Please remember how strange this all is.

A note-to-self from SFO

Please remember how strange this all is.

I am sitting in an airport in San Francisco. It is October 2025. I will get in a box today. It will take my body around the world in unbreathable air at 600mph.

The machines I see outside the departure lounge window are complicated and odd. Millions of computer chips and wires and precisely designed metal structures. Gears and belts and buttons. No individual knows how these things work.

I look down at my body. Even more unimaginably complex. An intricate soup of skin, DNA, fat and protein. Enzyme cascades and neuronal developmental pathways. These cascades are collectively producing these words somehow.

Please remember how strange this all is.

All this stuff exists, but we don’t know why. I am seeing and feeling and thinking about all this stuff and we don’t know why any of it is here. Nobody does. We make plans, we gossip, we deliver projects and look forward to holidays. We social climb and have sex and hold hands. We go swimming on a Saturday morning with a close friend and talk about our relationships and the water temperature and we silently agree to forget how deeply strange it is that any of this is even here and is like it is.

Please remember how strange this all is.

Experience is so absurdly specific. So surprisingly detailed. I am lost in my story; in the excruciatingly specific normality of it. Occasionally I remember. An obvious contrast. A strong memory. A flash of confusion. I sometimes remember, but I mostly forget. Remembering usually feels like a distraction from the thing that is happening now. It often is. I ask that you remember anyway.

Please remember how strange this all is.

Is this cliché? Am I being cliché? Or is that feeling of cliché-ness just more forgetting? More “this is normal”, more “this is usual and expected”.

We walk past each other on the street and forget the absurd mystery of why any of this is here. The strangeness and lostness in stories is the most reliable feature of all of our reality. Our confusion is the core vulnerability that we all share. Join me in the one place we can all meet.

Please remember how strange this all is.

The music playing in my ears. The movement of my pen on this paper. The feeling that these words are me. The flash of a vivid memory from last night. The complex web of social plans. The implicit meta-physics my thoughts are nestled within.

Please remember how strange this all is.

The woman behind the counter at the departure lounge café. The sound of boarding announcements. The complex array of brands of drink. Colourful and alluring and strange. The artwork in front of me is paper boats in water.

Please remember how strange this all is.

I talked to an old friend this morning in an Italian restaurant in The Embarcadero. He’s worried about AI and is dreaming of buying a house in the countryside. He wants to move away from the bay and stop fighting for the future of humanity.

Please remember how strange this all is.

Also remember to breathe. Breathe deep. Breathe deep through your nose and into your belly. Remember the centre. Remember to feel into your heart. Touch grass with your feet. Notice the consistent patterns and trust the context of your own perception. Seriously, remember to be breathe.

Then let go of that too. And remember again how deeply strange this all is.