The Philosophy of Everything Everywhere All at Once
Indexicality, nothingness, and no-thing-ness
“Everything,” “everywhere,” “all,” and “at once” are indexicals, terms with context-dependent meanings. Other examples include time-relative words like “now” and “yesterday,” pronouns like “they” and “you,” and physical gestures like points and eye rolls. All of these things must point to (or index) something in a mutually understood context to communicate meaning.
Say I walked up to you out of nowhere and said, “It is not here.” You would have no idea what I was talking about. What isn’t where? I’m not saying anything – anything meaningful. However, if I said that while we were both searching for the remote in the couch, then you would get the message. The shared search forms a context in which indexicals convey meaning. You could point to the kitchen counter and say, “What about there?” I understand what your gesture and “there” mean because we are on the same page, understanding the same implicit context.
Self-referential words like “I” and “me” are indexicals. When I’m reading you a memoir and say “I,” I’m referring to the author. Once I finish reading and say “I’m tired,” I’m referring to myself. You have to recognize that the context has implicitly changed to grasp the shift in meaning. Names work the same way, so long as there are multiple people with the same name. This context-dependency extends beyond self-referential words to your actual self, which is where things get interesting, existential, and potentially anxious.
What is the meaning of your life? To be indexically meaningful, your life needs a context greater than itself. Your lifetime needs to be placed within a grander timeline that contextualizes it for it to mean something. Condense your entire life into a point that can be placed on a graph of lifetimes. Where does it fit within this grand context? What are the dimensions of the existential graph? Everything Everywhere All at Once takes these questions seriously.
Many people come to this meaning problem in reverse. They start with a grand context and then lose faith and the context disappears. They experience domicide, the loss of their existential home. Their universe shrinks. Their lives used to fit within a grander “everything,” but then “everything” contracted and came to represent only the things within their lived experience. The grand context can be religious, such as the belief in a divine timeline with an afterlife. It can also be careerist, as with someone who thought their purpose was to professionally contribute to some field.
When “everything” narrows for someone in this way, they usually despair. Their stupid ordinary mundane life becomes it, everything, all there is. They lose touch with their existential current and become lost in a sea of regrets about missed opportunities in the past. Anxiety about the future throws them around like a tumultuous wind. They feel the weight of existential possibility, of everything everywhere, all at once.
Evelyn, the film’s protagonist, despairs when she sees all the things she could have become if she had made different life choices. She could have been a sensation, an actress, a kung-fu master, an incredible singer. Instead, she is a mother to a depressed child, a wife to a goofy man, and a laundromat owner drowning in taxes. She tried her hand at countless hobbies throughout her life but failed at all of them. When she contemplates what she could have done with her life, all the better existential contexts she could be inhabiting now, she becomes depressed and nihilistic. She stops experiencing joy. Her despair further distances her from her daughter, who is, by no coincidence, named Joy.
Joy is already in the midst of the meaning crisis when her mom joins her. “Everything” for her has already collapsed into context-free meaninglessness. In her depression, she becomes the villain Jobu.
Jobu: I got bored one day, then I put everything in a bagel...everything. All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every personal ad on Craigslist, sesame, poppy seed, salt, and it collapsed in on itself. 'Cause you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this...the truth.
Evelyn: What is the truth?
Jobu: Nothing matters.
When the “everything” that matters shrinks to the contents of life experience, life doesn’t matter – nothing matters. The bagel has “everything” on it, but it’s still just a big zero. Joy becomes Jobu, joy becomes despair. For Jobu, there’s just the day-to-day invalidation of her homophobic family, feelings of rejection by her workaholic mother, and the dreaded tasks in the laundromat. If these experiences are all there is, everything, what’s the point?
In her depression, Evelyn falls into the nihilistic abyss with Jobu. The film implies that they are both suicidal. Evelyn is about to give up, let herself get sucked into The Big Zero, and become truly nothing in death, but then she remembers joy. She remembers precious moments in her life like getting married, immigrating to America, opening a business with her husband, and seeing her newborn daughter. Joy temporarily saves her from existential collapse and literal death.
Jobu sees Evelyn remember joy/Joy and laughs cynically. She says that joy is fleeting, that it feels good for a moment but then vanishes. In one of the film’s iconic scenes, Evelyn and Joy transform into rocks sitting alone on an empty planet. They become no-things in the sense that they detach from all the things in their lives — all the regrets, worries, and daily problems. They sit in this no-thing-ness, uniting with stillness and silence together. Disconnecting from all the things lowers the stakes. It helps them rediscover humor and laughter, which brings them closer together.
The movie poses the existential question. What gives a life meaning? It presents four possible answers. First, you can kill yourself, but this precludes the possibility of meaning altogether. Second, you can identify with someone who you could have become or could still become, but this fails because you can never amount to the exceptional person you imagine that you could be. Third, you can identify with fleeting experiences of joy, but this too will eventually collapse into joylessness. You can’t decide when you will experience joy, it just hits you in the moment. If you live for joy and always try to find it, you won’t experience it because you try too hard.
Finally, you can detach from things, become a no-thing like a lone rock on a silent planet, and unify wholly with experience. You can become so present, in touch with, and connected to experience that all thoughts, all things, melt away. “Everything everywhere all at once” means something new when you live this way. Before it meant thinking about the weight of existence, of all the things you could have been in the past, all the things you could be now, and all the things you could be in the future. But now it means complete oneness. Everything everywhere is here now all at once in this present moment. Nothing matters in this oneness because there are no-things in your mind to calculate the value of. You are just here now doing taxes with the love of your life. Joy returns in this no-thing-ness, it arrives when you are present, which is to say when you aren’t there as a thinker trying to try at all. By living this way, you experience a kind of meaning that can’t be found in concepts or put into words. Meaning itself becomes indexical because it is here now in the experiential context. Meaning gives life, not the other way around.
Logically, this is absurd, which is why approaching life this way is like seeing out of a googly third eye stuck to your forehead. The googly eye understands the absurdity of trying to find logical meaning in life, laughs at the impossibility, and sees the humor in existence. If you don the googly eye and stop taking things seriously, you will wake up and see life anew.