In 2022, the film Everything Everywhere All At Once became a cultural phenomenon. Focused on a Chinese immigrant who is being audited by the IRS – while learning that multiple universes exist and that she alone must save all of them from a powerful dark force – the movie would go on to gross over $103 million worldwide and earn multiple nominations and awards among its cast.
It’s difficult to explain what Everything Everywhere All At Once is about. It’s a comedy, and an action film, and a touching portrayal of a complex mother-daughter relationship.
But for me, it’s mostly about choosing to be present with what’s in front of you, even though there are so many other things going on, all the time.
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The success of a movie like this right now is no accident. We’ve come through nearly three years of the world as we knew it being flipped upside down by COVID-19; we were forced to reckon with how we view work and rest and family and community. We were forced to let go of the plans we had made, the futures we thought we’d have, the potential other lives we could have lived if only this pandemic had not happened. And I think, most of all, we were forced to reckon with how we view our time.
If hustle culture was already on its way out by 2019, the pandemic was the last straw.
COVID-19 forced us to slow down, and to reevaluate.
We could no longer flippantly put off a family dinner or visit with a friend and say we’d do it another time. Now, we were unable to do those things, and unsure when we’d be able to again. We realized just how much of our time – of our lives – we were spending doing work which faded into gray in comparison to the brightly coloured friends, family, and communities we lost access to.
In the fall of 2022, we learned about the latest work-related movement: quiet quitting. First heard (as with so many things these days) on TikTok, the term refers to a movement “where workers have said ‘enough’ to overworking, and decided to set boundaries for their wellbeing.”
This movement was meant to be about preserving one’s self-care, work-life balance, and mental health. But as Derek Thompson summed up in The Atlantic, “What the kids are now calling ‘quiet quitting’ was, in previous and simpler decades, simply known as ‘having a job.’” It is not new to do the minimum at your job to simply get through but, as Thompson says, “[w]hen a phrase takes off, it’s often because the new words fill a space of uncertainty.”
And uncertainty, I think, is the moment we’re in now: we don’t want to be defined by work, and we don’t want obligations invading our moments of rest, but as the world opens up again we also want to re-engage in our communities. It can feel like either we do everything, again, like we did before, or we do nothing and miss out.
And it can feel like we’re running out of time to decide.
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Recently, I realized that my experience of time shifted over this three-year period. I’d always considered myself to be an organized person who operates on a schedule, but both my interpretation of time and my expectations of others used to be much more flexible. Pre-pandemic, when most of my work meetings and personal appointments were in person, there was always more of an understanding, more of a grace period, for people being late or for unexpected things happening. Perhaps, there was traffic, or you ran into a friend and stopped to chat, or you got the address wrong. We’re human and things happen.
But with the Zoom-ification of every part of our lives, I found myself becoming much more attuned to every minute that I was early or late to something, as well as to the timeliness of others. It felt like there was no excuse (for myself or for others) to be late, or to have to re-schedule, when all it entailed was opening a laptop or an app. And similarly, when the ability to do any task I could think of was at my fingertips, I began to feel like I needed to be doing something at every moment.
Running parallel to this feeling of the constant anxiety that time was getting smaller and every minute mattered, time also felt like it was ballooning outward.
Days and weeks and months stretched into each other, seemingly with no change, as my partner and I worked from home and went for our once-daily walk and video called with loved ones. Living in Vancouver did not help things. Being from the prairies, I already struggle with the lack of four distinct seasons here in Vancouver, and during pandemic times the feeling that every day was exactly the same as the one before it – with its overcast gray sky and slight drizzle of rain – only intensified.
It turns out that I’m not the only one whose experience of time was warped by the pandemic.
According to neuroscientist and author Dean Buonomano, time can feel like it’s moving slower or faster depending on what we’re experiencing. In a time like the pandemic lockdowns, he notes that many people felt “lost in time” and unable to process information about time in the way we had before. This is because time is linked with memory; “our retrospective judgements of time are really…‘guesstimates’ based on how many items we have in memory.”
Buonomano further explains that our relationship with time has long been linked to our relationship with work, and to the ever-increasing precision of how we measure time. While many claim the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries was driven by the steam engine, others argue it was driven by the availability of clocks that were affordable and available to people who worked in factories. You need to “synchronize human behaviour” in factories. Everyone had to show up at the same time in order to work the production lines that were needed for the Industrial Revolution to succeed.
This phenomenon has only gotten worse in the digital age, when we have satellite-precision not only in our clocks, but also in our phones, our computers, and our smart watches, buzzing and blinking and beeping to keep us on track at every moment. And for me – and I’m sure I’m not the only one – the huge and undefined pandemic period combined with this ultra-precision in my schedule meant that the clock-oriented way I viewed my work tasks began to leak out into the rest of my life. I started to view everything, from walks with friends to hot baths to cups of coffee, as measurable and quantifiable blocks of time.
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In response to the coalescing pressures of so much choice and so little time, we don’t have to zig zag between doing everything or nothing. There is another option: intentionally placing our attention on one thing at a time, slowly.
Jenny O’Dell writes in her 2019 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy that “[w]hat is needed…is not a ‘once-and-for-all’ type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else.” She notes this is difficult, and requires practice, saying, “If we think about what it means to ‘concentrate’ or ‘pay attention’ at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention.”
This is exactly what main character Evelyn has to practice in Everything Everywhere All At Once. By the end of the film, she has learned that there are other versions of her in endless universes. In some, she is rich, or famous, or has a different career, or, yes, has hotdogs for fingers. For a time she is tempted to live out what her life could have been in those universes, but ultimately, she chooses to stay and be present with her husband and daughter, running a laundromat and dealing with her taxes.
I used to think about choosing to focus on one thing at a time as doing less and I thought this meant missing out. I was afraid of staying still for too long and of erecting boundaries around that stillness. I thought boundaries would keep people out, that I would miss my turn, or that I would be happier if I could be part of every possible opportunity. But I found I wasn’t happier, I wasn’t more fulfilled, and the people who truly mattered continued to come knocking. And – surprise – I’m finding that with more stillness I also have more presence, more capacity, and more joy to offer others.
As author Judith Shulevitz argues when speaking about the practice of the Sabbath, deciding to set aside time when you say no to other activities is not about missing out, nor about adding a new self-care task to your schedule. It’s a practice of carving out space and time to simply be present, pay attention, and see what happens. She describes it as “a break after a line of poetry…. These are things that create meaning; they sort of bound time and say ‘this is going to be special. Now we’re going to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary.’”
Near the end of Everything Everywhere All At Once, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) says to her daughter (Stephanie Hsu): “No matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always want to be here with you.” I want this level of dedication to choice, to focus, to know that so much is always happening but it’s worthwhile to stay present in one moment at a time. I don’t have it yet. But I am working on it.
