A Magic Eye Poster

 There’s this great moment in BoJack Horseman where Diane tells her husband, Mr. Peanutbutter that, “Sometimes I feel like our marriage is like a Magic Eye poster. It’s messy, and at first glance it doesn’t make any sense and it’s hard to figure out. But, sometimes, if you squint at it just right, everything lines up and it’s the most beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing.” I remember that quote, because I feel like I spend most of my life looking at things that just seem to be random, messy, and nonsensical, and it’s deeply rewarding when you finally figure it out. Or, as Diane puts it, “Squint at it just right.” What really resonates with me, and with a lot of people, is when she follows it up with, “I’m so tired of squinting.” 

     Most of us are tired of squinting. All we do these days is try and make sense of senseless circumstances. Take Israels genocide of Gazan citizens. Nobody wants it, but our politicians won’t stop funding it. What sense does that make? Are they assuming our hatred of Trump and the republican party will be enough to take them to victory? Are they forgetting that not-voting is an option? That may be the worst example, but it’s far from the only one. We’re still being pushed to give up our dreams of working remotely, with excuses that no one in their right minds believes in. We’re being told that not only is Covid over, which it isn’t, but that we should forget that it ever happened. A few candlelight vigils and some memorials are all we get. Our world died, and we’re being denied an opportunity to mourn. 

     It’s not just our politicians and bosses who are forcing us to squint. It’s the idiots online who insist we overlook our president performing a literal genocide so that the worse candidate won’t have a chance to win. Never mind the fact that Trump shouldn’t even be allowed to run in the first place. But rather than question why the hell a president no one wanted who everyone knows broke multiple laws is allowed anywhere near a ballot, we’re supposed to square up and valiantly… kiss Biden’s ass to keep him in power. Any outsider looking at us right now would wonder what the hell we were thinking. We shouldn’t be voting for anyone. We should be in the streets demanding candidates who don’t suck ass. 

     Like most people, I remember the 2010s as a time of optimism. It occurred to me recently that when people talk about getting back to normal, they talk about going back to the 2010s. A time when the internet was mature enough to have good stuff on it, but still had enough diversity for you to be able to find your people if you looked long enough. The App store was garbage, but not every game was trying its hardest to be Candy Crush. Tech had hit the plateau, but it wasn’t obvious that the industry was run by idiots. You could still by into the idea that without innovation our world would have something of a future. Best of all, Trump wasn’t president, and we knew he never would be. Sure, the Republicans were pulling a lot of dangerous stunts, but no one thought that we would elect a president who could ruin America forever. 

        The problem is that in 2024, the 2010s aren’t what they really were. Like a Magic Eye poster, they were messy and didn’t make a lot of sense, because people in general don’t make any sense. So instead of remembering what happened, we remember what we thought happened, or what we wanted to have happened. For example, I remember having a Surface pro in 2013, despite not getting one until my mother gave me her old one in 2016. I only know it was in 2016 because when I got it, windows 10 had been out for at least a year, and I didn’t have a Surface with Windows 8 on it. I think that my brain combined the good parts of college with the computer that I liked (as opposed to the cheapest laptop they had at Costco) because that lined up with my internal narrative that college was perfect and wonderful until 2016. But it wasn’t. I started college with a bad laptop that I bought solely because it had a touchscreen and, for some reason, I wanted to upgrade. I hated that laptop so much I blocked it out. What else could I have blocked out? 

     Most of us look back on the past with blinders, or to borrow a comparison from BoJack Horseman, squint until our past makes sense to us. But that doesn’t fix the past. Or the present. It doesn’t erase the problems that make our world confusing and messy. It doesn’t stop the deaths of millions, or the screaming of those who just want to pretend everything is alright. At some point, squinting isn’t enough to erase all of the bad parts. That’s what life is like these days. You can’t squint anymore. You can only close your eyes and try to block out the noise.