“K-Nearest” Nabors  💙

I also cannot express how excited I am to be working with @rickhanlonii @threepointone and @yuzhiz <3

I'd like to give a special shout out to @sophiebits and @dan_abramov who helped define this role and encouraged me to go for it. This decision making process took a long time, punctuated as it was by Big Life Change. The team has been patient and thoughtful all along. Thank you.

I’m going to be in London next week for a few days. Want to say hi?

TFW you have to go stand in the back of the train because all the seats are taken and the dude next to you won’t stop touching himself.

I am pretty sure the scene with the dogs was not to say “oh humans are animals” but rather that their lives were as pointless as the dogs’: begging the question “to what purpose?” was this journey, this cruelty, this hardship. And the characters then answered for themselves.

I’m still sad about the dogs and the body horror though.

(Also holy shit I’ve seen some other people’s boss levels.)

I appreciated High Life because in spite of all the Worst Things Ever happening, in the end, the characters forged a way forward and found purpose. Morbid, scary, and depressing as that journey was. It was still the journey of a lifetime.

But it takes creativity. Imagination. And a jocular “oh ho, what is going on here?” attitude to take on these mini challenges. You can save your extra hearts for the real boss level. Every lifetime has its boss levels. Believe me.

You will know the Worst Thing Ever because it will take everything from you, and you won’t be able to do a thing. Anything short of that, you can find meaning. You can find purpose. You can find a way to pivot or to sneak around or to play the game better than they can. You can.

There came a point, after the burnout, death, international move, and divorce volley where I leveled with myself after a stressful day at work and was like, “Rachel, every little thing that happens to you can’t be the Worst Thing Ever. You just survived those things.”

How often I’ve looked back and seen, “Oh snap, if I hadn’t spent so much time crying out about how unfair that was and had just pulled this lever over here, that problem would’ve been solved!”

I’ve been looking at “road blocks” less as something I’m helpless to change and more as a puzzle to overcome these days. Thinking like a victim in every negative situation kills the creativity required to overcome that predicament, I’m finding.

Saw High Life. Wrapped in all of that was a message about finding purpose in a meaningless life. All our lives, whether here or in space, meet the same end after all. But we still have some free will.