{"id":10242,"date":"2024-11-17T04:45:35","date_gmt":"2024-11-17T04:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=10242"},"modified":"2024-11-17T04:45:38","modified_gmt":"2024-11-17T04:45:38","slug":"the-time-travelers-are-not-ok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/17\/the-time-travelers-are-not-ok\/","title":{"rendered":"The Time Travelers Are Not OK"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Time Travelers Are Not Ok<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Time travel may have started all in good fun, but its growing status as the only gimmick capable of saving humanity carries some troubling implications for what is being saved.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Charles Carman<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u201cIt is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate.\u201d \u2014 Friedrich Nietzsche, Use and Misuse of History for Life<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In 1976, David Lewis published an \u00a0 in the American Philosophical Quarterly<\/em> about paradoxes implied in time travel, the most famous perhaps being the grandfather who is killed by his grandson. The paradoxes were not meant to suggest, according to Lewis, that time travel was impossible; he believed that it was. Unlike in Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s infamous alive-but-not-alive cat theory, by which the author originally meant to note the paradox and therefore absurdity of super-positions in quantum mechanics, Lewis noted some seeming contradictions simply as oddities. Contradictions would occur, he readily admits, if we imagine that only one future is out there, i.e., the future where the very grandson exists who kills his grandfather. But if we imagine that the grandson who succeeds in killing his grandfather by that very fact creates a new<\/em> future, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Multiple futures are possible, because anything in the past is revisable; with every revision, a new future branch will come into existence.<\/p>

It wouldn\u2019t be long before Hollywood took these Ideas to the big screen. Terminator<\/em> (1984) and Back to the Future<\/em> (1985) paved the way for a slew of movie concepts revolving around time-travel paradoxes of all sorts, each with more or less credible \u201csolutions.\u201d Today, the idea of an alternative branch of history has matured to the belief that an infinite set of universes already exists (sometimes to be entered into by means of changing the past, sometimes just by entering a portal). The stories we tell involving time travel are running into paradoxes\u2014even contradictions\u2014which go far beyond those imagined by Lewis. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

I have often entertained a modest proposal: a return to the good ol\u2019 days of time-travel movies, or else a moratorium on the entire concept in film\u2014pretty please and thank you. Of course, most acknowledge that there are too many movies nowadays with the timey and the wimey mixed in the batter. But<\/em>, some will say, they\u2019re still great movies<\/em>\u2014like, so I hear, one of the Spiderverses<\/em>, or, that great one by that one director. Arrival<\/em>? Yes, the characters of the cartoons are splendid, and the creativity is off the charts; and Arrival<\/em> was a beautiful film. However, not all time-travel movies are made equal, and the creativity of our stories is suffering under the blinders of \u201cjust use time travel to save us.\u201d<\/p>

So, that\u2019s the proposal, but it\u2019s not the aim of talking about time travel. There\u2019s no sport in shooting an animal in a cage; there\u2019s certainly none in criticizing the Hollywood storytelling of the past decade. The normal viewer will have noticed, along with the snobbish cinephiles, that certain tropes are taking over film. The sky-beam, alien-invasion, a motley crew of CGI characters coming to save the day\u2014the internet has already teased out and catalogued them all. Like in the music industry, where key-changes and complex arrangements are endangered species, in so many films today, it seems the same tropes and characters are only barely distinguished from each other by sheer copy-right law. Each story seems the same sort<\/em> of story.<\/p>

Among other tropes, time travel especially has grabbed film companies and executive producers by the Dr. Whos. Marvel\u2019s Avengers<\/em>, DC Comics\u2019 The Flash<\/em>, Tenet<\/em>, The Tomorrow War<\/em>, Arrival<\/em>, Looper<\/em>, Spiderverse<\/em>, Everything Everywhere All at Once<\/em>\u2014there are so, so<\/em> many. Time travel, and its younger sister the multiverse, are implied in nearly every story of rescue and reconciliation. It has become all but unthinkable to save humanity from total calamity without some<\/em> form of temporal contortion.<\/p>

And before the age of MIT research grants, time travel was harmless. What-Ifs were just playful Just-Sos in the age of garage-tinkering scientists. One reason why Back to the Future<\/em> (\u201985) was so easy to roll with is that it considered time paradoxes and quantum mechanics with levity. The whole back-in-time thing was an excuse to revel in the awkwardness of accidentally romancing your cute mom, the bendy scandal of introducing rock-\u2018n-roll ahead of its Overton window, and awakening the dormant thumos<\/em> in your dad\u2014all things chaos theory would surely not look kindly upon, but, hey, it\u2019s all in good fun. Time travel was an excuse to revel in nostalgia for the \u201850s, or the \u201880s, to visit the kings of music and shake hands with presidents along the way. The Past was a sandbox, and as long as you didn\u2019t wander too \u201cfar out!\u201d you could reshape whatever you wanted and keep the rest intact.<\/p><\/div>

But things started turning uncanny with Groundhog Day<\/em> (1993). According to a standard reading of the plot, Phil Connors is trapped in a time-loop, inescapably waking up for the Groundhog Day celebration on February 2nd in the forgettable middle-America town of Punxsutawney, PA. Except it\u2019s not an exact time-loop, because he remembers the loops. If the time loop included Phil, then it would be a boring film. You\u2019d just be watching the same day multiple times. But Phil, because he can remember, is the only one not<\/em> caught in the time loop. Thus, in traversing February 2nd for who knows how many times, Phil progresses from existential crises to experiential explorations. If he\u2019s not trying to woo a girl by learning exactly what to do and say to impress her, he\u2019s trying out different ways to kill himself. Of course it turns out all right in the end, when he gets the girl and\u2014would you believe it\u2014the time loop stops, and he wakes up to February 3rd.<\/p>

When I watch Groundhog Day<\/em>, though, I find myself looking at the wrong thing. That is, it makes sense that we connect with Phil, and align the success of the plot with his own self-exploration and -development. But I couldn\u2019t help thinking about everyone else apart from<\/em> Phil. The others were the real time travelers, not Bill Murray. February 2nd restarted again and again, and they returned to their original states of mind, their memories wiped of everything Phil Connors tried on them, their desires redirected to their pristine orientations, their future paths as nearly pre-determined as billiard balls for Phil to redirect. It would only take a change in music and recutting some shots, and this movie could fully assume its potential for perfect horror.<\/p>

Movies like Back to the Future<\/em>, Hot T<\/em>ub<\/em> Time Machine<\/em>, and Bill & Ted\u2019s Excellent Adventure<\/em> were just having fun. Other films after Groundhog Day<\/em> tried to make time travel romantic (the temporal stalker gets the girl, but he\u2019s so cute and the piano is so reverberating). Terminator<\/em>, though\u2014released a year before Back to the Future<\/em>\u2014set time-travel on a wholly different path. Time travel is no longer the playground of temporal vandals and tinkerers. It is the stage of human salvation by means of the final technical achievement: the manipulation of time and space.<\/p>

I\u2019ve heard that movies have no villains anymore. It may be no coincidence that humans are slowly forgetting any other way of cancelling the apocalypse than to time-jump. You gotta go into the future and fight the enemy (The Tomorrow War<\/em> or Live, Die, Repeat<\/em>, or\u2026 just so many); or you gotta rely on the future to come back and save you (Interstellar<\/em> and Tenet<\/em>). It seems to me sometimes\u2014when this pattern swells into something like a Zeitgeist feel\u2014that time travel is the last-man\u2019s truncated version of the eschaton. The purely immanent cosmos bootstraps itself by manipulating basic principles of existence towards a destiny better than whatever its actions deserved (\u201cAnd to keep things economic,\u201d say the Hollywood execs, \u201cplease make sure this keeps on going so that we have to make spin-offs!\u201d).<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What makes us persons often makes us miserable, and sometimes to lessen the misery we would be willing to trade a piece of our souls.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u201cThere is<\/em> no inner self. Looking, \u2018in,\u2019 we have found nothing\u2026 stable\u2026 nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, not conclusive\u2014because there is nothing to find<\/em>.\u201d \u2014Peter Watson, Ideas<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Time travel not only changes our notion of time and space, but also has far reaching effects on what we believe it is to be a person<\/em>. In fact, we are already past the point where the \u201ctimey-wimey\u201d has forgone an older sense of person entirely. We now openly and unreflectively imagine a world where time travel is possible, but in which no persons exist in ye olde sense of the term.<\/p>

A study of personhood as we think of it today is not an ancient practice. Persona<\/em> (and the Greek equivalent prosopon<\/em>) had their origins in the epitaphic likenesses and funeral statues found among the Etruscan, Latin, and Greek civilizations. In plays, a persona<\/em> was the mask through which the actor played his part; it was through analogy to the actors on the stage that a human\u2019s \u201cpersonality\u201d was conceived by Cicero, Epictetus, and the Stoics. Seneca argued that the perfectly rational human being was one who wore only one persona<\/em> his whole life, whereas the imperfectly rational human, \u201cgoes around with no stable identity, and (what I find most dishonorable) is inconsistent with itself. Realize that it is a great thing to act as just one human being. \u2026 [However] we keep changing our mask [personam<\/em>].\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

The terms persona<\/em> and prosopon<\/em> received more acute attention among the Christian theologians. Personhood was shaped on the forge of trinitarian and later Christological debates. With the intellect, memory, and will\u2014the hallmarks of a persona<\/em>\u2019s mind\u2014Augustine saw an icon of the divine life. For the bishops of Alexandria, as well as the Cappadocians, the past held a special place in defining a person. However defined\u2014as a rational, individual substance, or a self-conscious center of intellect, memory, and will, or as that creaturely share in the life of the Trinity\u2014a person\u2019s very salvation assumed past deeds as (mysteriously) unalterable corrigenda. The essence of a person\u2019s history, as Josef Pieper puts it, is made up of \u201cfreedom, decision, uniqueness, unrepeatability, uninterchangeability, unpredictable capacity for variation, [and] the individually solitary.\u201d A stable past makes for a sound person.<\/p>

The past is the field harvested by memory, setting the stage for our decisions, for better or worse. It is a source of pain and suffering, the home of our mistakes. Our imaginative powers, the counter-factual computations, are strong allies against despair and regret. In The Past is a Foreign Country<\/em>, David Lowenthall writes, \u201cThe desire to alter what has happened is a common if futile response to a dilemma that confronts us all: past events have determined the world and ourselves as we are; \u2026[and from what] might-have-been we fantasize reaching back to make it so.\u201d What makes us persons often makes us miserable, and sometimes to lessen the misery we would be willing to trade a piece of our souls.<\/p>

Modern philosophy has a Gordian solution to this tangled knot: personhood<\/em> is kind of a delusion. There are many spaces (some popular, some niche) where one can find a theory of personhood which reduces it to an epiphenomenon: e.g., Philosophy of Mind or\u2014and this does exist\u2014analytic philosophers writing about Indian metaphysics of the self (so, in 2021, a debate started up again between the Buddhist Personalists (the Pudgalav\u0101dins) against the standard reductionists (\u0100bhidharikmas) about whether persons\/selves are irreducible or not). Marilynne Robinson and David Bentley Hart have made mincemeat out of the grossest claims of the philosophy of mind guys, so much so it hurts. Still, it is easier than it used to be to imagine that a person is just<\/em> a computer in a meat-bag, just<\/em> a concentration of panpsychic matter, just<\/em> whatever we want it to be. After all, if I want to change my personality by changing my body parts or upgrading my head with a neuralink thingy, it becomes easier to imagine changing more fundamental attributes. One\u2019s memory, for instance. As memory becomes fungible, erasing bad memories, or replacing them with better ones, would certainly seem to many as not only a preferable way to live, but, in many cases, more humane.<\/p>

Still, if for any reason Being a Person remains a desirable thing, the classical views of it are preferable to the modern. Modern philosophers of personhood (some bathing in the acid of analytic philosophy longer than their mothers would like, others smoking the hasheesh of post-modern absurdism behind their mothers\u2019 backs) have trouble seeing anything irreducible about personhood. The classical models, found in Aristotle or Plato or Thomas Aquinas (seeing as they respected their mothers a great deal) saw personhood as one of the<\/em> irreducibles of existence. For the moderns, persons are not really real, but rather emergent. For the ancients, persons are transcendent. For today\u2019s philosopher, persons might not really exist; for the philosopher back then, everything else might not. As Eleonore Stump put it once during a talk on Trinitarian Theology, “It\u2019s persons all the way down.”<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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You don\u2019t remake the past without unmaking persons.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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“You know why I actually built the bagel? It wasn’t to destroy everything. It was to destroy myself.” \u2014 Joy Wang, Everything Everywhere All at Once<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The classical models of personhood are all very well and good if you want personhood to be real; but what\u2019s often the most real about being a person are the pains of knowing<\/em> from your memory<\/em> what you chose<\/em> to do. You are what you did. If we could change what happened (or happens, or will happen), we might save ourselves the pain of what remembering what happened (etc.).<\/p>

From the ol\u2019 fashioned view of personhood, the irreversibility of the past is dangerous to suspend belief in, partly because it is too sweet a comfort. It\u2019s the same reason why it\u2019s not decent to fantasize about the lottery. The unreachability of so complete a life-change only darkens the colors of your present estate. You feel poorer without the winning ticket\u2014or the opportunity to see that one person again; to unsay what you said; to heal a friendship, whatever it might take.<\/p>

The changelessness of the past is an important anchor to the self. You don\u2019t remake the past without unmaking persons. (Some time-travel movies went hard down the \u201cthere\u2019s nothing you can do\u201d line. The Butterfly Effect<\/em> and Looper<\/em> made time travel very un-fun. The only way to undo the past was to undo oneself, a version of killing baby Hitler that was melancholic and cool because you were actually a decent enough guy to point the gun in your own direction, and you still had the last, heroic word.)<\/p>

Time travel may not be a problem from the standpoint of physics; a universe is perfectly imaginable where some natural phenomenon\u2014say, a sun by means of a black hole\u2014travels back in time and destroys its cosmic grandparents or jumps ahead and impacts a future-state galaxy. It may turn out that the world in which we live is open to time travel (though I doubt it myself). Which is to say: the paradoxes of time travel are not intra-timey-wimey; they occur when you throw a person-shaped monkey wrench into the time machine. The puzzle with time-travel movies is not so much a mechanical one as it is spiritual. It\u2019s not the laws of physics which ask of us a past which does not change, a present balance of necessity and contingency, and an open future; it is our understanding of personhood. That is to say, the laws of physics (and the authors of those laws in Hollywood), by envisioning a world in which time travel is possible, construct a cosmos inhospitable to persons.<\/p>

Consider perhaps the strangest effect of time travel (strange from a person<\/em>\u2019s perspective): no time-travel story has avoided, and many of them openly play with, the fact that no person may alter the past or visit the future without leaving himself <\/em>behind. All time machines are, in fact, devices for copying persons. Films like Looper<\/em> and Primer<\/em>, or the TV shows Dr Who<\/em> and Rick and Morty<\/em>, face this reality head-on, allowing the original and the newbie to engage with, even kill, each other. In films like Tenet<\/em> or the Marvel universe, on the other hand, this duplication is nothing too strange; it\u2019s just another part of the just-so of time travel.<\/p>

The ancients did not entertain such ideas\u2014modern physics had yet to be invented\u2014but I\u2019ll wager few things would seem more demonic to Christian theologians, or more sub-human to stoics like Seneca, than to \u201cinstantiate\u201d a new person by altering the basic dimensions of the cosmos. No intimacy, no love, no divine action. Just brute force upon cosmic stoichea<\/em>. Scratch babies born in labs; try persons created by breaking the universe.<\/p>

Whenever the laws of time travel are used upon a personal subject, the creation of the double is granted without contest. Without so much as a \u201cwhat in the\u2014\u201d the story assumes that a person can<\/em> be created ex nihilo. The writers of the film ask for some leeway, no doubt, but the narrative seems to demand more than, “just grant that there is a person made from another by the law of physics.” Pausing on that moment can make the spiritual planes spin. It is a moment of quantum-mechanical auto-production\u2014the technological conception of someone who shares the same characteristics to an uncanny degree, though usually possessed of their own intellect, memory, and will. Nothing weird here.<\/em> Yet if we can go skipping along in a world which can conjure up a person by breaking the cosmos, perhaps something else<\/em> has already broken.<\/p>

So long as the existence of many or an infinite number of You<\/em>s is somehow unsettling, the old notions of personhood (according to which, there can be only one) still stir. On this older notion of personhood, a multitude of You<\/em>s is unthinkable. They are<\/em> not You. Everything which seems essential to you\u2014the features of your face, your physical make-up, your origins\u2014are sort of <\/em>transferable. Other descriptors\u2014your will, intellect, consciousness, memory, hope, decisions\u2014are not included. Even in Everything Everywhere All at Once<\/em>, the effort to make these sharable (i.e., \u201cyou have access to all your infinite selves\u201d) only highlights the point. Either Evelyn receives knowledge the way Neo learned Kung Fu in the Matrix\u2014merely a sped-up version of learning from<\/em> another person\u2014or else the more that the selves coalesce, the less discernible is the supposed difference between them. (Also, who knows what really happened in EEAOO<\/em>\u2026)<\/p>

Inhumane cosmologies are not new. In our own way, we may sense in this new cosmology a similar dread to that which the Greek tragedians felt. Fate\u2014like time-travel\u2014contended with personhood. It questioned our sense of choice, of the divine power to define ourselves by our actions. The war with the Fates was often a war against a cosmos which seemed unwelcoming, unfit for truly human living. Neither identity through memory of past actions nor an irreducible freedom to make something happen (I<\/em> and I alone <\/em>did this) fits in a world that seems at its roots to favor all-embracing necessity or absolutely unbiased chance. In the same way, according to time travel, or the multiverse, you<\/em> and you alone<\/em> are not You. You may on any given day create a duplicate You<\/em> by traveling in time. In fact, in the multiverse, there is already an infinite number of You<\/em>s, just as much You as You are, doing all the things that You<\/em>s do.<\/p>

The final Irony is that the mechanics which render this world inimical to personhood are used to obtain salvation of persons. The seriousness of moral responsibility, the tenderness of love, the urgency of forgiveness\u2014they all rely on an unchanged past, on an open future, on the unique, solitary unity of one\u2019s Self. If these grounds are rendered plastic, as so many building blocks which, like our bodies, we are able through technology to alter, then they vanish, and with them, any sensible belief in our semi-divine power to define.<\/p>

But, it seems, there is no alternative. The gods will not save us; they are too busy elsewhere. The world does not care; it is moving along despite us. Being is not a gift; it will dominate or be dominated. Only by means of technical control of the cosmos can we procure the salvation of our supposed selves. Except that such a salvation will render the saved impersonal (almost as if such technical means can only produce technical results). You<\/em> would not be saved at all.<\/p>

Only an alternative cosmology will do. I cannot say whether or not time travel is valid, though certainly many wonder how much confabulating is at work among physicists. An alternative science\u2014a divine science, one might propose\u2014will have to ground existence, indexing our cosmos upon a Person, or something equally gracious. For it\u2019s either persons, or particles-n-waves\u2014all the way down.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Charles Carman<\/strong> is writing his dissertation at The Catholic University of America; he and his wife write and teach from Mount Rainier, Maryland.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time travel may have started all in good fun, but its growing status as the only gimmick capable of saving humanity carries some troubling implications for what is being saved. By Charles Carman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":10250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ocean_front_end_style_editor":"no","ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48,10,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-essays","category-issue-30-the-art-of-storytelling","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farefwd.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Photo-by-Jack-Anstey-on-Unsplash-1.jpg?fit=864%2C1080&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10242"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10254,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10242\/revisions\/10254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/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