series
Explanation
The Joke
A man prays to God, asking why he is so unhappy right now. God responds: "Like, this current moment?" The man says he means in general — his whole series of life. God clarifies: "Wait, you're living your life in series, not in parallel?"
The man pushes back: you can't just say he should consider his whole life — being 24, single, with a job he hates — from the standpoint of a future where things work out. That would feel bonkers. God replies: "You're going to do all these things consecutively? How long will that take?" The man says he has to pray for each thing to happen to him one event at a time. God, stunned, says: "In retrospect, it was a mistake to pray for empathy to an entity with no temporal limitations."
The Humor
The comic explores the fundamental disconnect between a timeless, omniscient God and a human being who experiences life sequentially. From God's perspective, the idea of experiencing events one at a time is bizarre and inefficient — like processing a series computation when you could run everything in parallel. From the human's perspective, being told "it all works out eventually" is cold comfort when you're living through the bad parts in real time.
The programming metaphor (series vs. parallel processing) is the structural joke, but the emotional core is the common frustration with platitudes like "everything happens for a reason." Those reassurances only make sense from a perspective that can see the whole timeline at once — which is exactly the perspective no human has.
Broader Context
Weinersmith often uses computational or mathematical frameworks to reframe philosophical and theological questions. The series-vs-parallel metaphor is drawn from computer science and electronics, where running processes in parallel is faster but requires different architecture. Applying this to the human experience of time highlights just how alien an omniscient perspective would truly be — and why divine reassurance might be fundamentally incompatible with human suffering.