#tryagainfailagainfailbetter

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

The Choices We Make

Note on the text: I used Dark Matter by Blake Crouch as published in 2017 by Ballantine Books

   I’ve seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic Designer. But it’s all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you’re in it, it’s all just day to day right? And isn’t that what you have to make peace with? (314).

Writing an essay about this book without giving away every detail about this book is very hard. This is a really great piece of science fiction that takes place across a multiverse that is, at its core, about choice- about the choices we make about our own lives and how we need to own them. 

The main character in this saga, across the whole multiverse, is Jason Dessen. Now although we meet multiple variations of this character as they pop up across the multiverse, the main version of Jason, the one that we follow all the way through, is a physics professor at a local college who is married to a woman named Daniela and has a teenage son named Charlie. 

When we meet Jason at the beginning of the book a mostly happy though somewhat remorseful man who wonders about the road not taken. In his youth his was a highly acclaimed researcher in the field of quantum physics. But once Daniela got pregnant with Charlie he decided to abandon his job as a researcher and settle down as a college professor. In fact, when we meet Jason, his old college roommate (and fellow researcher), Ryan, is being given the in world equivalent of the Nobel Prize for his research on the brain. Now when they were in college, everyone thought that Jason was the genius who was destined for greatness and “scientific immortality”, and yet because of his choices his life went in another direction. Ryan became the prodigy and Jason became just another academic. 

We all make decisions in our lives and those choices have consequences. Our happiness comes not so much from the choices themselves (although those are definitely important) as they do from our ability to accept the choices that we have made and move on. Every choice we make in life closes the door on one set of possibility while opening the door on others. Regret is powerful because it involves standing in front of doors that will never open, wondering about paths that can never be taken, while denying the reality of the path that we’re on right now. 

The antagonist of this book is one of the alternates of Jason called Jason2. He is a genius from another world whose life went down a different path. In his case, when Daniela told him that she was pregnant he opted to leave her so that he could focus on his work as a scientist. Eventually he developed a machine that allows him to go between realities. But he is extremely unhappy and has come to regret making the decision he made all those years ago, and instead of accepting the choice he made and finding a way to move forward, he has opted to go into this reality to take over this Jason’s life and send this Jason back to his own world. 

The way he sees it, life, as it is usually lived, will inevitably end in regret. Everyone has to make decision all the time which means that eventually they will make the wrong one, which in turn means that everyone is doomed to live in a state of regret. He sees his invention as a way to correct this. But “life doesn’t work that. You live with your decision and learn [from them]. You [can’t] cheat the system” (326). 

In some sense, Jason2′s choice wasn’t the problem: his decision to stay in a state of perpetual regret was, his unwillingness to accept the decision he made and move on from it was. As Samuel Beckett once said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. All of us make mistakes. The key to happiness is to not let those mistakes keep us from moving on. Instead we need to learn from our mistakes and keep going: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.