Member-only story
Don’t Worry, You’re Used to Dying
A five-minute thought experiment I’ve found more enlightening than years of meditation
It’s the year 2120. Everybody is vegan, the English language has been largely replaced by memes, and your kids are struggling influencers. You’re the superintendent of a Bitcoin-mining facility, owned by an eccentric cryptocurrency zillionaire who took the slogan “to the Moon” a tad too seriously — the factory is literally on the rocky satellite.
Not that you’re complaining — it’s good money — but the Earth-to-Moon commute has been killing you for years. Almost literally. There are so many of these goddamn floating Tesla Roadsters zooming about that the company had to hire Chewbacca himself to maneuver the spaceship through the traffic. Just last week the famous Wookie pilot, along with half of your colleagues, was wiped out in an incident involving a randomly exploding Tesla.
In response to the public outcry, your crypto zillionaire boss decided to make a belated investment in a teleportation device. Naturally, you’re stoked. What used to be a hazardous three-day journey is now a mere digression in your day, barely an inconvenience at all. The user experience is almost uncanny — you enter a windowless telephone-booth-like apparatus on Earth, and exit it moments later, already on the Moon. How…
