For a few weeks, I couldn’t tell if it was just me, or if every new movie release I saw this summer was grappling with some large existential question.

In Asteroid City, a school field trip goes awry when an Alien makes a visit to a historical landmark, forcing the community to reconsider their place in the universe.
In Spiderman Into The Spiderverse, a young man, and every other incarnation of spider man realizes that they are not unique, and that they exist in a universe with near infinite variations of their own tale.

In Oppenheimer, a nuclear physicist struggles with immense guilt and shame as he seeks to understand the implication of unleashing the power of the Gods among mortals; a modern prometheus.

And in Barbie, a plastic doll ponders her mortality. “Do you guys ever think about dying?” She wonders aloud. The music at the party abruptly stops.

As someone who is predisposed to grappling with these types of questions, I found myself forming deeper connections with the stories I took in this summer. I would sit with them, hoping to develop clarity.

I don’t believe in “universal truths”, but I think the closest thing we have to one is the fact that every generation seems to openly grapple with their role in the grand scheme of things. I wasn’t alive in the 60s, but I imagine the moon landing stirred some uncomfortable questions. What’s out there in the cosmos? Do we really matter all that much? What came before this, what comes after it? These questions were so disturbing to some that they resorted to saying “I don’t really think we landed on the moon…” as if this denial would shield them from needing to ask bigger questions.

The only point of reference I have is the era I grew up in. Maybe I don’t have enough data points and my perception is skewed. Or maybe with each year that passes, humans are forced to consider more realities outside of themselves.

I think it’s the latter. Within a few short years, we experienced a global pandemic which shut us inside of our homes, a war started, and the economy began teetering on the edge, like a giant glass cup on a counter that you pray to God doesn’t fall. The planet is becoming more populated. We have become more interconnected through advancing technology. Large-scale challenges threaten our humanity.

Oh, and did I mention Artificial Intelligence, which threatens not only our jobs, but our sense of purpose? I promise you AI didn’t write this blog post.

These are the stitches that make up the fabric of our collective current reality. Things are weird. I sought to escape these giant questions by going to the movies, hoping a large bucket of popcorn and a bag of M&Ms would stem the tide of my own impending existential crisis. But, I forgot that life influences art, and that Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, Joaquim Dos Santos and Greta Gerwig sip from the same fountain of inspiration as I: real life.

Time is the underlying existential questions we’re all grappling with, and this summer I learned a lot about it.

Did you know that of the five most common nouns in the English language, three are units of time?

Day. Hour. Year.

Or, how about this; if you sent two friends with watches to different locations, one to the top of a mountain, and the other to the bottom of a valley, time would pass more slowly for the person in the valley and more rapidly for the person at the peak of the mountain. When they came back together, the watch of the person from the top of the mountain would be just a few milliseconds ahead.

If time is untrustworthy, next time you connect with a friend who went on a long journey, compare their watch to yours, and judge if the second hand is lagging behind, even marginally so.

To truly understand their experience, don’t start by asking them how it was, but rather ask them “Did the time fly?”.

Media's Existential Moment