How to Get Out the Upside Down
There’s a moment in every genuine crisis when the manual stops working.
It is when the situation has exceeded the frame. The manual is perfectly accurate for all the scenarios contemplated, but some circumstances can still break through even the most perfect plan. When that happens, when the rules fail, when the science doesn’t give you an answer, when you need enough certainty to orient yourself, you need something else. It’s something closer to faith.
Netflix released the fifth season of Stranger Things this Thanksgiving. The series is a five-season meditation on this moment. Beneath the nostalgia and the monster fights, the show keeps returning to a single question: what do you reach for when everything else–the science, parents, institutions–fails?
The Two Frameworks
The kids in Hawkins have access to two explanatory systems for the nightmare they’re facing. The first is empirical. Mr Clarke, their science teacher, explains radio waves, wormholes and alternate dimensions. Hawkins Lab, for all its horrors, generates real data. The scientific method applies: gather evidence, form hypotheses, and test them.
The second is mythological, Dungeons & Dragons, a game of imagination, storytelling, and shared make-believe. The Demogorgon becomes a monster the kids have already encountered in their imaginary campaigns. The Upside Down becomes the Vale of Shadows. The incomprehensible becomes clearer with the right metaphors.
What’s striking is the place each framework has.
The scientific one helps them with temporary tools that aid with difficult tasks or support educated guesses. The mythological one helps them comprehend the incomprehensible. These are different capacities entirely. One requires technique (technology). The other requires meaning (metaphysics).
The Mystery at the Centre
Eleven represents a mystery the show never fully resolves because it can’t be thoroughly exhausted.
No one knows where her powers originated. Perhaps they came from the psychedelic drugs the lab gave to her mother. The doctors at Hawkins Lab may have helped her expand and harness them. That lab is the most reductive environment imaginable. Everything there is measured, controlled, quantified. Brenner treats her as a subject to be studied, the military as a weapon to be calibrated.
What emerges from that crucible transcends every framework that produced it.
Eleven’s abilities cannot be replicated, cannot be democratised, cannot be reduced to method. They exist outside the system that created them. And they’re the only thing capable of closing the wound that system opened.
This is the show’s deepest statement: the irrational remnant that survives reduction becomes the source of salvation.
I’ve sat with this idea for years, since watching the first series. It unsettles the part of me that wants solutions to be scalable, transferable, applicable. Eleven’s gift is none of these things. It simply is—miraculous, necessary, unteachable.
Maybe that’s the point. Some things remain a mystery, and when part of that mystery is revealed, a greater one unveils.
The Cognitive Trap
Today, we’re chasing a response to the work and existential anxieties posed by AI the way we respond to every disruption: we frantically try to measure the change, try to capture it, and we try to predict as much as we can about it.
Learn to code. Study machine learning. Acquire AI literacy. Upskill before the wave hits. Pseudoscience about philosophical goals, such as the artificial “general” intelligence, or the latest trendy word, “super” intelligence. Badly hiding the assumption underneath that if we understand the technology thoroughly enough, we’ll survive its disruption.
Research suggests something more uncomfortable. AI anxiety correlates most strongly with techno-complexity and cognitive overload. The more we try to comprehend these systems rationally, the more overwhelmed we become. And the more we use these systems, the more we increase the overload. I often ask myself, where is the progress, the productivity, the time and other liberations the technology complex promised us for decades? Why are we working more, and are we way more anxious than previous generations, while having marvellous tools our parents and grandparents could only see in naive renderings over Star Trek movie flicks?
We’re caught in a loop: the cure intensifies the disease.
This doesn’t mean learning is useless. Quite the contrary. But it implies understanding is insufficient. And our response has overweighted it catastrophically, as if knowledge alone could carry us through a transformation this profound.
What the Mind Flayer Knows
The Mind Flayer is the show’s most chilling creation because it operates like every system optimised for scale.
It doesn’t hate. It doesn’t feel. It processes. It reduces individuals to nodes in a network, consuming particularity to create coordination. Each person it touches becomes less themselves and more an instrument of the collective. But the orchestrator behind Vecna indeed hates humanity and wants to control it all.
This is what efficiency looks like when applied to consciousness.1
The party defeats it through anti-optimisation. Through responses that make no strategic sense, at least from a rational point of view.
Joyce believes Will is alive when every piece of evidence says otherwise. She hangs Christmas lights across her house and talks to walls. Anyone watching would call her delusional. She’s right, and her rightness emerges from something no algorithm can recommend: a mother’s certainty that transcends evidence.
Hopper stays to close the gate when escape is possible. The tactical choice is obvious—run, survive, fight another day. He doesn’t take it. His sacrifice is irrational by every metric that would matter to a Mind Flayer.
The characters’ decisions that make them heroes defy any dry calculation. They are made out of love, belonging, and redemption.
Notice who doesn’t save Hawkins instead. Not the government. Not the military. Not the schools, nor even the parents (except for Hop and Joyce). The institutions that should protect these children are corrupt, absent, or actively hostile. Brenner weaponises Eleven. The Department of Energy covers up the truth. Local authorities dismiss Joyce as hysterical. School and parents find it hard to have any meaningful line of communication with the kids, except for Michael and Nancy’s mom and Mr Clarke, the science teacher. They almost seem like protecting them from growing up–the very thing they should be educating and accompanying.
This resonates because it mirrors something we sense but rarely articulate: the structures meant to serve us increasingly serve themselves. The show doesn’t argue for chaos or anarchy, but it convincingly shows that when institutions fail their purpose, salvation comes from smaller loyalties. A party of friends. A mother who won’t stop searching. A cop who remembers why he became one.
The 1980s as Lost Capacity
The period setting means something specific.
The 1980s in Stranger Things represent the last cultural moment before total digitisation, before every mystery became an information problem. Before the unknown collapsed into a category (in truth, a fallacy) called “insufficient data.”
The Upside Down terrifies because it resists mapping. But Eleven’s powers evoke something else entirely—something we’ve almost lost the word for.
Awe.
We’ve built a culture that treats every unknown as a failure. A gap to be closed, a problem to be solved, an inefficiency to be eliminated. While this might serve the modern obsession with productivity, it impoverishes the soul. It reminds me of a sentence that stuck with me since I was 14. In my home country, Italy, a large annual cultural festival is held every August in Rimini, Italy. “The Meeting of Rimini” (officially: Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples) began in 1980 and is organised by the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, but it is not a religious conference in the narrow sense. It’s a broad, public forum. Its 1999 edition was titled:
“The unknown generates fear, the Mystery generates wonder”
(The Italian original: “L’ignoto genera paura, il Mistero genera stupore”)
Exactly that awe we need more of.
Stranger Things reminds us that human beings wrestle with two kinds of unknown: the darkness we resist and the light we trust without understanding. When we eliminate the second category, we lose our capacity to tolerate the first.
So what prepares us for a future this uncertain?
Technical literacy helps. The kids still use walkie-talkies; Mr Clarke’s lessons still matter. I’m not arguing for ignorance.
But we’ve neglected the other side of preparation almost entirely.
The capacity for awe. Communities that value presence over productivity. Relationships that refuse to optimise. Practices—creative, embodied, spiritual—that remind us we’re more than computation.
And perhaps most importantly, frameworks that honour mystery rather than eliminate it. The willingness to reach for meaning over the breathless search for scientific answers. As if science could answer the unfathomable depth of the human desire for purpose, freedom, and happiness.
The Wound
The Upside Down is a metaphor for the ominously ever-present darkness within us and, by extension, in the world.
We built it ourselves, one system at a time. And in the past twenty years, a new form of it emerged: every algorithm that reduces the person to a profile. Every optimisation treats attention as a resource to be extracted. Every layer of automation that processes human beings as inputs.
The breach is real. Scary. But Stranger Things teaches that breaches can be closed. They just require something other than the tools that opened them.
When Eleven confronts the Demogorgon at the end of Season 1, she doesn’t reach for any tools or the gods technology. She reaches into something beyond knowledge—call it will, call it spirit, call it the stubborn human insistence that we are more than what can be measured.
Every character’s story arc in the show seems to argue that this capacity exists in all of us, not just the telekinetic girl from the lab. The capacity to love without calculation. To sacrifice without strategy. To believe in what we cannot prove.
Stay Weird, Remain Strange
We face uncertainty in jobs, a fraying social fabric, institutions we no longer trust, and machines that already exceed us in ways that matter (actual machines or more figurative machinery).
But a question keeps surfacing in me: can we remain strange enough to matter in ways that can’t be computed?
The monsters are real—we’ve built them, trained them, deployed them at scale. So are miracles, though we’ve grown embarrassed to use the word. Something in human consciousness that persists despite every attempt to reduce it.
The kids in Hawkins prevail because they refuse the obvious lesson—that power belongs to the one with superior agency. They bring mythology to the fight against the unknown. They bring love to their decisions, facing unbelievable stakes. They bring irrational courage to a threat that cannot be understood, nor defeated, by rational means.
There’s another layer the show earns across its seasons: we watch these children grow up. Not just their characters but the actors themselves. The wonder and terror of Season 1 mature into something more complex and more grounded by Season 5. Fear doesn’t disappear. It transforms into responsibility. The party moves from hiding in basements to fighting in the open air and scary tunnels.
This is what coming of age actually means: stop hiding vulnerability and discover that the only stability worth having isn’t safety. It’s true friendship oriented toward a shared purpose. The kids don’t outgrow their strangeness. They learn to wield it together.
That’s both the nostalgia we feel when watching the show and the instruction.
The future belongs to those who remain strange enough.
On that, I recommend another great show just dropped by Apple TV+ – Pluribus
