Switching Up
A Short Story
When the Switching UpTM technology was first released, it was a great shock to everyone. Initially considered just another pointless tweak for cluttering up the post-post-modern mind, it allowed anyone using it to feel exactly what another person was feeling for one minute and 25 seconds. You wouldn't think this would be such a big deal, but actually it changed everything.
There were many surprises. "That's what you've been complaining about all this time? You've got to be kidding me!" Or, "You've been living with that for 25 years? How could you even get up in the morning?"
Compassion increased as those who had never known depression or hell-states got a quick but powerful introduction. "There were depths below as black and hollow as a starless night, and people lived there, married there and had children, paid their rent and taxes, walked in the free air and nobody hauled them off to shock treatments or manacles."1
The new technology made compassion and empathy real. These qualities had been trained out of many people by the stupid thoughtlessness of the age. "Go kill yourself, because nobody cares," was a common comment on social media. The people making such comments weren't evil, as might have been suspected before life was lived online. They merely lacked imagination, and their minds had never been trained, or only enough to bat insults back and forth like ping pong balls, imagining themselves to have won something.
It worked the other way too. Those who had never known boundless, overflowing joy now stood under its blissful waterfall. People lay on the grass laughing, listening to birds. For those who had not known love, the same. The tidal wave of passion that connected hearts, minds and bodies, or the sweetness of a charmed and protective love for a child or an animal.
Those who'd never known responsibility tasted it now: The crushing or grounding or inspiring weight of dedication to a cherished ideal, someone dear, or something it was one's duty to protect. Hope and inspiration were tasted as well, a revelation to all who’d formerly sleepwalked through their lives on automatic pilot.
Though the intervention ended in less than two minutes, even one of these encounters changed a person forever, and it could happen anywhere at any moment. (Due to a variety of factors, the originally subscriber-based technology quickly burst its banks and flooded into the general population. Before long no purchase or thoughtful decision was necessary.)
One of the greatest consequences, unforeseen by those who thought idealism, philosophy and religion were nonsense: The technology bridged the chasm between those who thought life was meaningful and those who did not.
Within the 21st Century science of neurotheology2, which explored ecstatic mystical states though the lens of the brain, research subjects across a spectrum of religions, nature practices, and logical frameworks reported five elements: connectedness, clarity, intensity, surrender, and transformation. These experiences of hyper-reality and ultimate interconnection were self-confirming, bringing unshakable conviction of their validity to the experiencers, if not to the baffled friends and relatives.
Before Switching UpTM, those who hadn't had the experience could dismiss these encounters as wishful thinking, imagination, a brain chemical high, or some variation of, "Wow, that's a really cool sunset!" As with all individual perceptions, there was no way to share it convincingly with the skeptical.
Now they could. For one minute and 25 seconds, anyone who happened to run into the right person could experience the self-affirming essentiality, goodness, and mind-blowing hyper-reality of the multiverse. And this turned out to be a real game-changer.
Damon Knight, "Be My Guest," in The Others, Terry Carr Ed. Story first published in 1958.
Andrew B. Newberg, Principles of Neurotheology