In case it’s hard to read: artist is Chris Madden
This is pretty good as a joke, but imagine this as a horror story. Here you are hiking a notoriously remote and dangerous mountainside and you come around a bend to find a man casually waiting in your path. Dressed for the office, carrying an umbrella, wholly unequipped for this location but looking for all the world like he just showered, shaved, dressed, and walked to the bus stop on the corner. This clothes, his posture, his expression say nothing of the week long hike it took you to get here, he smells of freshly applied cologne. He glances at you with the benal expression of the Thursday office grind, too early to be excited about Friday, to late to really care about the events of the week, and steps slightly to the side and back as if making space to form a queue as he waits. If he recognizes you, he makes no expression of it, nor does he react to the look of terror you fail to hide when you see he is identical to you, not in the way that a mirror image is, but in that slightly wrong way that forward facing cameras flip the image.
Do you pass him, daring to get close enough to do so? Do you turn around and risk putting your back to this thing? Do you join yourself in queue? No answer truely seems appropriate.
Now I want you to write the full story so I can read it. The premise is definitely a great launchpad and the style of your approach to it works great.
If I had the chops to actually write a full story, I’d gladly send it your way.
Sounds like this could be an episode of The Twilight Zone!
It’s happened before:
Sorry but that title is so shitty I can not click it.
I read, and can’t stop wondering if I would be scared or intrigued more. I think such a meeting could become an interesting conversation, apart from perchance being a hallucination from dying of exhaustion
I find these thought experiments important for understanding one’s self. Personally it’s on sight with anything that looks too much like me, I’m not going to humour a Doppelganger’s attempts to replace me. Cursed objects on the other hand, that’s like catnip for me. Haunted doll? It’s mine. Cursed puzzle box? You bet. Book bound in human skin and inked in blood? That’s going right on the coffee table. I will ship of Theseus haunted houses until I find every part that contains ghost and then use all of that to build a new 100% haunted house.
Kate Berlant has a recent standup comedy special on HBO where she says that she did a therapeutic magic mushrooms session with like a guide and she thought she was gonna peel back the layers of her ego and see who she really was while tripping but she ended up just talking about the TV show Succession for hours while crying.
Such a funny concept to be like, dang this is it? no hidden knowledge or epiphanies about enlightenment? Can’t even pretend that the weird shapes you saw in the bushes were significant messages from the cosmos?
It was Douglas Rushoff who said something like, Some people do Ayahuasca and they figure out their place in the universe. Tech bros do Ayahuasca and they are just tech bros doing Ayahuasca. That is, there is no deeper layer to them that they can access.
I have talked to a few peruvians who have taken ayahuasca, some many times. They all said the same thing. It is a medicine and if you take it while you are “healthy” you will have a trip and that will be all. No enlightenment, no self discovery. You need to be “sick” for it to be able to heal you. They also said a good shaman will talk to you a lot beforehand and if they see you are healthy they will send you away. That’s what made me decide I do not want to take it. I have problems sure, but I am content with who and where I am in live.
Of course the shaman the tech bros go to just wants the money of rich tourists so they will do the ritual for anyone.
Pretty much. And yeah, seeing the tourism side of it, those are just folks taking advantage of rich folks. Reckless but it is what it is.
Stan, bro, if that’s your true self then do yourself a favor and shove him off the ledge.
If that was my true self, I’d be tempted to push them off.
As you do, you hear another voice behind you. It’s another version of you, this one a little less true to yourself than the last. This one is talking to a coworker about weekend plans, touching up bits here and there trying to sound a little better than you normally would. It feels a little uncomfortable to hear.
Is this a deliberate reference to Stanley’s Parable?
This but unironically
