The Reconciliation of Doomerism and Rational Optimism in Everything Everywhere All at Once
Rarely does a movie convey a message that is as culturally relevant to the moment like Everything Everywhere at Once recently has. With global issues such as climate change, COVID, and war making headlines weekly, depression and mental health issues have become increasingly commonplace in younger generations, so much so that the term “doomerism” has materialized to coin this sentiment. Gen Z (or millennial) doomers see these worsening and seemingly unsolvable global issues and put simply, despair. What to do about this neo-nihilism that is contributing to a mental health crisis in young people? How do we inject hope into nihilist Gen Z’ers? In Everything, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka the Daniels) first show that this isn’t a problem that can be simply fixed through optimism — even rational optimism at that. Instead, the Daniels reconcile this rising sentiment among young people through a sort of optimistic nihilism that shares strong similarities with the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism.
If you’ve watched Everything, or even just watched the trailer, you might be scratching your head trying to compare a chiseled marble statue of Seneca with Everything’s awesome weirdness. Nonetheless, follow the Stoics advice and don’t let appearances deceive — underneath all the googly eyes and glitter-plastered outfits, the Daniels explore and debate worldviews in a uniquely dynamic way.
By having each lead character in Everything represent a relatively-defined philosophy — Evelyn and Waymond (at least initially) are rational optimists, Jobu Tupaki the nihilist, Evelyn’s father a pragmatist (JOBU MUST DIE!) — the Daniels are able to play chess and create a dynamic flow of ideas, a sort of mimetic evolution. The audience watches as Evelyn tries time and time again to break through to Jobu/Joy with her rational optimism (“this isn’t you!”) but is rebuffed each time by the incompatibility of Jobu’s nihilistic views. This continues over and over until, with Waymond’s help, Evelyn’s philosophy evolves into a form of optimistic nihilism — Stoicism.
We see in Jobu Tupaki a young adult who, met with repeated failure compounded with a tough mother, devolves into a nihilist (or, as the Daniels want us to realize, a Gen Z doomer) hell-bent on destroying the world. She is a unique being who shares in the experiences of every single universe’s Joy — and she has fallen, slipped, lost, failed so many times that she believes that nothing matters anymore. She just wants it to end, and for everything else to end with her. Hence, the “everything donut”, symbolizing Jobu succumbing to doomerism, with depression and suicidal actions resulting. As dark as it is, unfortunately this isn’t too unfamiliar if we look around at the real world, with suicide rates, incidents of public violence, and school shootings all on the rise.
Alpha-Waymond, aware of the existence of this potentially multiverse-ending donut, seeks out the one Evelyn out of an infinite amount of Evelyns to save them all. Upon finding the Evelyn we know and love, he asks her if she’s noticed how everything recently has seemed off — her coffee tastes a little bit worse each day, hair feels increasingly weird, and so on. Doesn’t she just want everything to go back to normal, how it was ‘before’? Seems a bit familiar once again. COVID is the first event that comes to mind, but the intensity of conflict seems to be rising all around us more than ever. Recent divisions, both political and social, seem amplified and irregular, as if there has been a crack in the glass of society.
Alpha-Waymond explained to Evelyn that this fracture in society was caused by Jobu’s donut. In having the donut be a two-fold symbol, representing both depression and a sense of doom, the Daniels draw a circle between the two to illustrate a positive feedback loop. Doomerism spreads like a wildfire so that when nihilists look up at the world around them, they see only burning trees — fellow doomers.
With Alpha-Waymond, Evelyn seeks to destroy this feedback loop at its source by defeating Jobu and destroying her donut. When she first encounters Jobu and realizes that this purported supervillain is her own daughter (albeit from another universe), she seeks to rationalize her way out of the conflict. “This isn’t you!”, Evelyn tells her daughter, failing to understand that Jobu’s pessimistic nihilism is not compatible with her own logic. Until the final scenes, we see Evelyn continue to try and break through to Joy with this rhetoric, for Evelyn and Alpha-Waymond are rational optimists, and positively skewed logic is the lens through which they see this world.
When Alpha-Waymond first meets Evelyn, he uses a touching dialogue to attempt to convince her of his seemingly crazy story of a multiverse and an evil supervillain. He voices over a montage of Evelyn’s life, telling her that all of her failures, all of her decisions, all of her choices have culminated into the person that she is today — for better or for worse. Why choose this Evelyn, a seemingly normal laundromat owner struggling to plan her father’s birthday party, to defeat an evil overlord? Alpha-Waymond continues to expand on his rational optimism (which Evelyn soon inherits) by saying that while she is the “worst Evelyn” — having not tried anything new, taken any risks, accomplished major deeds — in comparison to her infinite multiverse counterparts, this means that she has infinite potential. She can do whatever she wants from hereon out.
Why can’t Waymond and Evelyn apply this same rational optimism to Jobu? Other than the aforementioned incompatibility with logic, doomerism is inherently irreconcilable with optimism — there’s a reason the symbolic donut used by the Daniels is so reminiscent of a black hole, a galactic object that literally sucks in light to the point of complete blackness. After continuously trying to light a lamp in a black hole, Evelyn eventually finds a means of getting through to Jobu. She does so only with the help of her own Waymond, who allows her to adopt the headspace of Jobu (and her daughter) — to have empathy — through, quite simply, kindness. With this, Evelyn finally sees the issue.
Jobu Tupaki is “defeated” when Evelyn reconciles her daughter’s doomerism with her own rational optimism to form stoicism. Having experienced the infinite vastness of the multiverse — what Jobu has experienced throughout her entire life — Evelyn lets go of all preconceived notions and realizes that nothing, in fact, does matter. With her underlying structure of rational optimism (which young Jobu lacks), Evelyn doesn’t devolve into doomerism, but rises to stoicism. To paraphrase the Stoics: nothing matters? Good. Evelyn’s rational optimism makes her question the default outcome of nihilism — cynicism — and realize that the meaninglessness of life isn’t repressive but liberating. If nothing matters, we have ultimate freedom in our choices and actions — we can love whoever we want, as Evelyn’s father’s unexpected acceptance of Joy’s girlfriend represents. Nothing matters? The unparalleled wackiness of Everything is the Daniels’s response to this — we can be as weird as we want, cause nothing matters in the end.
While Everything posits that the infinite nature of the multiverse means that nothing matters, Stoicism zooms out on the history of humanity to put the span of a human life in perspective — we are but a speck of dust in comparison to all of time, and our actions will be blown away by the winds of time. Both respond to this mind-numbing realization in a beautifully simple way. Stoicism emphasizes that we only have so much time on this planet, so live wholeheartedly in the present. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and led his troops in war multiple times, yet he understood the importance of this, writing (and warning), “The present is all we have to live in. Or lose”. Once Evelyn’s philosophical fusion occurs, she too realizes the importance of presence — she begins to cherish the moments despite the chaos unfolding around her as wars once unfolded around Aurelius. She pushes all those externalities and worries, those tax documents and birthday party plans, to the side and devotes herself to the moments she has with her daughter. Joy says about their universe, “Here all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense”, to which Evelyn lovingly responds, “Then I will cherish… these few specks of time”.
Both Stoic philosophy and Everything Everywhere All at Once confront the terrifying expanse of the external. Comparing the 80-some years (if we’re lucky) that we have on this planet with the millennia of human history, or in Everything’s case comparing yourself to an infinite number of other yous, can lead us to believe that nothing really matters. Stoicism and Everything send a message to those whose cynicism teams up with this nihilistic realization to take them down a dark path, which unfortunately in younger generations has been occurring quite frequently. If nothing matters, then we have ultimate freedom — freedom that allows us to make the most of what we are given, despite all the external and uncontrollable events that swirl around our heads.
