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There’s a theory according to which we’re all part of a big Multiverse, where every new event sparks a new reality / a parallel Universe, leaving behind an infinite number of other potential outcomes, with just as many potential futures lying ahead. Personally, I don’t care for it.

It’s not that I don’t believe in it. I do. But I choose to ignore it. Our existence on this Earth is physical, and physical objects live in the now. The choices that we make are just that – choices. We are solely responsible with measuring the good-to-bad ratio of the outcome. Nature doesn’t seem to care. In this respect, novelist Cormac McCarthy once quipped:

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Truer words were never spoken. The passage stems from McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, which concerns an illegal drug deal gone bad. The story occurs in the Texas desert backcountry, in the ’80s.

Also a playwright and screenwriter, McCarthy has written ten novels spanning genres like Southern Gothic, western and post-apocalyptic. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for his 2006 post-apocalyptic tale, The Road. The aforementioned 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, was made into a motion picture in 2007. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

According to Wikipedia, the last time McCarthy was known to be working on new material was in 2009, when The Guardian reported that he had started not one, but three new novels. At the time, McCarthy was quoted as saying that at least one of the three novels will be considerably long, and that it centers around a young man as he deals with the suicide of his sister. The story is reportedly set in 1980s New Orleans.