This is actually a post that I’ve kept in my back pocket for a while, and one that I knew that I had to be in the right frame of mind before I could actually write it.  I had to be in an agitated mood, which is hard to imagine a person like me not being in an agitated mood, but I also needed to have the time necessary to put my thoughts to keyboard.

But not just any agitated mood, but one specifically where I’m feeling like there are just too many fucking people in the world, and how I’d wish a ton of people would just spontaneously vanish, like Thanos’s Snap or, and in the context of this specific post, like in the plot of The Leftovers.

Now [spoiler alert] because I’m going to go ahead and just probably spoil a bunch of things for those of my zero readers whom might actually be interested in watching this show in the future, despite the fact that at this point it’s like ten years old.

But the basic plot of the show in the beginning is that for absolutely no apparent reason at all, 2% of the entire earth’s population just spontaneously vanished.  Nobody knows whether they were killed, were transported, were abducted or whatever, the point is that 2% of the earth’s population just mysteriously disappeared, and that 2% might sound small, but still equated to about 140 million people.

[Spoilers begin] It turns out at the end of the series, the answer to The Disappearance is that the 2% did not die, or cease to exist, they were simply transported to basically, another version of the world where they were the only ones on the planet.  To them, 98% of the planet mysteriously vanished, and they clearly had it way worse than their counterparts, because with 98% of the planet’s population disappearing, that’s a whole fuckton of global infrastructure that’s gone with it.

And such is actually explained, that as a result of the planet becoming so sparsely populated, a lot of shit did kind of go primal, and stuff like the grid becoming unreliable, things such as transportation, flight, and science crashing to near halts, but the 2% of humanity does survive.  They acknowledge, adapt and survive, and as time passes, people move on with their lives.

All of this is explained as one of the main characters, late in the series, Nora, who lost her husband and both her children in The Disappearance, finds a scientist in Australia who claims to have figured out what had happened, and had invented a machine that could transport subjects into the alternate world, goes to the alternate world, discovers that her family, after dealing with the shell shock of their own Disappearance and the loss of a wife and mother, moved on.  So, as not wanting to traumatize her family with a miraculous reappearance, she decides to go back to her world, but is rudely awakened to the idea that a world with 98% less people in it, is just a little bit behind scientifically, and basically has to wait decades before the invention of the alternate world travel machine to be built so that she could return to her version of existence.

The point of explaining all of this is that every now and then, there are days of my own existence where I feel that there are just too many fucking people on this planet, and musing how liberating it must be to be on either end of a Disappearance.  Like days where I’m commuting to work, and wondering just why there are so many fucking cars on my route on some days versus others (the existence of I-285).  Or when I’m going to Costco and the parking lot is practically entirely full, and there are 107 cars in line for gas on top of everything.  Or when I go out of the house to run a quick errand and there’s a surreptitiously high amount of cars also on the road or at the stores, and I’m thinking what the fuck.

It sure would be nice if 140 million of these motherfuckers just bamf’d to alternate world and alleviated my world of their existence.  Or better yet, I get to be one of the lucky 2%-ers who gets to have a wide open fucking empty version of the world where there’s tremendously way less chance of people fucking up my daily rhythm just by existing in close proximity to me.

I figure Damon Lindelof came up with the general premise of The Leftovers to sound scary and ominous that such a wild global event could occur, but on days like this where I’m sour over the knowledge of the world’s global 8 billion human beings, I begin to think that perhaps The Leftovers and The Disappearance might also be a fantasy.  Because on days like this, it definitely sounds like a dream come true to me, to be somewhere 98% less populated.

I’d definitely miss my kids and family though. 😢