Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

August 17, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Gabrielle Zevin | 476 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group | Year: 2022 | My Rating: 9/10

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever“
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing.

This famous passage is a soliloquy spoken by the title character in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a novel about two friends who make video games together, but to describe it merely as a story about gaming would be as misleading as describing Moby-Dick as a novel about whale hunting. Zevin’s masterpiece is an exploration of creativity, friendship, ambition, grief, identity, and the fragile ways in which human beings love one another without always knowing how to express that love.

When I first picked up the novel, I expected an engaging literary story set against the backdrop of the video game industry. A few chapters later, I realised that the games were merely the canvas. Zevin was painting the extraordinary complexity of human relationships and the strange ways in which we create worlds, both real and imaginary, to survive the one we inhabit. Zevin understands that every act of creation, whether writing a novel, composing music, designing a game, or building a company, is an attempt to answer one of humanity’s oldest questions: how do we leave something meaningful behind? The medium, in this case video games, becomes almost incidental. The real story is about people trying to make worlds because they often struggle to inhabit the one they have been given.

The story follows two childhood friends and extraordinarily gifted individuals, Sam Masur and Sadie Green, whose lives become intertwined through collaboration, separation, misunderstanding, and extraordinary creative success. Their relationship defies easy categorisation, as they are not conventional lovers or just friends. They are collaborators, rivals, emotional anchors, and occasionally strangers to one another. Zevin refuses to reduce their bond into the familiar romantic template that dominates contemporary fiction. Instead, she asks a more difficult question, that can two people become the defining relationship in each other’s lives without ever fitting into society’s conventional definitions of love? That question becomes the emotional centre of the novel.

Reading their story reminded me that the people who influence us most are not always those we fall in love with. Sometimes they are the ones who challenge us intellectually, provoke us creatively, infuriate us endlessly and yet remain impossible to erase from our lives. Some relationships cannot be explained because they are not meant to fit into conventional categories. They simply exist, shaping us in ways we understand only in retrospect.

Having spent much of my own professional life designing programmes, developing products and trying to build ideas into reality, I found these sections deeply familiar. Every creator knows the strange mixture of excitement and insecurity that accompanies making something new. You begin with certainty. Halfway through, you become convinced the entire idea is flawed. Then, somehow, persistence carries you to the finish line. Creation is less an act of inspiration than an act of endurance. That may be why the novel resonated so deeply with me. It understands that building anything worthwhile, whether a business, a social movement, a novel or even a meaningful life, is emotionally expensive. Every achievement extracts a cost that outsiders rarely notice.

Popular culture often celebrates the myth of the solitary genius—the lone inventor, the brilliant artist, the visionary entrepreneur. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow dismantles that myth. Great creations emerge not only from talent but from friction where ideas are challenged, egos bruised, compromises negotiated, and failures endured. Sam and Sadie create remarkable games because they disagree passionately. 

The novel treats video games as an art form deserving the same intellectual seriousness traditionally reserved for literature, cinema, or painting. This is perhaps the novel’s most refreshing contribution. Too often, games are dismissed as entertainment or escapism, but Zevin recognises that games are narrative architecture. They are spaces where people rehearse choices, explore identities, confront loss, and imagine alternative futures. The novel argues that games possess a unique emotional power because they require participation. Unlike readers or film audiences, players make decisions. They fail, they try again, they persist, and in that sense, games resemble life more closely than almost any other artistic medium.

Another remarkable strength of the novel is its understanding of friendship. Contemporary fiction often privileges romance as the highest form of intimacy. Friendships frequently exist only to support romantic plots. Zevin reverses that hierarchy and makes friendship the central emotional relationship, possessing every complexity usually reserved for marriage or romance. Sam and Sadie hurt one another in ways that only deeply significant people can. Their conflicts rarely emerge from malice. Instead, they arise from silence, assumptions, pride, and emotional immaturity. Zevin understands that relationships often fail not because people stop caring but because they become incapable of communicating what they most need to say.

The supporting characters deserve equal appreciation, particularly Marx Watanabe, whose warmth and emotional intelligence provide a necessary counterbalance to Sam and Sadie’s intensity. Marx embodies generosity without becoming sentimental. He possesses the rare gift of seeing people as they are rather than as they wish to appear. In many ways, he becomes the novel’s emotional conscience.

What impressed me most was the novel’s refusal to produce heroes or villains. Every major character behaves selfishly at times and generously at others. They make admirable decisions alongside regrettable ones. Zevin understands that adulthood rarely consists of moral certainty. Instead, it is an ongoing negotiation between personal ambition and responsibility toward others. Relationships remain ambiguous because real relationships often are. Love does not always seek possession. Friendship does not always remain stable. Success does not guarantee happiness. Closure, when it arrives, is partial rather than complete.

By the final page, I realised that the book’s most profound insight had very little to do with technology or gaming. It was about the people who make us more creative, more courageous and more ourselves. The greatest masterpieces we produce are rarely individual achievements. They emerge from conversations, collaborations, disagreements and relationships that leave permanent fingerprints on our lives.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow deserves its reputation as one of the finest contemporary literary novels not because it speaks to gamers but because it speaks to anyone who has ever created something, lost someone, pursued an impossible ambition, or struggled to articulate love in all its imperfect forms. Gabrielle Zevin has written a novel that is intellectually stimulating, emotionally devastating, and quietly hopeful. Long after finishing the novel, I found myself thinking that the most important creations in our lives are often not the products we build, but the relationships that make those creations possible. Everything else is temporary. The worlds we imagine together, however, continue to echo, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

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The Whiteboard Mind

November 24, 2025 Leave a comment

In the age of digital tools, where every idea has a place in an app and every plan sits behind a login screen, the humble whiteboard continues to command its own quiet power. For many thinkers, creators, and problem-solvers, it remains the most dynamic canvas, a space where thoughts breathe, flow, and transform. For someone like me who designs projects, plans strategies, brainstorms ideas, and lead teams, the whiteboard and marker pen are not just tools. They are extensions of the mind,  translating abstract thought into visible structure. It’s not nostalgia or resistance to technology; instead, it’s about harnessing a form of thinking that is visual, kinetic, and alive.

There’s a deep psychological connection between movement and cognition. When you draw or write by hand, especially on a large surface like a whiteboard, you activate a different mode of thinking. The body participates in the act of thought. The hand sketches a relationship, the eye follows it, the brain reinterprets it, and new connections emerge almost instinctively.

Typing or clicking on the keyboard keeps the mind linear, confined to lists, bullets, and boxes. But drawing on a whiteboard invites a non-linear form of exploration. You can start anywhere, a square, an arrow, a phrase, and the rest begins to grow organically. This freedom to expand, erase, and rearrange is what makes it such a powerful thinking process. Each line is a possibility. Every arrow, a hypothesis. And each erasure, a moment of learning. When thoughts become visible, they also become testable. A whiteboard externalises the inner dialogue of the mind. It takes ideas that could remain foggy abstractions and turns them into something you can point at, challenge, and reshape.

This visibility is particularly powerful in complex problem-solving or project design. When working through implementation challenges or building systems with multiple moving parts, you can literally ‘see’ the interactions. Causal diagrams, mind maps, and process flows make dependencies clear and highlight gaps that words alone might obscure. You can stand back and see the whole ecosystem, how resources connect, where bottlenecks might occur, or which variables influence outcomes. The whiteboard gives you that clear view while still allowing you to dive into details when needed. It’s thinking at both the macro and micro levels, which is simultaneously intuitive and analytical.

Every creative or strategic process begins in some form of chaos. Ideas compete, assumptions overlap, and clarity hides behind complexity. The whiteboard is where that chaos finds its first structure. Drawing mind maps is often the first step, not because they provide answers, but because they show relationships. From one central idea, branches grow, each representing a sub-theme, a factor, or an alternative. You can add, cross-link, or reframe them without fear of permanence. The visual form allows you to rearrange logic faster than your words can catch up.

Causal diagrams, in turn, help identify the forces at play of what leads to what, what influences what. In project planning, this is invaluable. You can trace dependencies between actions, timelines, or external conditions. You can see where interventions matter most. You can uncover loops, positive or negative, that either amplify progress or create recurring setbacks. In a sense, the whiteboard becomes a mirror of systems thinking. It holds complexity while keeping it human and accessible.

The whiteboard isn’t just a personal tool; it’s a shared language. I often use it in team meetings or group ideation sessions, as it turns abstract discussion into a collective visualisation. People see not only what is said, but how it connects. Misunderstandings surface faster because assumptions become visible. When everyone’s looking at the same diagram, they’re also looking at the same version of reality and not one filtered through individual interpretation.

It democratizes contribution, leading to one common understanding. A quiet team member can point at a link and ask, ‘Why does this connect here?’ or suggest a missing node. Visual representation invites curiosity and challenges hierarchy. It’s no longer about who talks the most, but about what the group sees together. Moreover, it encourages iteration. Unlike digital slides or documents that feel fixed, a whiteboard remains fluid. You can erase, redraw, and refine as the conversation evolves. Every stroke on the board is an act of co-creation. Even with PowerPoint presentations, I often end up on a whiteboard (if available) to explain concepts, flow, and possible results. It has proven to be an excellent tool for scenario visualisations.

There’s also the element of speed. With a marker in hand, you can think and draw at the pace of your thoughts. There’s no formatting, no tabs to open, no distractions from notifications or interfaces. When you’re solving implementation challenges or breaking down a project into actionable components, this speed matters. You can move from problem to hypothesis to possible solution in seconds. The visual rhythm keeps the momentum alive. And because it’s temporary and erasable, there’s less fear of getting it wrong. You can test a scenario, discard it, and move on. This low-cost experimentation fuels creativity and decision-making alike. In fact, the transient nature of a whiteboard is part of its strength. It reminds you that ideas are living entities to be evolved, not preserved.

When designing projects, a whiteboard allows for holistic structuring. You can begin with purpose at the centre, draw out stakeholders, resources, activities, and outcomes, and gradually watch a project take shape like a constellation. At this stage, aesthetics and functionality merge. The diagram is not just a record; it’s a design prototype. You can visualise workflows, timelines, partnerships, and even behavioural change models. Seeing everything laid out helps identify what’s missing and what’s redundant. For ideation, it’s even more liberating. The blank board is an invitation to explore. You might start sketching something unrelated, only to stumble upon an insight that reframes the entire problem. The act of drawing keeps your attention anchored and your imagination open.

Often, my Millennial and Gen Z associates argue that digital whiteboards and collaboration tools replicate all these benefits, but there’s something irreplaceable about standing in front of a board with a marker. Your posture changes, your mind sharpens. The body’s movement through space, stepping back to observe, leaning in to draw, engages multiple senses. It’s immersive in a way screens can’t replicate. A whiteboard has boundaries, forcing you to prioritise. What fits stays, and what doesn’t must be distilled. This physical constraint often leads to conceptual clarity. Maybe the old school professor in me has a bias!

Using a whiteboard and marker isn’t about rejecting modern tools; it’s about complementing them. Digital systems store and polish. Whiteboards create and provoke. For anyone who works on complex projects, leads teams, or solves multidimensional challenges, the whiteboard offers a cognitive advantage as it makes thinking tangible. It transforms abstract reasoning into something you can walk around, discuss, and reshape. It reminds us that clarity isn’t found inside the mind alone; it’s constructed through visible relationships and shared understanding.

For me, the whiteboard is more than a surface; it’s been my live, on-the-spot thinking companion. Every mark carries curiosity; every erasure, humility. It captures not just what we know, but how we learn. To think with a whiteboard is to think in motion. It’s a dialogue between mind, hand, and idea. It’s where chaos meets order, and where clarity emerges, not from control, but from exploration. In a world of digital efficiency, perhaps the most human form of innovation still begins with a marker, a blank board, and the courage to draw what we don’t yet fully understand.

(The cover photo is from a project planning session by me; the central photo is generated using AI)

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