An Open Letter to the Universe: This Planet Is a Lot, Come Get Me

*Opinions are mine, conclusions are yours. Take what resonates, leave what doesn't. Respectful disagreement always welcome  unkindness never is.

Dear Universe,

I am writing to formally request a transfer. Not permanently. I am not being dramatic. I just need maybe a long weekend somewhere that was designed with even a modest amount of foresight and I would like to return refreshed and with a revised perspective on whether any of this is salvageable. I have been here the whole time. I have watched the systems. I have navigated the infrastructure. I have read the terms and conditions of existing on this planet, which nobody agreed to, because nobody asked us before signing us up, and I have some notes.

The Foundation Has Some Structural Concerns

Here is a thing humans did that is remarkable if you really sit with it. We built civilizations on top of older civilizations, inherited all of their original design flaws along with the new ones we added ourselves, and then kept going as though eventually the accumulated weight of all the bad decisions would somehow produce a stable structure. It did not.

We have systems that were designed for problems that no longer exist, maintained by institutions that have forgotten why the original rules were written, enforced by processes that require you to submit a form to get a form to find out which form you actually needed. We call this functioning. We have normalized it so thoroughly that suggesting it could work differently gets treated like a genuinely radical idea rather than a basic observation. The roads. The tax code. The healthcare billing system, which appears to have been designed by someone who had a personal grievance against human beings and a lot of time on their hands. The fact that in the year we currently occupy, critical communication still depends on whether or not a particular person checks a particular inbox in a timely fashion. We have sent things to space and we are still waiting for Carol to respond to the email from Tuesday.

This is the foundation. This is what everything else is built on. I understand now why the building keeps making that noise.

A Brief History of Decisions Nobody Would Approve Today

To be fair to the humans who came before us, they were working with what they had. Limited information, limited tools. A genuine and somewhat touching optimism that the thing they were building would be figured out more thoroughly by whoever came next. Whoever came next did not figure it out. They mostly just added a layer and hoped for the best. This is how we arrived at a world where the solution to a broken system is almost never to examine the system but to build a new system adjacent to the broken one and then staff both of them. Where the answer to a policy that stopped making sense in a completely different era is to add an amendment to the amendment to the amendment until the original document requires a dedicated scholar just to locate the actual point of it.

We are not governing. We are doing archaeology on decisions made by people who did not anticipate us and would be genuinely horrified by several things they would find here, not the least of which is that we kept most of their original work intact out of a combination of reverence and bureaucratic inertia. Some of those people owned other people, by the way. We kept quite a bit of paperwork from that era. Something to think about.

On the Matter of the Aliens

Here is what I need the extraterrestrial community to understand: we know you are watching. We have suspected it for a long time and at this point the evidence is compelling enough that even the people whose job it is to officially deny things have started saying well, we are not saying it is not anything. Which is the most human possible way to confirm something.

I want you to know that I understand completely why you have not made official contact. You pulled up, assessed the situation, and made the entirely reasonable decision that this was not the moment to introduce yourselves. The timing has not been ideal. Every era we have experienced has had a fairly solid argument for why this particular window was not the one, but I would like to formally extend an invitation. Come down. Not to the places you have apparently been visiting based on the footage, which seems like you are specifically selecting locations designed to raise the most questions, and honestly respect the commitment to the bit. Come to where the rest of us are, sit with us for a minute.

We will warn you about the infrastructure ahead of time so you are not caught off guard. The potholes are not a test. The hold music is not intentional. The seven to ten business days is a loose suggestion and should not be taken literally under any circumstances.

What We Did Get Right

In the spirit of fairness, and because even this letter should probably have some balance, there are things worth noting in the positive column. The food on this planet is genuinely exceptional and I will die on that hill. The music that has come out of human suffering is some of the most extraordinary art any species has ever produced, which is a complicated thing to be proud of but here we are. The way people show up for each other in the worst moments, quietly and without being asked, the stranger who helps and disappears before anyone gets their name, that happens every single day on this chaotic, structurally questionable, bureaucratically baffling planet and it is worth something.

We are also, and I mean this sincerely, extremely entertaining. If the aliens are watching this particular season of What Are They Doing Now, the ratings must be extraordinary. We have delivered. The plot has been unpredictable, the characters are complex. Nobody saw several of these developments coming including us If this is a show, I hope we are at least in the part where things start to make sense before the finale. I hope the writers have a plan. I have some notes on the pacing if anyone wants them. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The Transfer Request, Revisited

Universe, I am not leaving for good. I am attached to this place in ways that are inconvenient to my frustration with it. I know people here. I like the coffee. I have a whole life that is specifically located on this planet and I am not actually trying to go anywhere. But I am asking, on behalf of all of us who have ever sat in a waiting room for something that should not require a waiting room, or navigated a process that exists to slow down the very thing it claims to support, or looked at the news and needed a moment to remember that this is not the whole picture of what humans are:

Can we get some outside perspective? Fresh eyes? A brief consultation from something that got further along in the whole civilization project and could offer a few notes? We are trying down here. It is chaotic and loud and held together with systems that made more sense in a different century, and we are still trying. A little cosmic assistance would not go unappreciated.

I will leave the porch light on. 💡

Yours in perpetual bewilderment but not without hope,

Sam

P.S. If the aliens are reading this: I am a good travel companion, I ask interesting questions, and I will not touch anything without permission. The offer stands.

We did not build a perfect world. We built a deeply human one, which means it is frustrating and beautiful and somehow still standing, and most days that is going to have to be enough.