In our team meeting/update, we sometimes have a “fun” question. Last week was “what would you call your autobiography?” and I said “Well, how did I get here?"

Everyone kinda laughed, but I mean it! Here are a few other ways to say this:

• things just kind of happen
• your life is not “your decisions”; it’s at best how you float on the winds like a hang glider but even that is generous to how much agency you have in your life
• no comprehensible God
• how can you have any feeling about your life besides bewilderment?

There’s a Ted Chiang story called Hell is the Absence of God that I just reread. In this world, heaven and hell are real and angels visit earth, usually causing a lot of damage like a natural disaster. Heaven is wonderful etc. Hell is ok, mostly like Earth. You get to heaven by loving God a lot. Neil, our protagonist, has a bad leg and is kind of depressed and angry his whole life. His wife, the one person he loves in life, dies in an angel visitation, making him even more depressed. She goes to heaven. He tries to love God but can’t, so he goes for the hail mary (npi): seeing divine light. (When an angel visits, divine light peeks through the heavens for a moment, and basically everyone who sees it witnesses the glory of God and they all go to heaven.) He finally does see it, though he dies shortly after.

“So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway.”

I hesitate to say this, but this feels like our world. God, or whatever is controlling all of this (physics?), is just … unknowable, arbitrary, and impossible. It’s like our health: yeah some things tend to lead to better health and some to worse, but anyone can get cancer or ALS.

And yet, most people are happy enough. How?

I’ve been tracking my moods on a 0-10 scale as I’m trying medication again¹. And this whole post is the kind of thought that comes up on a 2-4 day and goes nowhere, and mostly vanishes on a 5-7 day. So,fill up all the tanks and hang glide on the winds I suppose.

I guess I understand the “soldiers of God”, the ones who are fully dedicated to Jesus or Allah or something, the ones who in Chiang’s story are going to heaven. But how does one give oneself to God? I don’t want to, or think I can, join the zombie Cthulhu cult of God lovers in Chiang’s story.

I guess I also understand the “good enough” people. I know lots of people who don’t worry about God or whatever, they just have a pretty good life, a lot of 5-7 days, and that’s good enough. But I don’t think I can do that either; certainly my life is “good enough” by any measure and I can’t just chill and enjoy it.

Well, we’re not in Chiang’s story. There must be a better way. I hope that someday I write a better title for my autobiography.