If you’d ever asked me why I don’t smoke, I’d tell you it is because I have an addictive personality. I believe it might come from my mother, as I remember looking at her longingly on my way to bed. She’s curled up on the sofa, her face lit up by a blue glow, hunched over a Nintendo I know she’ll claw until 3 AM to play Germ Buster. Her addictions, or phases, have always been fleeting and harmless, video games or yoga. She would obsess over something for weeks, months at best, and then get bored and move on to the next thing. I am not like that.
My addictions stick to me like chewing gum in a little girl’s hair. Calories, of course. But also, setting alarms to avoid times that end in 5 or 0 (7:06, 9:57, 13:59). But also, walking back and forth in my living room at 11:37 PM to reach 10’000 steps. But also, not checking my phone until night if I am waiting for an email. And so on. New habits wrap their tentacles around my brain, and when I can’t follow them they tighten and it gets hard to breath.
Some call it magical thinking, the notion that you can influence the world by seemingly unrelated actions. Some call it superstition. Some call it OCD.
Either way, our desperate search for control is a part of being human as real as an organ. It is what has made religion so appealing for so many centuries. A laundry list of things to cross off to guarantee eternal salvation.
The mythical lore of magical thinking is supported by the revisioning history I apply to everything that has ever happened to me. If you were to ask me, I’d be able to pinpoint the exact instants my life has changed, several times. Those moments are frozen and still in the museum of my mind. Of course, they are made holy by hindsight’s perfect vision. I obsess over them. Relive those vignettes over and over, trying to find the recipe that created the perfect storm. Trying, desperately, to conjure them again.
In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.
As I live and die by my self-made rules, that is all I want. I am trying to crack the algorithm and figure out how to get the best possible outcome.
We were obsessed with the idea of the perfect play. The idea that there was a way to play any game that had the minimal number of errors, the least moral compromises, the quickest pace, the highest number of points.
Religion, manifestation, self-development, magical thinking, spirituality. We are all just trying to chase the perfect play, but is it even possible? And most importantly, would we even want that?
At our book club meeting, one of the members, Dodo, mentioned how the three characters named Anna Lee in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow could be seen as a direct response to Sam’s what-ifs about his mother’s death. Anna Lee is a representation of the inevitability of life and tragedy, of the impossibility of a perfect play. In the different scenarios, she commits suicide, dies in a car accident or loses her son. Who’s to say what outcome is better? Which one could be considered a victory?
At first, I thought the idea of magical thinking was comforting. It provided me with an illusion of control over an incomprehensible life. Soon, I understood its sinister implications. My responsibility, in every horror of my life. My fingerprints smudged red on my greatest traumas.
So I found comfort in something else, the knowledge that, unlike video games, the world isn’t finite, and it doesn’t end with my death.
In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Anna Lee’s suicide completely changes the lives of every single character, even the ones that have never come in contact with her. Her impact with the ground ripples through the wrinkles of time until it finds each and every one of them, stuck to the web of this butterfly effect. Her life wasn’t just hers, it was the world’s.
We can believe that everything happens for a reason, but we need to accept that everything is not just events, it’s lives, centuries, eras. And reasons could be larger than life or smaller than a grain of sand, and more importantly, never made known to us. We need to come to the realisation that in real life, there is no victory, no algorithm, no best possible outcome. There is only tomorrow.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Five Discussion Questions
Throughout the book, both Sadie and Sam betray each other. Do you think one character treats the other worse than vice versa over the course of the story?
The book seldom acknowledges Sadie's problematic relationship with Dov, neither by the characters nor by Sadie herself. Do you believe this was intentional? If so, what might be the reason behind it?
What is the significance of all three characters sharing the name Anna Lee?
There is a scene where it is acknowledged that Sam and Sadie's career could only unfold at that specific moment in time. Do you agree with this assessment?
Out of the games produced by Unfair Games, which one would you be most excited to play?