#347: Marc and Link discuss stories about ‘What if’s and alternate timelines.

Marc Cuiriz 0:11
Welcome to GT radio on the Geek Therapy network. Here at Geek Therapy, we believe that the best way to understand each other and ourselves is through the media we care about. My name is Marc Cuiriz, and I am joined by link. Hello, Link.

Link Keller 0:25
hello

Marc Cuiriz 0:28
So it is just you and I, this week,

Link Keller 0:31
the Dream Team,

Marc Cuiriz 0:32
the absolute goofball Dream Team, someone decided to leave the recording doors open for us. And we just weaseled our way in here. And here we are

Link Keller 0:46
going to tear it up. Someone’s gonna come home to a bunch of stuffing strewn about the house because we ate the couch.

Marc Cuiriz 0:57
That was a weird metaphor, but I’m gonna roll with it. Okay, so I have been doing some reading, which is a shocker because I have not been doing a whole lot of reading. But this lately I’ve been doing a little bit of reading. I’ve been reading this book with my wife. It’s called the midnight library. I’m curious, have you heard about it link?

Link Keller 1:25
I have heard you mentioned it before. And I’m very intrigued.

Marc Cuiriz 1:29
Yes,

Link Keller 1:30
I’m going to add it to my, to my extremely long list of books I want to check out from the library.

Marc Cuiriz 1:38
Yeah, it’s, it’s a book that it’s got a weird writing style to it. In terms of like how the chapters are laid out, like, one chapter is like, I miss my cat. That’s literally the entirety of this one chapter in particular. And

Link Keller 2:01
like a single line of a chapter? or a chapter worth of explaining how much they miss their cat?

Marc Cuiriz 2:07
like a single line,

Link Keller 2:09
Oh, okay

Marc Cuiriz 2:09
like I’m tired. I really miss my cat and something like that. And then the title is, the title of the chapter is something I’m not quite sure. But it it scratches an itch that I’ve been I’ve been wanting to scratch for a while. And that is the philosophical stuff behind it. So um, without doing a whole, like no spoilers or anything for the book. But it in general, the basis of the book is this woman Her name is Nora, she decides that she feels that the world would be sort of better off without her life. She’s been kind of struggling. And so she attempts to take her own life. And then she finds herself in this vast library. And in this library, all these books that are in there are actually all different variations of herself. And they’re all living different points of her life. It goes into quantum, it talks about quantum physics. And the idea that all different possible realities are happening all simultaneously. They’re just obviously a little off. And some things are a little different. But ultimately, they’re the same thing. And so she’s navigating through this one book called The Book of regrets, and it’s all of her regrets that she’s had throughout her entire life, and trying to find a life that feels like it’s the right one for her. So basically, she’s almost like hijacking a different version of herself and experiences that life. And if she ultimately finds it to be disappointing, then she gets pulled back into the library. And then she can find travel and try a new life and see how that works for her. So it it scratches that itch of like existentialism. And it’s funny because Nora in her root life as she calls it, she was a philosophy major. So it talks a lot about different philosophers and different ideas of the self and of how you view your own life. And I don’t know, I just thought it was really interesting. What do you think about it? Like what do you what do you think about the idea of alternate realities or alternate versions of ourselves? And the idea that they either are happening at the same time simultaneously what along our life or the idea that maybe I I don’t know in some way, shape or form. There’s a maybe a way that we could eventually see these alternate realities kind of like string theory.

Marc Cuiriz 2:23
Well, I think that the premise is very intriguing. And I do like multiverse alternate reality stories where a character has the ability to examine their life through a different lens. And I think that that’s a fun, a fun little game to play in your life. It can, it can be beneficial, in reexamining the way that you look at things, and events and people in your life, it can also be negative in that it becomes like a rumination thing where you’re obsessing over stuff out of your control or out of the realm of possibility. It’s pretty contextual, but I do think it’s a it’s a great premise for a book.

Marc Cuiriz 6:18
Yeah, I like how this book is really doing its best to be relatively subjective in terms of how Nora is sort of viewing both herself and her route life. And these different lives of her own. Like, when she jumps into life. She has no memory of anything that happened prior to this point. She’s literally jumping in and as like, what’s happening, what’s going on, I have no idea what’s going on. So like, in one life, she decided that, at one point in her life, she thought about being a glaciologist. So she jumps into this life. And then next thing, you know, she opens her eyes, and she’s on a boat in the Arctic. And she’s like, Oh, what am I doing here?

Link Keller 7:11
I’m cold.

Marc Cuiriz 7:12
And people are like, expecting her to know things. Because in that life, that Nora knows things, she’s the she’s a glaciologist, it’s her expedition. And she has to try to play it off. Like she knows what she’s talking about. But she’ll frequently ask questions of like, what are we doing here? Again, I’m sorry, can you remind me about this thing, this thing is such a such and all these sorts of different things. And I don’t know, I just think it’s, it’s an interesting topic to kind of think about, and I know for, I know, it’s something that’s kind of been explored and other things as well, like the most recent example I could think of is dr. strange in the multiverse of madness. That takes it in a different route. Instead of it like kind of being like string theory, or in I forgot how they worded it in the book. But they basically were saying it was like the idea of quantum physics and having them all overlap with each other. In this case, it was more along the lines of like, these different universes are coexisting, but they’re not like overlapping in any way, shape, or form. And then you have America Chavez, who can punch a star in, in these in these in these universes, and just be like, and I’m gonna try this one out for size and see how it’s like. But I don’t know, if you had that opportunity to sort of examine either different universes or see different versions of link. Would you do it?

Link Keller 8:51
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I would, I think, mostly from a curiosity standpoint, rather than wanting to escape my current existence so much, but you know, the answer would be different if you asked me when I was 16 Yeah, I think that I think that that’s very intriguing. I think the idea of being able to see the what ifs of your lifetime and getting to examine that but I do think like, there is something that I find like, terrifying about like that, that idea of like, my consciousness jumps into another version of myself, but like, they disappear and I’m in their place and being having to figure out like, Oh, God, what are the rules here like that sounds very scary, very anxiety provoking. I would still probably do it just like again, like...