Steins;Gate: The Future You Cannot Have

(Official Series Artwork from @sion_0d1m on Twitter)

Contains Unmarked Spoilers and Content Warnings for Death and Depression

When you look back at everything that has happened in your life, what is it that you wish you could change?

For myself, it would be everything that happened in my personal life in the year 2024. To make a long story short: I lost my grandmother, my 14-year-old cousin, my job, my ability to have my obsessive-compulsive disorder under control, and my happiness. In terms of the quality of my mental health, no other year comes close in terms of how terrible I was feeling. It was only after receiving psychiatric treatment and the help and support of all of my loved ones that I finally get back on my feet and rediscover my passion for living once more.

But even then, going into 2025, I still had lingering feelings of dread and hopelessness. I had been through so much that even though I was through with the worst of it, I was afraid that I would never feel like “me” ever again. I was still dealing with high anxiety spikes and endless intrusive pondering about what I had faced and if life was going to remain this way forever.

Enter me watching Steins;Gate. This was a series I heard about through good word of mouth from my friends and the animanga community at large. To genre aficionados, it is a series that needs no introduction. But for everyone else, it’s a series starring the obnoxious, quixotic, and yet lovable 18-year-old college scientist Okabe Rintaro. His varied, rag-tag friend group comprises the apartment-sized Future Gadget Laboratory in Akihabara. To make a long story short: together they discover a way to alter the past by sending text messages (dubbed “D-mail”) back in time. One of the main ways they use D-mail is to change aspects of their past that haunt them, and they get to live in a reality where none of those events transpired, blissfully unaware of their tragedies.

In retrospect, hearing that premise offered some wish fulfillment and escapism that I didn’t realize I had desired. But more than just the allure of being able to change the past, it was seeing each layer of all the characters being pulled back to reveal something deeper than what’s on the surface. In particular, the one that resonated with me the most was Luka Urushibara’s, one of the lab members, story of being able to live life as a girl. As someone with a good amount of queer friends, seeing that struggle on-screen (even if it could have used a bunch more tact) made that story more personable. I could get caught up in the illusion of good vibes only.

But it wasn’t long before that illusion was shattered. As a consequence of messing with time, a butterfly effect scenario leads to the corrupt and omnipresent organization CERN taking over the world and the death of fellow lab member and Okabe’s childhood friend, Mayuri Shiina. Naturally Okabe does everything he can to stop this from happening by traveling back in time over and over again.

But nothing works.

No matter what changes he makes, everything stays the same. CERN wins, Mayuri dies. There is no escape. There is only forcing yourself to relive the pain over and over again in hopes that this time something, anything might be different. But to no avail.

It was then that I realized that this struggle mirrored my own. I was forcing myself to mentally relive the pain of 2024 because I couldn’t fathom how I could cope with going through so much. So I kept replaying everything that happened in my mind on repeat, hoping to find something of value I could get out of it. But that’s not true acceptance. Sometimes you have to realize that things are the way they are not for any discernible reason, but because that’s how the dominoes fell.

Realizing that he can’t live in this reality anymore, Okabe has to undo all the D-mails in order for the future to change. Meaning, to make the world a better place, Okabe has to convince everyone to change their D-mails. And that means having to let go of the past that haunts them and accept what happened. It’s a painful process to see every character having to let go of everything that matters most to them, but the most important thing is that all ends up ok for them in the end. Letting go of their past made them better people.

Steins;Gate is a show that ultimately teaches us that we can’t live with our pain forever. Attempting to relive it or dreaming about “fixing” it only leads to arrested development. So don’t stay in the future you cannot have.

And cherish the one you can.