Wednesday, 2020: Larry has a revelation.

Barry took his usual trip to work. He stopped at the usual coffee shop and ordered a coconut Latte. “Larry”, he answered when the barista asked his name. While Larry waited for his coffee, he noticed the morning newspaper. On the front page was a story about a sleeping man on a train, who crashed the day before into a guy with a laptop. Coffee spilled all over the laptop, which contained years’ worth of work that had never been backed up. The Laptop guy, realising that the book he had been working on for the last 8 years was gone, lost his sanity for a moment and punched the poor sleepy guy straight in the face, and then proceeded to repeatedly bash his head with with the laptop as stunned commuters looked on in horror.

Larry started to have a few thoughts about what had happened the night before at the train station, and then what had happened the morning before according to the newspaper. He collected his coffee and headed to work, where his day was filled with leadership training session focusing heavily on personality profiling. Previous to this, Larry had been required to complete a tedious online questionnaire that posed a long series of difficult questions that had no real right or wrong answer. For most of the questions he didn’t know what to say, so he chose at random. Out of this exercise somehow Larry was provided with a report detailing his strengths and weaknesses. During the training he learned that people could be categorised into a small set of personality types according to their strengths. But, all of these strengths could start to become weaknesses when “over-expressed”. Admittedly, Larry’s report did kind of sound a little bit like him, but then a lot of horoscopes also tend to sound fairly accurate because they say things in such a vague way that they can be interpreted differently. At that moment, Larry had a realisation. This whole exercise was being paid for by the company. Why would they do that? Only for the benefit of the company, was the answer he arrived at. Everyone had a different set of personality traits. Everyone was a different shaped cog and had a place in the machine. This was business trying to mould him into something more effective for their end goal: making more money. The exercise was trying to achieve this by increasing “empathy” between people that are starkly different to each other. Sounds like a really good thing, doesn’t it? If someone was an absolute wanker to Larry, it’s not because they were a wanker, it was because they were over-expressing their strengths that day. And if we could all just accept that those different people have the right to be wankers, and it’s not their fault, then we would be more forgiving of each other, we would not leave so quickly due to personality conflicts, each cog would continue to perform its function without so frequently grinding each others’ gears, and the company would be more successful.

It was interesting to Larry how it had become so fashionable to focus on weaknesses. Or imperfections. Larry wondered to himself, what is a weakness? Was it really not just a strength in the wrong context? If so, then he almost saw some logic in the exercise. But then, sometimes people are just assholes. Being aware of his own imperfections was important at times, but focusing on them so constantly had started to lead to him seeing his imperfections as his identity. All of a sudden, Larry started to feel a little foolish and vulnerable. Was this all just a great way for the powerful to help subordinates come to terms with their inferior identity and their lot in life? “Fuck that” thought Larry. “And fuck them”. “My weaknesses are my strengths. And I will use them on the strong so that they realise what true strength really is.”

Later that day, on his way home, Larry started to wonder where all that rage came from. He wondered if he was finally starting to lose it. Those thoughts, they must be based on built up anger and nothing more. What was he thinking? He didn’t have any special strengths or special weaknesses. He didn’t even know that much about how to do his own job. Why the hell was he doing the job he was doing when he knew nothing about it? “Jesus… I could be fired tomorrow”, or that’s what Larry thought.

“What do you know about Jesus anyway?” said a voice on the train. Larry looked startled to his left to see a blind guy in a t-shirt. “Pardon me?” said Larry.

“Jesus was black, Jewish, and had no special powers other than a superhuman level of self-confidence, and a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy from the National Guild of Hypnotherapists.” said the blind guy. “Oh, and a knowledge of how certain things really work, thanks to opening his mind to the possibility of imagination becoming reality. You see, Larry, if that really is your name, the problem with most people is that, not only do they not know what they don’t know, they also don’t actually know how much they do know.” The blind guy continued.

Larry interjected “wait, who are you?”.

The blind guy said “that’s a difficult question to answer accurately, but you’ll figure it out eventually.” Larry started to feel a little bit freaked out, or that he might be dreaming. “You imagined that guy’s face being pummeled into an un-flushed toilet, and guess what, it happened.” Said the blind guy. Larry’s face dropped. The blind guy continued, “You imagined that sleeping guy falling forwards into that laptop dude, and guess what, it happened. You are closer to waking up than most people ever get, Larry.”

“Wait, what?” said Larry, “You were reading my mind?”
“The mind, Larry, is hard wired to interact with the quantum world. To receive messages from particles that have been entangled with each other. Since the dawn of time, when all matter from the old universe was drawn into a small child’s black hole experiment, all new matter has been entangled. The sub-atomic particles that I breathe in ‘know’ that they are being breathed and they share this knowledge with all other particles even in the far reaching universe.”

“…” Larry was speechless.

“In the know? The wealthy? Entangled particles? What are you talking about, man?” Stammered Larry, who was now beginning to think he had not woken up this morning and was still asleep in his bed, dreaming.

“Let me show you.” Said the blind guy.