The Best of All Possible Worlds

I’ve been working on an idea for a short story based on the cross-country trip I’ve alluded to in previous posts.  This is the trip I took after graduating from college, traveling from Utah to North Carolina to see my sister get married.  The one where my car broke down twice, where I lost almost all of the possessions, after which I spent a year living in North Carolina trying to get the means to return to Southern California and start over.  

My reason for writing such a story was to put it a box in and place it on a mental shelf.  To understand what this trip did to me in order to move past it and do a better job of creating a life of my own choosing.  A “Better” life than the one I have now.  As I’ve been contemplating this story, an unexpected realization came to me.  

I may already be living in the Best of All Possible Worlds for myself.  

I remember hearing once that optimists believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that pessimists believe that optimists may be right.  And certainly, I see truth in that saying.  From the pessimist’s point of view, certainly.  But I think I’m starting to understand the position of the optimist as well.

While pondering that trip, thinking about how I could have changed things, if I could go back in time, for instance, and warn my fresh out of college self about what was going to happen and help him avoid it, I’ve always assumed that if I could have avoided the people and the disasters I encountered on that trip, then my life would have been “Better.”  I would not be as risk adverse as I’ve become.  I would be more daring.  More positive.  I would reach for my dreams more wholeheartedly.  I would have more love.  I would be happier.  

But another thought has crept into my calculations since the Thanksgiving I spent with my buddy from college, and the talk we had about the trip and how I was before and after.  My friend reminded me of the letters I sent to him while stuck in North Carolina.  How I wrote that I was determined to change my life so I would never be that unable to help myself out of a jam again.  I had forgotten about writing the letters.  I do remember that sentiment, though.  It had become something of a mantra in my life at the time.  

With this in mind, had I found a way to avoid disaster on that trip, reaching my family without the dramatic loss of money and property I’d suffered, what would I have done then?  With this in mind, had I found a way to avoid disaster on that trip, reaching my family without the dramatic loss of money and property I’d suffered, what would I have done then?  Would I have seen my sister get married then driven off to New York and pursued my dream of becoming a professional actor, going on to fame and fortune?  Achieving the Best of All Possible Outcomes? 

Or…  I would have faced other disasters.  Maybe even greater, more dangerous ones.  I would still have been as ill-equipped to handle them as I was before reaching North Carolina.  I would still be just as ignorant of that inability.  Would I have been able to recover enough had my car broken down somewhere near the Jersey shore instead of the Kansas plain?  I don’t know.  

And I never will know.  Because we only live in this world, the dimension that you and I share.  Physics tells us that in each moment of our lives alternate realities are created.  Copies of ourselves are made based on the changes, the choices, that are faced in each instant of our existence.  But a condition called “decoherence” prevents us from experiencing what those alternate selves are feeling or experiencing.  We only have access to the set of circumstances that our consciousness bifurcated into at that moment when this reality was created.

We can imagine all the ways our lives might have been different if we had made different choices, or had different things happen to us.  But we can never know with certainty that our lives would have been “Better.”  Those imaginings come from looking at the parts of our circumstance that we don’t care for and wondering where it was that we lost out and how could we have prevented it.  

So…  And I hope I’ve lead you to this point well enough for you to follow me to this point, this life, this existence that we have right now IS the Best of All Possible Worlds.  Because it’s the ONLY Possible World we have.  Rather than review it and focus on its flaws, comparing it with imaginary dimensions that can never be proven to be real, and which can’t be accessed even if they are real, I think I want to find a way to look at it and say, “Yes.  This is the Best Possible World for me.  It’s where I am after all my efforts to live a life, which I tried to live to my best ability.”  

Even if a Best of All Possible Worlds is not quite what you want, it doesn’t mean it can’t be made Even Better.  And instead of spending energy trying to figure out how it could have been changed to be even better now, a plan that can never be executed anyway since traveling back through time is as impossible as reaching into other dimensions, it would be better to spend that energy making this Best of All Possible Worlds into the Even Better Possible World.  Because we are committed to traveling through time into the future. 

The basic story idea I’ve come up with…  Not really an “idea” yet, more like a kernel of an idea, revolves around a service in the far future based on a quantum computing AI.  I pick quantum computers because, if they can be made to work, would do so by reaching into multiple alternative realities to do their computations.  And this service would be a decision making app that people would subscribe to in order to help make better decisions.  They would enter the choice they face and the AI would reach into these alternate dimensions to run simulations, which would be presented to the subscriber in a virtual reality where they could see and feel the result of a particular choice.  They would then be able to decide which of the simulated futures was the one they most wanted and make their choice as to what they were going to do.  

The theme would be something along the lines of how even with this service, even with the data showing that it had a high rate of accuracy in its predictions, it still couldn’t show you what your other choices WOULD HAVE BEEN.  It would be a technological replacement for one’s own imagination.  A tool to help you imagine the outcome better.  And no matter which choice you made, you would STILL be in the Best of All Possible Worlds.  To deal with as best you could in the here and now. 

It’s kinda rough, I know.  But I can always do something to make it a better idea.