrase “the imp of the perverse” to describe the temptation to do the wrong thing simply because you could, and for many people the imp had become more persuasive.
On compounding decisions toward who you want to become (maybe toward an authentic self, if there is one):
“I’m not sure about the math,” said Dana. “But I definitely think that your choices matter. Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are. If you want to be someone who always gives the extra money back to the cashier, the actions you take now affect whether you’ll become that person.
“I know it’s not,” said Dana. “But the question was, given that we know about other branches, whether making good choices is worth doing. I think it absolutely is. None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.
“And it’s not just your behavior in this branch that you’re changing: you’re inoculating all the versions of you that split off in the future. By becoming a better person, you’re ensuring that more and more of the branches that split off from this point forward are populated by better versions of you.”
Better versions of Nat. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s what I was looking for.”
“But recently I had this . . . this opportunity to do something actually nice for another person. It wasn’t anyone I had wronged, just someone who was hurting. It would have been easy for me to behave the way I always have. But I imagined what a better person might do, and I did that instead.
“I feel good about what I did, but it’s not like I deserve a medal or anything. Because there are other people for whom being generous comes easily, without a struggle. And it’s easy for them because in the past they made a lot of little decisions to be generous. It was hard for me because I’ve made a lot of little decisions to be selfish in the past. So I’m the reason it’s hard for me to be generous. That’s something I need to fix. Or that I want to fix. I’m not sure if this is the right group for that, but this is the first place I thought of.”
Read this story. It will make you feel happier.
