The Egg
A metaphor for my early twenties
I read Andy’s short story during my early years in college.
I was in my young twenties. I had a freshly shaved head and brazen ideas inside it.
When someone formed a virtual book club on Whatsapp, I fit right in. I wanted to explore the big questions with kids who were caught in the crossroads too.
We had been suspended in the purgatory between our childhood’s light shackles and adulthood’s imminent routines.
We didn’t know what we wanted, and we thought that thinking out loud would help us figure it all out.
We wanted to ask about anything without judgment; no idea was too dangerous or radical then.
So, we were lucky to bump into each other. We read each other’s book recommendations and short essays.
Our writing was raw, our ideas still simmering.
We read works by Camus, E.B. White, Adichie, Cole, and a lot of short stories too.
So, when someone shared Andy Weir’s ‘The Egg’ on the group, there were mixed reactions as usual.
One of us thought that it felt like the type of manipulative story that people spread on Facebook out of fear of the story’s threat. The existential tale nestled well between the rest of us little philosophers, along with all the philosophical tales we consumed at the time.
So, we left it at that.
When I saw the animated version of ‘The Egg’ on Youtube’s top trending spot today, I was taken back to that time.
We’re no longer on the crossroads facing each other.
One of us moved to Egypt, the guy who read A Brief History of Time as a kid is in the United States working on a related field, the girl who shared her poetry on her blog is now a published poet, the artistic guy is studying to be a professional visual artist, the medical student had already seen dead bodies by now, and I had encounters that are almost as crazy as the one described in ‘The Egg’, and I don’t tire writing about my Creator-the Subject of those encounters-lately.
But ‘The Egg’ seems to have incubated in the public consciousness for years before Kurzgezagt brought the idea to life.
It’s a slightly arrogant idea in that it makes the individual the center of the universe. And it’s an idea that promotes kindness and empathy even if only to treat oneself kindly.
To me, it’s a story that reminds me of a romanticized era in the human lifespan: young adulthood.
-w
