Nothing Matters

Evelyn is absolutely exhausted from overworking herself just to please Father. Barely her own person anymore, a victim of people pleasing herself to almost oblivion. She’s just a bunch of titles. A daughter, a mother, a wife, a laundromat owner, an immigrant.

She’s racing through life as if nothing else than work, work and more work will fill out the void of that deep dark abyss in which she keeps her trauma locked away, never to be accessed, lest the beast that it is might ascend from the depths and blow on the card house that is her life.

This would work fine and all, if it wasn’t because your daughter was gay and also emo. Your daughter took the key to the abyss of stowed away trauma and opened the doors wide for the beast of darkness to flail around the physical realm, for her to live and breathe the smoke of this vile being.

You would think the master of this wretched beast of trauma would step in and limit the ravage caused by his creation, but no… That is not within Father’s interests. His expiration date is approaching, so why should it matter to him?

The last hope is Waymond, the kindest man on earth. If anything happens to this man, I will be a wanted criminal in at least seven countries.

How do you tame the vile beast of prey, when it’s master fails it’s calling?

You put GOOGLY eyes on it. Yippee! (Insert tbh creature)

Evelyn doesn’t like this suggestion. (No more googly eyes!)

There are two wolves inside of Evelyn.

One of them wants to accept her gay daughter Joy and invite her girlfriend Becky into the family. To do this, she would have to break the cycle and realize that this vile beast Father has created, is actually hers to control now. Coming to terms with her coping mechanisms… ew.

The other wolf wants the status quo between Evelyn and Father.

This would put her relationship with her daughter on a lottery ticket with a lower odd of winning than being hit by a cow falling from the sky and killing you.

An outsider might go “pff, that’s an easy choice” but some people REALLY don’t like uncomfortable change. When you have spent your whole life chasing THEIR approval without getting it, you can get really really desperate.

If you paused the movie before the tax audit scene, you might get the sense that this a normal movie, a realistic social commentary. A slice of life?

But then the TAX AUDIT HAPPENS.

I: NOTHING

At the tax audit, Evelyn’s husband’s body is taken over by a different VERSION of him… from THE ALPHA VERSE.

Evelyn's universe is on a string of infinite alternative universes. This one has the possibility of containing the most powerful Evelyn. Why, you might ask?

Sci-fi super powers? Secretly descending from a god?

She is NOTHING OF THE SORT.

Her sci-fi ultra superpowers are MEDIOCRITY.

She has so many dreams and aspirations that she never acted on that it makes her the most unaccomplished and pathetic of all versions of her. In every alternative universe, she’s more successful than here.

God, imagine getting told that.

So, why is the Alpha-Verse here, telling her that she’s unaccomplished and absolutely mediocre?

The mission of the Alpha-Verse is to slay Jobu Tobaki, the big bad evil villain of the movie. Jobu has been ravaging the other universes, executing every version of Evelyn she could find. She’s not just dangerous because of her ability to travel to different universes at the snap of her finger, she’s also invested in a passionate art project, for which she needs the most mediocre Evelyn of them all to finish the piece. To find a version of her mother that looks the most like her, who will understand her vision.

“It’s not so simple. She’s been building something. We don’t know exactly what it is. We don’t know what it’s for. But we can all... feel it. You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day, your hair never falls in quite the same way, even your coffee tastes... wrong. Our institutions are crumbling, nobody trusts their neighbour anymore, and you stay up at night wondering to yourself...”

“How can we go back? “

“This is the Alphaverse’s mission: To take us back to how it’s supposed to be. But that begins with finding the one who can stand up to Jobu’s perverse shroud of chaos. One who believes in truth and order.”

With the most cunt serving I have ever seen a costume department deliver in film history, Jobu is discovered to be the Alpha-Verse version of Joy.

Her main goal is not to destroy the world, actually, although it may seem like that at first. She wants to self-destroy, mainly, but she wants Mommy to see her art installation before she goes. What’s this creation that is so important that she’s travelling into endless universes in search of it’s desired audience?

It’s A bagel.

She took everything, all meaning, and put it on a scary floating bagel stuck in limbo and if you look at it for too long, you automatically join the cult of [CIRCLE with shaky frame and boom sound]

Intet, Janne Teller

When I was 13, I read NOTHING.

It's a Danish novella from the year 2000 written by Janne Teller, about a completely normal and fine 7th grade class in Denmark. It was adapted into a horror film in 2022 by Svensk Filmindustri Studios, which actually made it kilometres more morbid than the book. The book is often a part of the Danish curriculum when you are around 12-14 years old, but [in thick Danish accent] statistically most people are not native Danish speakers like me, so I will give you a recap. Or as we like to call it, a Resumé.

The conflict of the movie is Pierre, who decides one day that nothing matters, so why should he go to school? He just, leaves the class and occupies a plum tree for most of the story. A bit silly at first, but then his classmates become obsessed with convincing Pierre that some things must have meaning. Around this goal, they form a pact… And then it all goes downhill from there.

[Glitch Cuts to Plague Doctor]

[Plague Doctor Starers for 3 seconds]

[Glitch cuts back to Atlas]

Trigger Warnings for Gore. Violence. Sexual Violence. Death. Animal Cruelty.

Take care of yourself! You can skip to the next chapter if you want to.

Also, if my recap of the plot sounds absurd, it’s because… it is.

The kids take turns to bring an item that matters to them and sacrifice it to The Pile of Meaning. That person chooses the next giver, and what to "donate".

It starts innocently with someone’s manga-collection and a bike. But the suggestions get gradually… out of hand. They bury up a student's dead brother. They sacrifice a dog that they have un-alived. They S.A. a student to “sacrifice” her virginity. And the last kid to donate is known for playing the guitar to impress girls. He’s forced to have his finger freshly sliced off and added to the pile. I had to skip reading those parts of the book, it’s graphic and morbid.

The local police finds out, the media gets involved and The Pile of Meaning becomes a hot topic of public debate. Eventually this big art museum wants to buy The Pile of Meaning, thereby declaring it “art” and everyone is like, what?

Then, on the evening before the great museum is coming to collect The Pile of Meaning, the students meet up one last time.

Sophie, whose “sacrifice” was her virginity… Something clicks for her. If The Pile of Meaning is going to be sold, it’s reduced to a mere MONETARY value. That, to her, is meaningless. She breaks down and yells the emotional punch in the gut that the morbid events of the book have lead us up to:

“Nothing matters. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter. Happiness. Grief. Love. Hate. Birth. Life.

It was all the same. Everything. Something. Nothing.” (Teller 2022, 117)

As the existential epiphany spreads among the classmates, they start to violently attack each other. This is what finally gets Pierre to come down from his fucking plum tree, to take a gander at The Pile of Meaning.

As he’s faced with his fellow students and The Pile of Meaning he doesn’t know how to react. He just… dismisses it.

He turns around to leave, but the students beat him to a pulp and it’s implied that he’s knocked out, possibly dead, as they leave him in the shed. At the same night, the shed happens to catch fire and burns to the ground, taking Pierre with it.

The Novella ends after his funeral, the narrator of the story coming in with her sharp reflections for the dead nihilist.

“It’s been eight years since then. I still have the matchbox with the ashes from the sawmill and the pile of meaning. Once in a while I take it out and gaze at it. And when I, carefully, open the worn down cardboard box and peek into the grey ashes, I get this unusual feeling in my stomach. And even though I can’t explain what it is, I know that something has meaning. And I know, that the meaning is not something to poke fun at. Is it, Pierre Anthon? Hm?”(1) (Teller 2022, 128)

Aside from the absurd plot line of this book, I think it does have some things to say about puberty and the meaning of life.

The death of Pierre, I think, is not to be seen as literal, but as symbolic.

The teenagers have to kill something in them that is capable of nihilism before they can advance into the conformity of adulthood.

In the process where this is “supposed” to happen, puberty creates this ideal environment for nihilistic revelations.

Up until this point, your method of making sense of the world has been through the lens of childhood, and now you’re faced with snippets of “how adults do things”. For many, those are primary conditions to go “hold on, that doesn’t make any fucking sense?”

Pierre and Joy come to the same conclusions because they are both young and in this juxtaposition between the fading of childlike wonder and the looming coldness of adulthood.

[Glitch Cut to Plague Doctor]

[Plague Doctor picks up phone]

[Glitch Cuts back to Atlas]

It’s not just about puberty isn’t it, WE MUST VENTURE FURTHER INTO THE VOID.

The Stranger, Albert Camus

In Albert Camus' The Stranger, we’re taken inside the mind of a cynical edge-lord, Morris, who’s living his best mediocre life in Algiers, at the very northern tip of the African continent.

He doesn't give a shit about anything. In the beginning of the book, he attends his mother's funeral and he’s absolutely unbothered by the circumstances.

After he got home, he went to hook-up with his former co-worker, Mary. He doesn't even care that his mom just died, he just goes out there and gets laid… wow, the gull!

He’s so humble too. When his boss is like “I'm giving you a promotion” he's like… [in french accent] “Non merci. I will stay”

We're supposed to think he's super calm, maybe a little eccentric, but just in general a neutral member of society, detached, participating as little as possible in anything.

This image gets challenged when Morris and Mary are invited by his friend Mason and Masons wife, to a cute little double date at their beach house… plus the third wheeler, Raymond.

I know their French names are Masson (Mason), Mersault (Morris) and Marie (Mary), but switching between Française et Anglaise a cette rapidité, pour égard pour moi esprit, mas corde vocale, et mas capacité rouillé a la langue française, je préférer faire la vidéo toujours… one language.

Back to The Stranger.

While the women are doing the dishes (smh), Morris and the boys go for a walk, where they run into ~The Arabs~. They have beef.

Raymond used to be in a relationship with the sister of one of the Arabs. When he found out that she had cheated on him, Raymond physically abused her.

In a s o c i e t y, where cops don't protect vulnerable women from abuse (looks at camera) the men in the family choose to stand up for her. Raymond gets stabbed, but can walk home just fine. Morris, on the other hand, in a sunstroke daze, returns to the beach where he finds the Arabs once again. He finishes the job with a pistol he acquired from Raymond, and shit hits the fucking fan.

Morris gets arrested for manslaughter and through a fever dream of a court case he’s sentenced to death. The book is supposed to make a point about how absurd the world of Morris is, and how cool it is to be completely unphased and nihilistic about it. And how you get in trouble for challenging the establishment.

On his way to the public execution, he is in a state of bliss. He has fully accepted that his death doesn't matter, because nothing matters.

The Plague Doctor (Scene 1)

[We cut to Plague doctor, monologue]

Do you ever think about dying?

Do you ever lay in bed and stare at the wall, exhausted? Coming home from a long shift, making barely enough to survive, barely enough energy to order some food and lie down with your phone. Contemplating what all this hard work is for when we’re all gonna die anyway?

Do you ever think about people who mattered to you, who passed.

Why did they have to die. Do they have regrets?

Do you ever feel like crying to no end?

Thinking about all the people in the world who are suffering.

Do you ever feel powerless?

Do you ever wish you… didn’t know?

Climate Change, Economic Inequality, Human Rights Violations, Generational Trauma, Abuse, Wars, Civil Wars, Queer Phobia, Systemic Racism, Threat of Fascism, Pandemics, Genocides…

Do you ever feel deeply empty and unimportant…

Are you like me? Thinking about everything, everywhere, all at once…

And that fills you with this… dread?

Conclusion

In the Venn Diagram of Joy, Pierre and Moris, the crux of the issue lies, right there in the middle. They have all been given a set of meanings that conflict with their actual experiences.

Evelyn expects Joy to undermine herself and her queerness to conform to the expectations of Father.

But Joy has moved out and experienced the, well, joy, of being out and living her queer life.

Pierre’s surroundings expect him to go to school, graduate, get a job, wife and kids, but due to his upbringing in a “non traditional” housing situation, he’s seen how that isn’t the only option.

Moris’ surroundings expect him to be consumed by grief upon his mother’s death, with his mother’s friends completely disregarding the complicated relationship he and his mom had. He didn’t have a strong emotional connection to her before her death, so why should he after?

The statement “life is meaningless” could be specified. What you really mean to say is that “the things that are expected of me to act as my meaning of life... are meaningless to me”

The more dissonance between what you’re told, and what you experience, the more you feel this dread… This phenomena has a word.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two related but contradictory cognitions, or thoughts. The psychologist Leon Festinger came up with the concept in 1957.(Villines, u.å.)

If you’re not equipped to handle Cognitive Dissonance, or equipped but not comfortable handling it, that will take a big toll on your mental health. And this phenomena is more common than you’d think. I’ll be honest, I have several videos I’ve been working on, but... this one has been like a demon on my shoulder. My life experiences, and my interest in history. I deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance. I’ve been in psychotherapy because of the Behemoth of Cognitive Dissonance I’ve inherited from my parents, and the abusive kids I were surrounded with for 10 years in school.

I was told “...when you have a wife and kids, you’ll understand” when I didn’t want kids, nor a wife. I was told “Seeing you in a dress would be my greatest nightmare” while that was exactly what I wanted to wear. I was told “You’re fat” while being probably one of the skinniest people in the class.

I think about Pierre, and Joy, and Moris and I recognize that sense of dread, the Cognitive Dissonance. I too have periods in life, where nothing feels real, and it may seem that nothing matters. Up until a certain point in my life, I would have agreed with these thoughts.

But I’m not an expert. All I did was go to therapy, idk.

I agree the world is absurd, but I don’t agree with the further train of thought presented here. Life is absurd, but that’s not an excuse to give up.

At the end, Joy wins over Evelyn, and Evelyn will die. So keep on being you, and everything will work itself out…

[Fake End Credits roll, reference to the fake ending scene]

[Glitch Cut]

Tacitus

[Plague doctor green screen moment.] [Posing to match the text. Example: As “Noose” and “Manacle” are said, cut to PD standing with noose and manacle respectively. Noose blurred for YouTube ofc.]

“Rome was in an unprecedented state of fear and panic: people acted guardedly even to their closest friends, and avoided meeting and talking to each other, no matter whether they were friends or strangers.”

“Could they expect any day of the year to be free of punishments, when the manacle and the noose were conspicuous on the very day that by custom was meant to be free even of ill-omened words? Tiberius, they said, must have stirred up this indignation purposely: it was part of a plan to make it clear that the incoming consuls were as able to open prisons as they were the shrines and altars.”(Tacitus 1989, kap. 70)

“Do you imagine that the Roman’s bravery in war matches their dissoluteness in time of peace? No! It is our quarrels and disunion that have given them fame. The reputation of the Roman army is built upon the faults of its enemies.”

“Terror and intimidation are poor bonds of attachment: once break them, and where fear ends hatred will begin […] The enemy have no wives to fire their courage, no parents ready to taunt them if they run away. Most of them either have no fatherland they can remember, or belong to one other than Rome.”

“Which will you choose – to follow your leader into battle, or to submit to taxation, labour in the mines, and all the other tribulations of slavery? Whether you are to endure these for ever or take quick vengeance, this field must decide.”(Tacitus 1970, kap. 32)

II: EVERYTHING

The Plague Doctor (Scene 2)

Atlas:

I was originally gonna make a separate video about trauma and video games, but the video will get so… long…

Plague Doctor:

You’re avoiding the topic.

I know.

Acknowledge the darkness. You have to.

Yes… Yes. Just, give me a moment.

…

I’ve lost people. I was the firstborn in my level of the family tree, in a big family of people who were all very young when they had kids.

Before I turned twenty years old, I lost a total of eight people who mattered to me to some degree or another. I was made aware already at five years old the unpredictability of death. My grandma’s second husband that I would call granddad… I could tell his story but it would be too much like something you’ve heard before.

“An angel gone too soon”

The one that haunts me is the most recent one. In Denmark we have a school you go to for three years, when you’re usually 16-19 years old. The graduation is marked with you and your classmates driving around in a party-truck, visiting the parents of every classmate for 15 minutes before driving on. We would start at 10am, and reach the last stop at 11pm. It’s a period of time that’s supposed to bring up good memories for people. Like, “Graduation! What a fun time! Cause for celebration!”

Are you dragging it out?

I-

I already watched the first part of the video. You’re gonna talk about Cognitive Dissonance, because this is the period where you were told to feel one way, but you experienced your parents threatening to throw you out because your friends called you Atlas in front of them at the graduation party.

And that matters too, but that’s a different video.

Just, say what you want to say… The real reason you wanted to make this video.

I-

Okay.

The first time me and my class saw each other again after graduation...

was a funeral for our classmate.

That’s why nothing matters. I can’t go back to normal from that.

[Atlas takes a moment to let this sink in]

I was told when I was a kid, that people die when they’re above a certain age. And like, that’s what’s “supposed” to happen.

My classmate was 19 when he passed.

If someone my age could die in a car crash, or to cancer, or to anything unpredictable… Why do I still live, several years after? Why do I do… anything?

(nods) Mhm

It haunts me. Because logically, I’m still here, so I must have found an answer… I just need to… formulate it.

You’re on the right path. Continue.

Thank you…

…

That’s it! Gaming!…

I’m sorry, what?

Gaming has been my answer to the meaninglessness… no… that’s a stupid way to word it. It’s way more complex than that. Maybe I should do some research…

Yes. Yes. But before we do that, can we commit to this blatant use of Socratic Dialogue and also do an intro in the same style as her? You wanna be her so bad, don’t you?

[Atlas does eye judge thing]

Ugh. (picks up a remote)

What are you doing? No! Please, I’m begging-

[Plague Doctor disappears]

[Atlas look at camera, and reads the title of the next part]

GOOGLY EYES

If you have watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, you know it doesn’t end here. Both Evelyn and Joy have a right to their feelings, but they’re also WRONG in some ways.

To explain the ending of the movie, you’ll have to like, get it.

I mean, first of all, Evelyn learns to gloriously wreck the most havoc possible to the cycle of trauma by unleashing absolute ravage upon every universe she’s in control of. Let’s talk symbols here.

In what I’m gonna dub The Laundromat Universe, Evelyn has been in the business of literal washing cycles, I know, stay with me here I swear I have a point with this. Initially the washing cycle is something… cyclical, as seen when Joy at the start of the movie has that depressed homosexual stare at it…

This is realistic queer representation. Forget Bareback Mountain or Call Me By Your Daddy, this gay and apathetic stare… That’s my queer representation. Anyway, circling back.

(clicks gun)

You know a movie is absurd, when I’m about to tell you how the symbolism of washing cycles change over the course of a movie.

At the start of the movie, the washing cycle symbolizes the cycle of trauma, never ending. Always clothes to wash. When Joy changes it out for a spinning bagel, she’s just giving the cycle a new coat of paint. It’s still a cycle, a never ending bagel that will eventually destroy her.

When Evelyn goes berserk in the laundromat with a sledgehammer, she is starting the process of breaking the cycle. We’re not quite there yet, but this is a symbolic first step. For me that step was running away from my parents in 2019. It didn’t fix me, but it gave me space to heal from their abuse. What is needed is what the washing cycle and the bagel gets replaced with at the end of the movie: The googly eyes.

“I am learning to fight like you.”

The googly eyes are also a cycle, but a much more sustainable metaphor for this train-wreck we can scarcely call life. When you shake a googly eye, the iris might fall in any position within the pupil. And most importantly, it’s a choice. Why do we shake a googly eye? Because it’s funny! It makes funny brain chemistry in this meat vessel go yippee!

It’s a much more applicable metaphor. If you want to break the cycle, you have to stop viewing it as a cycle all together, but rather as a choice. No, life is not an endless cycle where history repeats itself in a world-wide Ouroboros.

Life is a googly eye. It gets shaken on purpose, sometimes for no purpose. Repeating trauma & repeating history is a choice, not a chore.

So, what does this mean for the meaningless?

You see, I can’t fully explain the impact of this ending, without explaining why it resonated with me. Back in Autumn 2023 when I started rewriting this video, I actually didn’t know a proper answer to this question. I knew it had something to do with death, but… what?

So I shelved the script, and spent like 8 months while working on other stuff, trying to figure this out. I found that the answer is spread throughout my life, my trauma, my queerness, my neurodivergence, my experience being an Admin of a Minecraft server. And then, when I wrote an exam paper on Female Pilgrims in Medieval Europe, the universe hit me in the head with this book (holds up the book).

This is Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture, from 1978, by anthropologists Edith & Victor Turner.

In their analysis of pilgrimage as a phenomenon, they distinguish between two types of Christian pilgrimage: liminal and liminoid pilgrimage. This is not be confused with liminal spaces, which might get you thinking of these physical spaces that exist between buildings, destinations, rooms, etc. In this context, it’s a liminal stage in a ritual, it’s meant more as metaphorical “space” that you are in.

As a pilgrim in medieval Europe, you occupied a legal and social status that was outside society. You had special protections, but also didn’t “belong” anywhere. Until you came back, you were constantly in this impermanent state of travel. Ideally, the pilgrim was going to venture out, experience the religious fulfilment, and come back a healed child of God, ready to properly fit back into society.(Craig 2009) Just like I would fit right between a goth person’s thighs… But it wasn’t always like that…

A liminoid pilgrimage is the ideal Christian pilgrimage. You choose to go, of your own piety, and the change experienced from such a journey, is only internal. Upon return, your exterior remains intact, but your internal devotion is secured. Your experience of being outside society, makes you accept your role within it.

A liminal pilgrimage is the type where you can feel obligated. Yet, it’s a type of pilgrimage, where the change you experience, is externalized. Being outside society for a while, has changed you so fundamentally, that you cannot go back to how things were.(Turner og Turner 1978, p231)

Do you get where I’m going with this?

Allow me to transfer this concept to Joy, Pierre and Morris for a moment, and this is where it clicked for me. They view their experiences as liminal, whereas their environment expects them to view it as liminoid.

Joy being an emo teenager and kissing girls is not a liminal phase that she’ll grow out of. She chooses to stay out of the closet, and be open about her queerness. She cannot go back to how things were. Her mother thinks that her rebelling against her dad, choosing a man he doesn’t approve of, can only be experienced as something liminoid. That she inevitably has to come back and fill out the social role of her dad.

Pierre lives in a world that wants him to experience his puberty as liminoid, and then “grow up”, find a wife and kids, and then die. But he doesn’t want to do that. His family lives in a houseshare. He has seen that there are other options than the nuclear family. Besides, he’s doing pretty good up in his plum tree! There’s plums, the weather is nice… But winter will come, and he’s gonna have to return to something at some point. In his world, you either kill your inner nihilist and conform, or you let society proclaim you an outsider, who might as well be dead.

Morris is expected to grieve his Mother, regardless of inner feelings and their actual relationship when she was alive. His mother’s friends expect him to return to normality at her death, and forgive her, regardless of actual experience, and conform to the ideal of son and mother. But he can’t.

Forgive me if I am a little shaky. This is where it gets personal.

You see, this is how my own mother viewed her youth. My mom grew up with divorced parents, with a dad who had the same emotional availability of a brick, and her mother was impulsive and emotionally unavailable due to her own trauma. Both my grandparents on my mothers side came from working class Swedish immigrants in the ghettos of Copenhagen. They both worked themselves up the ladder thanks to education being free, and both of them ended up marrying rich after the divorce.

My mother grew up in the upper middle class, with the expectation that she should pick the fruits of the social mobility my grandparents had worked so hard for. So, she rebelled. By all accounts, my mother was pretty cool before she had kids. She rocked a buzz-cut, played video-games with my Dad, and went to metal concerts with her friends. But this was all liminoid. As soon as I was born, she began a transformation I experienced throughout my life as the firstborn child. She went from metalhead rebel who questioned authority to suit-wearing business woman, who abused her kids and tried to make us all conform to bougie cultural expectations. In this self-therapy masked as academic analysis, you can see that because she saw her youth rebelling as liminoid, she reverted back to the cycle of abuse, back to normality. She was able to, because she’s straight, her mental health is externally high-functioning, and she had the means to fall back into the template she grew up with.

But, she wasn’t really allowed to rebel as much as it would seem on the surface. I know from interacting with my grandfather, that he did not approve of her rebelling at all, and only when she came back to conformity, they came back on speaking terms.

My mother found a way to get her dad’s approval, just like Evelyn, but at the expense of her children.

When I came out as gay when I was 13, she didn’t approve, and we couldn’t talk about it until I was 17 and I forced the conversation, because I knew that at some point, I was gonna come home with a boyfriend. My youth was liminal, I choose not to go back to normality. My theory, which I have reached through therapy of many kinds, is that she saw me choosing to be outside society, and she envied me. It collided with her world-view, this view of I suffered to return to normality, and that suffering is central to my identity. This world-view cannot survive if you don’t convince yourself that there are no other options.

But I saw that there was. I was happier when I was holding a guy’s hand. And I really didn’t want to do a hetero-normative version of gayness, where me and my partner conformed to masculinity. I had grown up with metal music. I wanted long, dyed hair. I wanted piercings.

I couldn’t go back to normality. I chose to remain outside while my parents stayed within, and the more I remained outside, the more I realized I wasn’t alone… thanks to the internet, gaming, and the queer community.

Community

Trigger Warning for Suicide.

In the video game Stardew Valley, you play both a farming, dating and community simulator. You have taken over the farm of your weird magical grandpa, and have to build it back up from scratch.

At some point in the game you meet Pam.

Pam is not friendly. At first. But I was hooked. I felt like there was something deeper to this character that my friends at the time thought was just being a grumpy old boomer. So, I stalked her on the Stardew Wiki and started giving her beer. She started giving me batteries, and eventually as you progress in the Community Center, you can give her back her old job as bus driver.

You find out she’s grumpy because she is living in a trailer with her daughter, and she’s deeply ashamed of that. Further into the friendship you can buy her a house, and she is over the moon about it.

You haven’t fixed her though. She substitutes her alcoholism for religion, and keeps relapsing into the previous addiction. On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t have given her all those beers.

The game is all cute pixel art farm game sim until you pursue the bachelor Shane, and get to the heart event where you have save him from taking his own life. Showing him that someone loves him motivates him to seek therapy and ditch his addiction to beer.

In Stardew Valley, at first, it seems that you are looking to “get the town back to normal”, but as you get further into the game, while there’s some things that do get back to how they were before, there’s a major thing that wasn’t there before: You.

You build them something new. Your arrival is liminal, not liminoid. They cannot go back to how things were before you came, because that’s what lead the town into decay the first time around.

People have often asked, do video games cause violence? But I think that’s the wrong question to ask. What you should really ask is, what can video games do?

I was gonna write a separate video about that, but most of the studies done on this question are by this one guy who’s a massive dweeb, who cannot possibly conceive of any other games than World of Warcraft, Dota 2 and shooter games being relevant study material, skewering the sample size. Maybe someday in the future when more studies have come out about other games, I’ll make a full fledged video essay.

In the meantime, I can direct you to “To Gay or not to Gay” How The Gay Button Changes The Way We View Queer Gaming by the channel called E. It’s linked below and in the Zotero database, and you get the tangent from me solely based off of personal experience.

One of the video game I have played the most is Minecraft, and in the way I have played it for the past 5 years, it’s not created violence. It has created community. I have been the admin of a Queer Minecraft server since 2020. A lot of the regulars in the community are people who are unable or have a hard time going to queer bars, or queer events, if they even have any in their area. To some, the server IS their queer community.

There’s something about building that can bring people to believe in themselves. And to know they’re not alone, that they have this one queer anchor in their life.

This is part of why the ending of Everything Everywhere All At Once matters so much to me.

The messages I have gotten from people throughout the years… I’d like to read you some.

“I love this server so much. I feel so much more accepted than I did before finding it. I feel loved and I love playing will all of you.”

“My dysphoria has actually got a bit better after joining this server.”

"No other server and community actually makes me smile for real lol"

“I've been on this server for around..maybe a week or two and boy..it feels great to play on a survival server and have no one griefing your stuff, saying bad words and other stupid things we saw in other servers..

Also love the fact to found a LGBT+ Server..it's really helpful sometimes when you finally find a community you can join without being rejected or things like that!”

”Ok I’m just gonna be a little sappy, I’ve been in [The Ser´ver] for like almost 2 years now (march smth i think) and it’s been amazing, I always felt like grandmas house was there for me, I’ve made some really amazing friends here and I don’t know what id be doing with my life at this moment if I didn’t have grandmas house. Grandma's is such a motivator to just keep going, and proof that i can make it out there, and that ik ill always have some really amazing people support me entirely, thank you grandmas house for existing”

And that’s why I prefer Everything Everywhere All At Once to the predecessors of existentialist media. The Stranger and Nothing, they don’t get far enough for me. They get so close, but cower before the finish line.

If you’re looking for a conclusion, I don’t know… There is none. I mean, I can summarize what I’ve talked about, but when it comes to the meaning of life… You have to seek it yourself. It’s not gonna dump into your arms like fresh laundry out of a washing machine.

When Sartre said “Hell is other people. Heaven is each other”(Satre 1944), this is what I think of. To me, the purpose of human life, is each other. The meaning of life is that there is no objective meaning of life… but you’re not the only one in that situation.

The meaning of life is community. And it’s a choice.

…

[Glitches out to Plague Doctor, once again :)]

Milanovic

“There is no historical precedent for this triumph. In the past, capitalism whether in Mesopotamia in the sixth century B.C., the Roman Empire, Italian city-states in the Middle Ages, or the Low Countries in the early modern era—had to coexist with other ways of organizing production. These alternatives included hunting and gathering, smallscale farming by free peasants, serfdom, and slavery” (Branko Milanovic, 2020, p. 10)

“The setup of liberal capitalism has the consequence of at once deepening inequality and screening that inequality behind the veil of merit. More plausibly than their predecessors in the Gilded Age, the wealthiest today can claim that their standing derives from the virtue of their work, obscuring the advantages they have gained from a system and from social trends that make economic mobility harder and harder.” (Branko Milanovic, 2020, p. 14)

“As the elites in liberal meritocratic capitalist systems become more cordoned off, the rest of society grows resentful. […] Malaise in the West about globalization is largely caused by the gap between the small number of elites and the masses, who have seen little benefit from globalization and, accurately or not, regard global trade and immigration as the cause of their ills. This situation eerily resembles what used to be called the “disarticulation” of Third World societies in the 1970s, such as was seen in Brazil, Nigeria, and Turkey. As their bourgeoisies were plugged into the global economic system, most of the hinterland was left behind. The disease that was supposed to affect only developing countries seems to have hit the global North.”(Branko Milanovic 2020) (Branko Milanovic, 2020, p. 16)

The Plague Doctor (Scene 3)

Plague Doctor: We’re so close… But I just… I can’t get them to cut though to the core that we both know is there.

Plague Mother: I know.

Fear not, my acolyte. I will take over from here.

Plague Mother (Scene 1)

Atlas: And so that’s why Everything Everywhere All At Once matters so much. Time to credit my patreons-

[A mysterious sound as Plague Mother enters]

Atlas: Who are you?

Plague Mother: … (smiles)

Atlas: …

Plague Mother: …

Atlas: I- Are you…

Plague Mother: …

Atlas: Why now! The video is over, I have been a good boy. I can let this rest, right?

Plague Mother: …

Atlas: … Could you at least give me something?

Plague Mother raises her eyebrow

Plague Mother: You’re forgetting something…

Atlas: …

Plague Mother: …

Atlas: …

Plague Mother gets up and leaves. We cut to black.

Why Nothing Matters, truly

Trigger Warning: CSA.

When I was a kid, I was sexually abused by my mother.

She would “help me in the shower” to “make sure I was cleaning myself right”, all the way up to around 11 or 12 years old. I have blocked out 99% of these memories. I only know it happened because when my uncle was taking care of us one weekend. I remember asking him… “Aren’t you gonna watch me shower?”

It wasn’t until I watched Jenatte McCurdy get interviewed on Whitney Cumming’s podcast(McCurdy 2022), that cracks started showing up in my perception of my own life.

I used to say “My mother was mentally abusive, but not as much physical, because she never hit me or anything.” but then one day, it hit me. When cuddling with one of my exbfs and showing them Ptolemea by Ethel Cain, everything clicked. I was in fetal position in the living room, rocking back and forth, as the doors of a vault I never thought I had, flung open.

One realization after the other proceeded in the following months. Whatever my mother did in the shower, was sexual abuse. When my dad would lay on us if we couldn’t sleep and wait for us to do so, that was sexual abuse. When I was 14, lying about my age on a gay dating websites, doing sexual things for men over webcam, that was sexual abuse. When I came out to my ex-girlfriend as asexual, and she broke down crying at the idea of not having sex with me, threatening to break up with me, that was sexual abuse.

For a long time, I had been wondering why it hurts so deeply. Not just when the topic of abuse comes up, but every time I experience a situation where women are framed as the passive victim and men as the active perpetrator. It makes me feel that same cognitive dissonance, because I am a man who was sexually abused by a woman. I am being told something that doesn’t match with my lived reality.

Reading Noah Zazanis’ essay On Hating Men (And Becoming One Anyway) got me in the direction of unlocking what’s going on here-

“Learning that my experiences of harm were because of patriarchy allowed me to see myself as a victim and stop blaming myself for violence done to me. But it also meant that my conceptualization of my own reality, and my right to label these experiences as violence, was inextricably tied to seeing myself as a woman—or at least, within this binary framework of who harms and who is harmed, as not a man.”(Zazanis 2019)

Tumblr user sasquotch, when speaking on their abuse experienced in Conversion Therapy, says

“marking me as someone who had been r---d would emasculate me”(sasquotch 2024)

When I was speaking to one of my ex-boyfriends about this, who is trans, he said…

“Being abused makes me feel dysphoric.”

Since I entered the queer community, I have been naturally gravitating towards trans masculine people who have experienced abuse, sometimes at the hands of cis women. When I would finally get close friends who are trans femme, lo and behold. Years into the friendship, it turned out they too were abused by women. Why do I gravitate towards these people? And why have I felt so… spellbound on the trans men I’ve been friends with?

I think because we both struggle with the cognition, “being abused doesn’t make me a woman” in a world filled with people who think otherwise.

I used to think I was a binary trans woman. I thought that me having non-binary thoughts was simply me being “afraid that I’d turn into my mother” if I medically transitioned.

But after having experiences with people who understand, and who know about my abuse, and respect my boundaries, I have felt so much more secure in what I have known for SEVEN years. Being abused doesn’t make me any gender. It just makes me a survivor of abuse.

Every time I am being told that women cannot assault, or men cannot be victims, it is like a knife to my trauma AND my dysphoria. Equating “abused” with “women”, makes me feel gender dysphoric. It makes me feel, like nothing makes sense. It makes me feel cognitive dissonance. The psychiatric repercussions of my childhood will fade, but they are permanent. I am permanently mentally disabled because of it. I will never go back to normalcy.

My life is liminal. And I prefer it that way.

[The lights switch off and I’m wearing a different outfit]

You’re right. Nothing Matters.

But if I let myself succumb to that conclusion, my mother has won, and I am a very competitive person.

At some point, I have no choice but to stop being a Joy, and start being a Waymond.

Not in spite of being depressed, or scared.

No.

Especially when I’m scared and I feel like nothing matters.

Especially when the world is crumbling.

That’s when it’s needed the most.

Humans are flock animals.

Humans thrive in community.

Experience is supposed to change you.

It’s not a journey you venture out on, and return to normality.

You build a new world, you change. And that’s okay.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

...

III: SOMETHING

Alt, hvad hun ville, var at danse

Natten ung og smuk og usandsynlig

Gemt i sin elskedes arme

Tæt på, lige ved og næsten fri

Men fyren, som var hendes kærlighed

Sad midt i en alvorlig diskussion

Om ting af væsentlig og stor betydning

Som inderst inde ikke angår nogen

Det eneste, hun ville, var at danse bare en enkelt nat

Drømme uden at vågne op igen

Og nogen syntes måske, det var lidt synd, og andre skreg af grin

Langt de fleste lod som ingenting

Og festen var en lang og ensom tale

Hvor ingen hørte, hva' hinanden sagd'

Alt, hvad hun ville, var at danse

Og bare slippe ud derfra

Det eneste, hun ville, var at leve bare en enkelt nat

Drømme uden at vågne op igen

Og nogen syntes måske, det var lidt synd, og andre skreg af grin

Langt de fleste lod som ingenting

Så dansede hun pludselig der på gulvet

Lidt usikker, alene og forladt

Og uden at nogen rigtig så det

Forsvandt hun i den iskolde nat

Alt, hvad hun ville, var at danse

Glemme alting, mens det stadig sker

Flygte i sin elskedes arme

Hviske ord, som ingen husker mer'

Det eneste, hun ville, var at danse bare en enkelt gang

Drømme uden at vågne op igen

Og nogen syntes måske, det var lidt synd, og andre skreg af grin

Langt de fleste lod som ingenting

Something matters.

I mentioned Ethel Cain’s album, Preacher’s Daughter.

I thought I had gotten it.

I thought I had finally gotten it.

I was so blinded by the revelations in Ptolemea, that I though nothing of Sun Bleached Flies… until now.

God loves you, but not enough to save you
So, baby girl, good luck taking care of yourself

So I said fine, 'cause that's how my daddy raised me
If they strike once then you just hit 'em twice as hard
But in the end, if I bend under the weight that they gave me
Then this heart would break and fall as twice as far

We all know how it goes
The more it hurts, the less it shows
But I still feel like they all know, and that's why I can never go back home
And I spend my life watching it go by from the sidelines
And God, I've tried, but I think it's about time I put up a fight

But I don't mind 'cause that's how my daddy raised me (How my daddy raised me)
If they strike once then you just hit 'em twice as hard
But I always knew that in the end no one was coming to save me
So I just prayed and I keep praying and praying and praying

(Cain 2022)

The real reason I wrote this video was NOT to make the world understand.

I know plenty of people who do.

These are my good friends now.

I wanted to open the eyes of the one person, who I have never gotten to fully understand.

Finishing this essay, I realized, he will never.

I have been so obsessed with finding the cause of my nihilism out in the world, that I forgot to look right beside me.

Like Ethel Cain said,

I'm still praying for that house in Nebraska
By the highway, out on the edge of town
Dancing with the windows open
I can't let go when something's broken
It's all I know and it's all I want now

(Cain 2022)

So, I decided to break the cycle.

I broke up with him.

After 7 years, I finally had the courage & clarity.

I’ve started volunteering in the real life queer community.

I’ve met people, who care as deeply as me about the beauty of humanity.

Someone like me, who harbours a deep love for the world that can only bloom from seeing hell, yet still choosing to care.

And what I’ve realized is that someone cares.

Something matters.

Bibliography

- Branko Milanovic. 2020. The Clash of Capitalisms: The Real Fight for the Global Economy’s Future. Foreign Affairs 99.
- Cain, Ethel. 2022. Sun Bleached Flies. Preacher’s Daughter. Daughters of Cain Records. https://open.spotify.com/track/6fKIyDJHZ9m84jRhSmpuwS?si=c883ba56f4804597.
- Craig, Leigh Ann. 2009. Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill.
- McCurdy, Jennette. 2022. Jennette McCurdy Interviewet af Whitney Cummings. https://open.spotify.com/episode/30l5VGqDj5O2iMvjUVLkvL?si=c2cd53313cf0484b.
- sasquotch. 2024. “‘the Whole “Trans Men”’...” Tumblr. Sasquotch (blog). 14. marts 2024. https://www.tumblr.com/sasquotch/744916819725451264/the-whole-trans-men-just-have-sexual-trauma.
- Satre, Jean-Paul. 1944. Huis clos.
- Tacitus. 1989. Annals IV. Oversat af D.C.A. Shotter.
- Tacitus, Cornelius. 1970. The Agricola and The Germania. Oversat af H. Mattingly og S. A. Handford. Penguin Books.
- Teller, Janne. 2022. Intet. 3. udgave. Frederiksberg: Dansklærerforeningen.
- Turner, Victor W., og Edith L. B. Turner. 1978. Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture. Columbia classics in religion. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Villines, Zawn. u.å. “Cognitive dissonance: Definition, effects, and examples”. Set 26. marts 2024. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326738#signs.
- Zazanis, Noah. 2019. “On Hating Men (And Becoming One Anyway)”. The New Inquiry (blog). 24. december 2019. https://thenewinquiry.com/on-hating-men-and-becoming-one-anyway/.

Notes

(1) I have translated from Danish, with small liberty taken to match the tone of the situation.

Original:

“Det er otte år siden. Jeg har stadigvæk tændstikæsken med asken fra savværket og dyngen af betydning. En gang imellem tager jeg den frem og kigger på den. Og når jeg forsigtigt åbner den slidte papæske og ser ned i den grå aske, så far jeg denne her underlige fornemmelse I maven. Og selv om jeg ikke kan forklare hvad det er, så ved jeg at der er noget der har betydning. Og jeg ved, at betydningen skal man ikke spøge med. Vel Pierre Anthon? Vel?”

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