The Alphaverse

I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once twice, about a year apart, and came away with a completely different perspective each time.

The first time — I’ll be honest, I was a little stoned — I thought it was a film about change. The central device is irresistible: in order to jump between universes, you have to do something so wildly out of the ordinary that it fractures your timeline. The crazier the action, the further the jump. This is played for incredible comedy, and it also reads as a kind of philosophy. If you want to change your life, you have to do something unpredictable. You have to act without fear. The universe rewards boldness, and the bigger the move, the bigger the divergence from the life you’re stuck in.

I also walked away with this warm, vague impression that Evelyn and Waymond were destined for each other — that across every timeline, they’d find their way back together. It was romantic and reassuring and, as it turns out, not what the movie was saying at all. In plenty of timelines, they don’t end up together. In the main timeline, Evelyn nearly throws the whole thing away. My brain filled in the version of the story I wanted to see. The actual film was making a harder argument.

The everything bagel

The second time I watched it, sober and paying attention, the movie’s real subject came into focus. It’s not about change. It’s about what happens when you can see too many possibilities at once.

Joy’s arc is the key. Her problem isn’t that she lacks access to the multiverse — it’s that she has too much of it. She can see every version of her life, every path she could have taken, every timeline branching out in every direction, and the sheer volume of it breaks something in her. If every path is available and the one you’re on is arbitrary, then what’s the point of any of them? She arrives at the everything bagel — this black hole made of every possibility collapsing into meaninglessness — and her conclusion is clean and devastating: if I can be anything, I might as well be nothing.

The film is dramatizing something I think a lot of people feel but don’t quite have language for. People my age were told some version of you can do anything, you can be anything you want when they were kids, and it turns out that message, taken to its conclusion, isn’t liberating. It’s paralyzing. It makes every commitment feel like a foreclosure on something better. It makes the path you’re actually on feel small and arbitrary compared to the ones you can imagine but never live.

There’s a name for what this looks like in practice, and it’s optimizing for optionality. Keeping every door open. Never fully committing to a career, a place, a direction, because commitment means closing doors, and closing doors means you might miss the better thing. The logic is airtight from the inside. From the outside, it looks like Joy in front of the everything bagel, watching the possibilities swirl and unable to grab any of them.

The guy with the googly eyes

Waymond is easy to underestimate. He looks like comic relief — the goofy husband, the soft guy in a film full of people doing spectacular things. But the movie is doing something deliberate with him. He’s the only character who is fully committed to his life as it is.

He knows his wife is unhappy. He knows his family is coming apart. He’s got the divorce papers in his fanny pack. And he doesn’t want to leave. Not because he’s naive, and not because he can’t see the problems, but because he’s chosen this path and he’s staying on it. The googly eyes moment — when he puts googly eyes on everything in the middle of chaos — isn’t just a gag. It’s a philosophy. This is the life we have. We might as well find it worth staying for.

The three main characters map out a spectrum. Joy sees every possibility and it destroys her. Evelyn is torn between the life she chose and the lives she can glimpse. Waymond is anchored. He’s the foil to both of them — not less aware, but more grounded. The movie doesn’t say any of them are wrong, exactly, but it’s clear where it thinks the peace is.

The furthest fork

There’s something the film does with time that I think is its sharpest move. Evelyn’s biggest divergence point — leaving her family to be with Waymond — is decades in the past. And because it’s so far back, the alternate life it produces is the most radically different from her current one. That’s the timeline where she’s a movie star. Glamorous, successful, living a life that looks nothing like a struggling laundromat in a strip mall.

This is just math — more time means more compounding divergence. But the movie is making a psychological point. Old decisions produce the most seductive fantasies precisely because the gap is so wide that the alternate life becomes purely imaginary. You can project anything into it. You can furnish it with everything your actual life is missing and none of what any real life costs.

The alternate life the movie shows us is literally a movie star. It’s fiction within fiction. The glamorous version of Evelyn’s life is a performance — a story being projected on a screen. The film is quietly telling you that the fantasy of the better life is always a kind of movie you’re screening for yourself. It’s not a real place you could have gone. It’s a narrative you’ve constructed out of the distance between what is and what you wish had been.

The further back you look, the more romantic and less real the alternatives become. And that’s exactly why they’re the most dangerous ones to dwell on. The gap is so wide it becomes a screen you can project anything onto.

Where it lands for me

I keep coming back to this movie because I’ve been at every position in it.

I know the bagel from the inside. When I was in college, every option was still open and I could feel them closing one at a time. Which major, which career, who I was dating, what I was going to turn out to be. The openness is supposed to be the good part. It wasn’t. Every choice felt like a subtraction from the person I might still become. It was honestly the most painful stretch I’ve been through. It didn’t lift because I found the right answer. It lifted when I was finally able to commit. I closed the doors, and the closing turned out to be the relief.

I’ve been a software engineer for fifteen years. Every year or so, usually when I’m having a rough stretch at work, a voice kicks in: my life would be easier if I could have just been a landlord. Maybe I’d be happier if I gave it all up and became a professional scuba diver. The fantasy is always clean and flattering — no bad Tuesdays, no failed projects, no version of the alternate career that has its own version of the problems I’m running from. It’s my movie-star timeline. It’s fiction, and I know it’s fiction, but it’s vivid enough to feel real when the week is bad enough.

And then there’s my marriage. I’ve been married for over ten years, and I refuse to run the same exercise. Not because marriage is easy, but because the refusal is the commitment. That’s what the promise was. It’s the ground I stand on. I’m not optimizing for optionality there. I’m anchored.

All three sit on exactly the spectrum the movie maps out. College was Joy — every possibility live, none of them grabbable. The career is where I’m Evelyn, glimpsing the other lives and feeling the pull of them. The marriage is where I’m Waymond, staying on the path I chose and knowing that it’s mine.

I think this is why the film sticks with me. It holds both impulses at the same time — the pull of the possibilities and the case for the anchor — without pretending either one is easy to dismiss. It doesn’t just tell you to commit to your path. It makes you understand why leaving is so tempting, and then it makes the case for staying anyway. The movie’s argument is that you can’t live in the multiverse. You get one timeline. The everything bagel is where you end up if you can’t accept that, and the googly eyes are what it looks like when you do.

It’s also extremely wacky and surreal, has great kung fu, and is one of the funniest and most heartfelt movies I’ve seen in years.