Societal Conclusions

One of the major societal conclusions we drew from the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was the threat of overuse of technology. The technology that the Alphaverse used to "verse-jump" (obtain skills from the user's counterpart in a different universe) takes a toll on its users' minds. If it is used too much, it can cause their mind to irreversibly splinter, leading them to experience everything in every universe, simultaneously. The main villain, Jobu Tupaki, was originally Alpha Joy, Alpha Evelyn's daughter. Overuse of the verse-jumping technology led to her mind splintering. After she began to experience all the universes simultaneously, she became immensely nihilistic and began to try to take over and wipe out every universe. 

Without this overuse of verse-jumping, Alpha Joy would be a normal person, without omnipotetence and the belief that nothing matters. Many of the lives lost in the movie would be saved, and the Alphaverse would not spend resources searching for an Evelyn capable of defeating Jobu. While this would lead to a far less interesting movie, in the real world, this is a massive benefit of not overusing technology.

Overuse of technology is a very large problem today as well. In 2024, Pew Research reported that almost half of surveyed U.S. teens use the Internet "almost constantly" [1]. Social media and the Internet are known to have major effects on teens' mental health (as we mention in our slideshow), so this level of use of the Internet is very problematic for the mental well-being of our youth.

References

[1] Pew Research, Teens and Internet, Device Access Fact Sheet, (Pew Research, July 10th, 2025), https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-internet-device-access-fact-sheet/ (May 5, 2026)