Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

    You don’t know me, but we’ve been living in the same world for a while now.  You helped connect it with your idea for Facebook back in college. I’ve mostly enjoyed the change.
   You are also according to Internet sources worth $150 billion as of today in 2025. This brings me to the reason and timeliness of this letter. I heard that you were at an event with Billie Eilish who begged to ask the question: “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire.” I could understand that hurting. Guess it doesn’t matter what you do. It’s inevitable that we all get judged. But if this upset you, then you must already see. I can understand striving toward more and more just to maintain a sense of control. But it won’t last. This incident  stirred up feelings of curiosity in me. Sometimes my favorite things to do are the things nobody obligates me to do. I suddenly long to connect with you to share a few of these thoughts and ideas. 
   Of course you’re not the only billionaire that these ideas might benefit, but I feel like you might understand. You put yourself out there and changed the world by connecting. I grew up with Facebook and I’ve defended it at every turn. Memories of most of my whole life is in there through pictures and posts sent to family and friends. It’s gotten so that we don’t even keep photo albums anymore. I can hardly keep up with computer storage. And you’ve never charged making Facebook integral to the world in a very meaningful way.  

   At least through your life story, I can see the American Dream. If you ever actually read this that alone would be a testament to your ambition. 

Here’s the thing though Mark, you are a billionaire (X150) and there are maybe 8-10 billion people on this shared world of ours.  

   Many work most of their waking lives just to sustain themselves and give their children a good start. Many purport and promote stupid things just to try to market something and get ahead. I know you probably need more than most others just to maintain. And I know there needs to be some disparity in goods and services to maintain motivation. But things are about to hit the fan. It’s all going to change one way or another.

   What if you did change things? You could literally give a billion dollars to every soul on Earth right now. You’d only be down 10-12 billion (with distribution costs) so you’d still be way ahead of the game in general. And everyone would feel connected to you in a much more real way. 

   But that’s not why I’m writing. See AI is about to replace a lot of jobs. So I asked it how you could fix this problem.  

1. Taxes and fiscal policy — take more from extreme wealth, redistribute.
   • Progressive income taxes, higher top rates, stronger estate/inheritance taxes and targeted wealth taxes reduce concentration and raise funds for services.  
2. Strengthen labour and pay-setting — raise wages at the bottom and rebuild bargaining power.
   • Higher minimum wages and stronger unions compress pay gaps more effectively than redistribution alone.  
3. Universal or targeted public services — health, education, childcare, housing, transport.
   • Direct public goods improve living standards and reduce the need for private wealth to secure basic needs. OECD analyses stress public investment and opportunity pathways.  

   So it seems this points to a team you’re not currently on. I know upsetting the norm might be scary, but it’s about to be upset anyway. Why not do your best to empower everyone as much as possible and focus on a different goal? Why not try to reset us all? Think long and hard about what you want and then let the rest go. Pool your money into policy changes for the good of a shared environment instead of a self interest which is beyond you. Be the one billionaire that actually empowers other people. How awesome would that be?

   

The Gift of the Present

   “Try here. Stop.”

   “What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen?”

   “Now. You're looking at now, Sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.”

   “What happened to then?”

   “We passed then.”

   “When?”

   “Just now. We're at now now.”

   “Go back to then.”

   “When?”

   “Now.”

   “Now?”

   “Now.”

   “I can't.”

   “Why?”

   “We missed it.”

   “When?”

   “Just now.”

   “When will then be now?”

   “Soon” (Spaceballs).

   Eckhart Tolle wrote an entire book on The Power of Now. It’s interesting that it takes a person an entire book (and let’s be honest) several reads of that entire book to truly grasp the concept of really living and being present for the only period of time we ever actually experience, the now.  But the truth is living in the moment is a skill one truly must ponder and internalize before practicing and hoping for mastery. But the benefit of this skill cannot be overstated. I can tell you just from my experience of coincidences the truth of this statement.

   “If there is no future there must be no past.” (“The Answer” Richie Sambora).

   This quote confounded me as an adolescent.  My best friend appeared to take it in stride, but I could not wrap my head around it. Time moves forward, so it seemed to me to be obvious that there would in fact one day be no future. But, regardless, this did not could not in any way preclude the existence of a past. Why would it?  This wasn’t logical, right? There is a lot that I used to dismiss that I now realize is not only still possible, but probable.

   This was all before I experienced something now being called the Mandela Effect.

   The truth is that there are hundreds of common so-called: “Mandela Effects.”  While it is possible to chalk them all up to shared mistaken memories, the fact is that if you investigate long enough, you’ll find one you simply know is not true. The feeling that someone is pulling some kind of fast one on you is disturbing to say the least. When it happens multiple times you dig a little beneath the surface trying to conjure explanations… things get hairy.

   My first experience of the Mandela Effect was just before my first born’s first grade talent show.  He was doing a comedy skit and my wife thought he might at the last minute experience a little stage fright. To head off that concern she ordered a children’s book from a series involving characters who were bears that we both knew as children. 

   It was a while later when I remember seeing the book in a glance and noting that she must have received some kind of bootlegged knock off as the series name to me definitely appeared to be spelled incorrectly.  

   This was 2017. Things were already feeling different for me, but at this point I hadn’t quite put my finger on why. I had a kid in Elementary School and pretty much since the moment he was born my life had taken off on a rollercoaster ride!  But that Spring when Kody did his comedy act in the school talent show (Turns out he’s a born showman without an ounce of stage fright tendency in his body) she’d shown me the purchase and had already read him the book.  The talent show came and went (He was a hit!) but my moment occurred weeks, perhaps even months later as I was just passing the bottom bookshelf (where we kept the kids’ books). It was then that I casually read the name of the series she’d chosen: The Berenstain Bears. 

   This was not a huge deal for me, but I do remember the moment and the thoughts that flooded as I meandered my way into another room. Berenstain Bears? I remembered The Bernstein Bears from my childhood. My aunt had read some of that series to my step sister, but it wasn’t very personal to me. I do remember at that moment thinking about Jewish names, the history and connections with fleeing Germany that I’d read, and how I’d never really heard of one ending in “stain” before.

   A little while later I remember being all excited to share the Star Wars series with my son. We got all the way to the end [spoiler alert] of Empire Strikes Back when Skywalker faces off with Darth Vader for that pivotal moment where his true paternity is revealed. Like a good Jedi Dork I mouthed the iconic words as I had done so many times prior. Luke grimaces in pain from his lost hand and pouts his retort to Darth on the fate of his beloved Anakin Skywalker’s demise as the story had been related to him by his predecessor Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

   Darth mischievously growls his taunt “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.”

   Luke grimaces in pain at the loss of his hand.  He shouts and pouts like a child “He told me enough.  He told me you killed him.”  

   “No,” Darth says. [Wait what?] “I am your father.”  

   What the heck? That’s not the line! I actually looked at the tape I was watching it on and considered how it must have somehow been dubbed? Come to think of it, there were a couple funny scenes.  Why was C3PO walking around with a silver leg? That seemed to have started when Disney took over releasing their versions of the series. But I thought I had the original movie on this tape!?! I specifically remembered a particularly funny Comedy Skit where the comic expressed how gay C3PO was gliding around the galaxy just absolutely encased in gold lamay!  Encased!

   Like that stark realization, slowly other disconnects began to surface. The Monopoly Man’s Monocle, Curious George’s …tail was gone??? I remember him hanging from it in my sister’s children’s book. Magic Mirror on the wall! Suddenly, there’s a weird pig tail in the middle of every Ford logo. The Mandela Effects became a kind of crazy obsession for me. JC Penny is now spelled wrong - everywhere. And Mickey Mouse has nothing holding up his pants! Nothing!!! What the heck are the buttons for???

   And then things started changing while I was exploring this. During the pandemic I joined a Facebook group on the subject. Someone mentioned the peanut butter thing again but with something new. I’d remembered Jiffy peanut butter but had been eating organic and nut alternative butter for years (we’re teachers) so I didn’t have the regular experience with that brand that others might. However, in 2020, we accepted any food we could find for a time (food was pretty scarce for a spell). I knew I had acquired a jar of this “Jiff” (despite it literally creeping me out to even look at the brand in the supermarket since I’d learned all this) but it was in our cabinet on the top shelf where I remembered putting it just in case things got so crazy and we needed some kind of protein to feed the boys to avoid having to kill the cat. (Just joking!) 😬

I read a post off that Facebook page one day that sent chills down my spine however. Someone claimed the name had just changed again for them. I ran to my kitchen to look at it.  I’ll never forget the foreboding feeling I got as I opened the cabinet. I knew I remembered the peanut butter I’d just bought.  I knew I’d looked squarely at that particular label because I always looked squarely at that particular brand’s label. Nobody but my family had even been near our house for months at this point as a result of quarantine. I reached up and turned the peanut butter jar around slowly to bring the label forward “J…” and this giant jar I had clear, recent memories of buying “…i…” had somehow “…f… [nothing].” This label suddenly now only read Jif!

   So Celestine introduced me to Physics and Quantum Physics has been in chaos for decades.  It’d taken years for me to really understand the complexities of Uncertainty Principles and Double-Slit Experiments. But now Mandela Effects seemed to me to be proof that I was quite possibly no longer even in the same universe I’d grown up in.  In hindsight, I feel now that I knew these things were wrong.  I still feel that this place is somehow different. I chalked it up to my different age, perspective or the newness of place but that doesn’t seem right anymore. It’s all different. I feel like I’m living in that that Steven Wright joke where everything I knew (almost everything I knew) has been stolen and replaced with an exact (well almost exact) replica.  I sometimes relate to that Stephen King story The Langoliers which brake down each moment but were now building almost-copies for me every new minute. And I now know it wasn’t just me who knows it.

What’s the moral of all of these Mandela Effects?  Here’s where you get a bit of a homework assignment. Look some of these up for yourself.  Go ahead, it’s a quick Google search.  Once you’ve come to realize that this kind of thing is possible, suddenly almost everything is. Once you realize everything is, then you can see the possibility of most beautiful paths you can choose.