Last week I went to see “Everything Everywhere All at Once” again. We screened it at Cardiff Buddhist Centre as part of the film night cycle that I co-organise there. My friend Andy Smith gave a fantastic introductory talk (entitled “Multiple Lives and the Karmic Momentum of Choice”) to set the scene. I liked the film a lot the first time I saw it. But Andy’s talk really opened my mind and brought it all home for me. This blog post isn’t going to plagiarise Andy’s talk or provide a summary or analysis of the movie. I want to pick up on a quote that really stood out to me as a decision coach.
Right is a small box invented by people who are afraid.
Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki in Everything Everywhere all At Once
And I know what it feels like to be trapped inside this box.
Reaching Breaking Point
The ironically named Joy (or rather her parallel universe doppelgänger Jobu Tupaki) utters this thought-provoking statement as she prepares to plunge her mother Evelyn (and by extension the whole world) into the maelstrom of the “everything bagel” she created. The “everything bagel” is a black hole. It represents nihilism: Nothing matters, your choices are inconsequential and meaningless, you are nothing, and no-one cares about anything anyway.
The everything bagel (echoed in Jobu Tupaki’s hairpiece) is a clear reference to the Enso of Zen Buddhism. Where the Enso is a symbol of Enlightenment, the bagel is its inversion, born from Jobu Tupaki’s confusion and bewilderment. Confusion and bewilderment she feels after gaining the ability to experience all possible universes at once. We are talking about a sci-fi movie here, after all! Because she lacks the wisdom and compassion to harness these insights skilfully, Jobu succumbs to nihilism.
The film does not tell us how she arrived at this breaking point, but we can guess. My take is that Joy grew up with teenage angst, peer and parental pressure to conform, fit in, and succeed. She would have been worried about getting things ‘right’. Maybe she did not have all that much freedom to make her own decisions, and where she was free, she would have felt anxious to make the correct choice. And so she felt trapped inside the small box of right.
We have much to learn from Jobu Tupaki — and of course the heroine of the story, her mother Evelyn who in the end saves Joy / Jobu and the world by showing her what does matter: Love. Or, as my friend Andy so aptly put it “Evelyn saves the world with a hug”. But not so fast.
What does “Right” mean in the context of Choice?
It is worth trying to unpack what “Right” means when we talk about choices and decisions. There are of course multiple ways to approach this: Right in terms of ethics, financial sense, practicality, political expedience, societal convention, etc. And frequently, different types of “right” might point into different directions. When they do, and you are facing a decision in the midst of such a muddle, chances are you will experience discomfort or, at a minimum uncertainty as to how best to proceed.
From a decision coaching perspective, choices are only ever right for YOU, and right for NOW. We all have different values and priorities. While we may roughly agree on some principles and rules, our intuitions on how these principles should manifest in the real world will have slightly different nuances. And just as we cannot step into the same river twice, we cannot make the same choice twice. The decision context, and even our own preferences change. What was right for us yesterday, may not be right for us tomorrow.
So does that mean we should just throw in the towel and not bother? Well, in a way that is what Jobu Tupaki has done. For her, making the right choice was a tiny box into which she felt she had to squeeze herself, at a time when what she really needed to do was to grow into her full potential. She felt trapped and constrained, and her response was to rebel. Thus the bagel building, universe destroying villain was born.
What is the Small Box of Right?
My first reaction upon hearing her say the stuff about the small box was bafflement. “This doesn’t make sense” the decision coach voice in my head said. Well, to be precise, the first part made sense to me: I could totally see how “Right” could be narrowly defined, to keep things clean and simple. People who are afraid to think for themselves will have an easier time if they just follow guidelines set out for them by others. And rulers (whether political or religious) who are afraid that people might question their authority likewise will have an easier time holding on to control (for a time, at least) if they regulate what is and is not ‘right’.
So far so good. We are talking about an almost prejudiced definition of “Right” here. One that does not recognise that, in a way, there is no such thing as ‘right’, because different people have different needs, values, and preferences. So that’s the tiny box of Right, invented by people who are afraid.
What baffled me was the second part of the statement: To know what it feels like to be trapped inside that box. After all, the decision coach in me knew that “Right” is sort of elusive, that your right may be different to my right, and that therefore, ‘right’ has to be fluid. And you cannot be trapped in something fluid, can you? Or, to put it differently, if Jobu actually had made the right choices, choices that were right for her, then she would not have felt trapped. So whatever she was trapped in, could not have been having made the right choices. Such was my thinking.
The Anxiety of Making the Right Choice
Then I realised that there are two ways how Jobu’s second statement can make sense. How one can feel trapped inside the small box of right, invented by those who are afraid.
Firstly, we can fail to recognise that ‘right’ can only be right for us. If we base our decisions on standards imposed on us by other people, or if we use someone else’s values as guiding principles, then of course we will end up in a place that alienates us, that does not feel right for us. Driven by anxiety to please those around or above us, we fail to recognise our own needs, or are too afraid to honour our own principles. This may go well for a while. We may be successful in our career, and other areas of life. But eventually we will feel the squeeze of having made choices that were right for everyone but ourselves.
Alternatively, we may well recognise that right has to be right for us, but be overwhelmed by the knowledge that the decision context and our preferences will change; that our right today may be different from our right tomorrow. This can lead to decision paralysis, something I talk about in my free e-book in a bit more depth. Agonising endlessly about what the right choice is, we end up making no choice, and go nowhere, instead feeling trapped in the status-quo, ever more acquiring more information, checking more facts, in the vain hope that we can think our way out of the dilemma.
Don’t try making the “Right Choice”
The good news is that the way out of both traps is the same. Having spent a lot of this post writing about what “right” means in the context of choice, it might come as a surprise that I am now going to say that the solution is to just give up on the idea of making “the right choice”. But there it is. Don’t try making the right decision! What shall I do instead, you ask? Isn’t that the same as throwing in the towel, Jobu Tupaki style?
No. Far from it. Instead of trying to make the right choice, we try to make BETTER choices. Or go for the BEST decision. You might have noticed that the motto on my website is to help people make BETTER choices. I’m not in the business of telling you what the correct decision is. I am helping you to figure out what the best option is for you.
Holding things lightly
When we approach things this way, we come with the recognition that everything is in flux, and that all we can do is to do the best we can, right now, with the tools and knowledge we have to hand. If we are really clever, we may even bring some insight into our future selves to the table. After all, we have been there before, experienced how our preferences change, and so we can factor that into our decision making.
The key difference here is to hold the decision lightly and proceed with ease. This cannot be done if we act from a place of rigidity, with a small box of right surrounded by a vast wasteland of wrong. It is surprisingly easy to fall into this trap though, and surprisingly hard to navigate your way out of it! Good thing that there is such a thing as a decision coach who can help you take these steps, ey?
A Metaphysical Coda
There is of course a third way how Jobu Tupaki could have been trapped in the small box of right. As I mentioned above, we learn in the film that Jobu gained insight into all the possible realities of the universe, all the different ways her life could have turned out, had she made this choice or that. Overwhelmed by this vast amount of information her mind broke and she turned into the nihilistic villain that is menacing all the parallel universes in this world.
We cannot fail to notice a certain nonchalant cynicism as she goes about her world-destroying business. This suggests that Jobu has adopted the view that nothing really matters. In fact, she says as much. All versions of herself are just variations of the same, and in the end there is always disappointment and suffering, and so, she concludes, the best way forward is to just annihilate herself and the whole universe to put everyone out of their misery. Yes, we are back to the bagel of nihilism.
On Insubstantiality and Impermanence
When Jobu sees all the possible realities of herself, she gets a glimpse into the insubstantiality and impermanence of her own existence: Recognition that her current self arose out of countless conditions shaped by previous choices, made by her and others; recognition that this current self will change, depending on yet other conditions and choices still to come. This comes pretty close to the Buddhist concept of Emptiness, which is symbolised by the Zen Enso. But the near enemy of Emptiness is nihilism. Jobu thinks that nothing matters or means anything, because everything happens, everywhere, all at once, anyway. To her, this means that her own existence is utterly futile. In other words she equates emptiness with nothingness.
Her mother Evelyn, however, when she eventually gains exactly the same insight into all the parallel universes comes to a different conclusion. She, too, sees everything happening, everywhere, all at once. She, too, can see that this means that, fundamentally, her own existence is empty. Not empty of meaning, however, but empty of a separate self, and instead full of everything. Everything, everywhere, brought her to this point. And everything, everywhere, will shape her future path. Because nothing (taken on its own) matters, everything matters. From this insight into the interconnectedness of all things, she develops the most powerful weapon any heroine could wish to have: Universal compassion and love. Hence her saving the universe with a hug.
Bringing it Down to Earth again
It would be easy to dismiss musings on Impermanence, Insubstantiality, and Emptiness as fanciful and removed from the pressing realities of everyday life. After all, our bills are real and often substantial. And we might worry about our bank account being permanently empty. But that would be missing the point completely. I learnt an important lesson from watching Everything Everywhere all At Once again. It reminded me that we not only make choices about what to DO, but also about how to BE.
I know that if I want to make better choices, I need to be more mindful of the world around me. I also know that better choices make it easier to be more mindful. That’s a virtuous circle that I’d take over the bagel of nihilism any day!
If you enjoyed reading this piece about Everything Everywhere all At Once, you might also like Vishvapani’s Thought for the Day on it, or Sean Feit Oakes’ article in the Lioan’s Roar.
If you would like to find out more how decision coaching can help you avoid being trapped in the small box of right, why not jump on a free consultation call with me?
