“The Egg” is a very short story by Andy Weir, the author later famous for The Martian, and the short film embedded below brings it to the screen. In it, a man who has just died in a car crash meets God, who explains that he will be reincarnated, and then reveals the twist: every human being who has ever lived, or ever will, is the same soul, living one life after another. The story’s point is simple and unsettling: when you hurt anyone, you hurt yourself, and every kindness you show is a kindness to yourself.
Below you can watch the film, learn where the story came from, and explore the ideas behind it and why it still resonates with so many readers. Be aware that the sections after the video discuss the ending.
Watch the short film
The film follows the story closely: a quiet conversation between a newly dead man and a calm, almost casual figure who introduces himself as God. It takes only a few minutes, about as long as reading the original text, and like the story it relies almost entirely on dialogue. If you prefer to read first, Weir publishes the full story free on his website, Galactanet, in English and in a long list of reader translations.
The story has been adapted many times. Wikipedia lists short films by more than ten different directors, and the science animation channel Kurzgesagt released a widely shared animated version in 2019. It has also been staged as a one-act play.
Where the story came from
Andy Weir, born in California in 1972, was working as a software engineer when he began posting fiction on his personal website. “The Egg” went up there on 15 August 2009. It was the first piece of his writing to attract real attention, and it remains his most popular short story; readers have translated it into more than 30 languages.
Weir has said he wrote it very quickly and never expected it to spread the way it did. He explained that he had wanted to write a story in which life turned out to be fair after all, and that most religions contain some version of the idea that “what goes around comes around.”
Two years later he began serialising a novel about an astronaut stranded on Mars on the same website. That book, The Martian, became a bestseller after readers asked for an e-book version, was picked up by Crown Publishing, and was adapted into the 2015 film starring Matt Damon. His later novels include Artemis (2017) and Project Hail Mary (2021), which was made into a film starring Ryan Gosling.
The story in brief
The narrator is God, and he speaks directly to “you.” The famous first line sets the tone at once: “You were on your way home when you died.” You are a 48-year-old man killed in a traffic accident, and your first worry is whether your wife and children will be all right. God reassures you, warmly and with a dry sense of humour, and tells you that you are not going to heaven or hell but will be reborn.
When you protest that a new life would wipe away everything you have learned, God explains that your soul is vastly larger than any single human mind. Each life is like dipping a finger into a glass of water: a small part of you goes in, and when it comes out, you have gained all of its experience. Your next life, he says, will be as a peasant girl in China in the year 540.
Then comes the turn that gives the story its power. There is no one else, God says. Every person on Earth, in every era, is you in a different incarnation. You were Abraham Lincoln and also John Wilkes Booth, who shot him. You were Hitler and every one of his victims. Each act of cruelty you have committed was done to yourself, and each act of kindness was received by you as well.
Finally, God explains why. The universe is an egg, and you are still growing inside it. When you have lived every human life across all of time, you will be ready to be born as something like God.
The ideas behind the twist
The story borrows from several old ideas and combines them in a new way.
- Reincarnation. The belief that a soul returns in new bodies is central to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, and appears in ancient Greek thought as well. In the story, God jokes that “all religions are right in their own way.”
- Open individualism. Philosophers use this term for the view that there is really only one subject of experience, and that every conscious being is that same subject. The Egg is probably the best-known popular illustration of it.
- The cosmic egg. Many mythologies, including Hindu texts describing Hiranyagarbha, the “golden womb,” imagine the universe hatching from an egg. Weir turns that image around: the universe is not what hatches, it is the shell around something still growing.
- The Golden Rule, made literal. Most ethical traditions ask us to treat others as we would like to be treated. The story removes the “as if”: others really are you.
Readers have also compared it to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “The Over-Soul,” which describes a universal spirit shared by all people, and to the philosopher John Rawls’s “original position,” a thought experiment in which you design a fair society without knowing which person in it you will be.
Why it stays with people
Part of the appeal is the tone. Weir’s God is not thundering or mysterious but friendly, a little sarcastic and plainly fond of the dead man, which makes a huge idea feel approachable. The story is also short enough to read in five minutes, so it spreads easily by word of mouth and social media.
More importantly, it offers a vivid way to think about empathy. You do not have to believe the story literally to find it useful. Imagining that the stranger who cut you off in traffic, the colleague you dislike, or a person on the other side of the world is simply you, living a different life, can change how you see them. Many readers say that is exactly the effect it had on them.
The story has inspired other artists too. The rapper Logic built his 2017 album Everybody around the same concept, with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson voicing God in a track that retells the conversation.
Common questions about The Egg
Is The Egg based on a real religion?
No. It is a work of fiction that borrows from reincarnation beliefs and from philosophical ideas about shared consciousness, but it does not represent the teachings of any particular faith. Weir has described it as a story, not a statement of belief.
Can I read the full story for free?
Yes. Andy Weir hosts it on Galactanet, linked above, and lists translations into many languages on the same page.
Who made the short film?
Many independent filmmakers have adapted the story, and the version shown here is one of several posted online. The words and the idea belong to Andy Weir.
What do you make of the idea that we are all one person, living every life in turn? Does it change how you think about the people around you? Share your thoughts in the comments below. This piece was first shared on the site by Kirsten, who introduced many readers to the story.
Sources: Andy Weir: The Egg (Galactanet); Wikipedia: The Egg (Weir short story); Wikipedia: Andy Weir.
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