Dabbling back into fiction for the first time in a long time (probably at least 5 years???). It’s been pretty refreshing.
I just finished was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. I won’t go into too much details about the premise of the book for any who plan to read it but this book definitely makes you think about death, though perhaps more saliently it makes you think about life.
“Am I living a life of no regrets?”
“Is it too late to change course?”
“In a world of infinite possibilities and infinite (albeit with constraints) choices, why can’t my present life be the one most worth living.”
I think movies and books and social media perpetuate this idea that beauty in life comes from outcomes. That happy ending, conflict resolution, rags to riches, the perfect revenge, tragic demise. Good or bad, the “best” stories have closure. But life, at least as we experience it, has no “closure.” At least not in the same way all our favorite stories do. Our entire life, until the day we die, is a continuous story, and if our death is the ultimate outcome of life, we don’t really even get to experience our own death. Life just ends. And in that life, each decision we make sends us down a path with consequences we have to live with. There’s no one at the end of the line with a camcorder to play it back for us. There’s no extra takes to get it just right. There’s no closing the book when we get to the good part. No changing channels (or universes) when we’re dissatisfied with what we’re seeing. No plot armor. Just a series of choices and whatever comes after. With that in mind it’s understandable why a person can get overwhelmed by the weight of even the smallest decisions.
As a recovering perfectionist, I used to struggle with the balance of aiming for excellence and optimized outcomes in my life, with trying to not be paralyzed by “perfect.” As I got older, I started to dissociate my value as a human being from my academic performance and economic potential in a capitalist machine. And in my more recent years, I fear I may have swung to far on the other end of that spectrum. Accepting mediocrity and lowering expectations of myself in the name of “self compassion” and “personal wellness.” And just as I once faced depression with a relentless pursuit of being the best, I now am confronted with a similar depression in the name of unfulfilled potential. The beauty of living a life of endless choices, is there are endless opportunities to choose a different path and see where it leads.
Our choices do matter, but what matters even more is how we deal with the consequences as we endlessly steer our lives to one we’d choose if given the chance to experience infinite lifetimes.
nANIMOv 