Liberating Your Life Story
What I read: Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project by Kieran Setiya. Published November 23, 2022.
Every so often I read something that makes me hold my breath for a moment, then exhale in a burst of wow-ness. Wow is how I felt as I read the last words of the article. I re-read certain paragraphs a few times. Even before I had finished reading it the first time my insides told me there's something important to be learned, something that can change one's entire perspective on life in an instant.
Maybe that's a bit of an over-the-top reaction, but it definitely made an impact.
Whether we realize it or not, we’re all influenced by outside forces to cobble together a coherent narrative story arc for our lives. Parents. Schools. Employers, Family. Religions. Friends. At every turn we’re encouraged to craft a life that has a connected beginning, middle, and end.
One phase of life is supposed to smoothly and naturally move to the next in a steady series of key elements that taken together should represent a good life, a proper life, a life of success as seen through the eyes of everyone but perhaps the individual in question.
The idea that we narrate our lives to ourselves, and that doing so is part of living well, is sufficiently commonplace that its most vocal critic, the philosopher Galen Strawson, could describe it as “a fallacy of our age.”
If I’m entirely honest, my life is mostly a series of random change points. I entered college as an accounting/pre-law major and exited my third semester quite suddenly to pursue a career as a dancer. If while I was a dancer you had told me I would someday end up working in technology for many years, I would have ardently protested that no, that’s not in the plan (there really was no plan). I could articulate myriad ways my life has taken bizarre and unexpected turns. Some sheer luck. Some snap decisions. Some planning, but not much. Most plans I’ve made for my life go up in smoke within days of embarking on them. I bet many people experience the same, but we’re consistently urged to plan our lives out and set long-term goals. I’ve abandoned that process.
Kieran Setiya suggests that he too is one of those exceptions to the “psychological conjecture that we are bound to tell our lives in story form.”
Like me, you may be one of them, living from day to day and year to year without much sense of narrative direction.
The classic story arc is linear, A leads to B leads to C and so on. But is that how your life has unfolded? Mine sure hasn’t. My life has been anything but linear. As author Jane Alison point outs, linear storytelling is but one of many options. Stories can also “meander, spiral, explode, and branch, or divide into cells.”
Meander, spiral, explode, branch, and divide. That sounds exactly like my life. As I’ve talked to friends and colleagues, for the most part that’s their story pattern too. As the creators of our story, we have the right, indeed the obligation, to ensure that our story unfolds in the manner that is meaningful and useful in each moment. That means that when you reach a life tipping point or fascinating path, you should seriously consider taking it even if it runs counter to the big picture story you’ve been holding on to because that’s what you think is expected.
Is this a problem, that so many people attempt to adhere to a singular life narrative? Yes. Of course, we’re all free to navigate our lives as we see fit. But I contend so many of us feel trapped by the narrative, imprisoned by the story. The need our culture fosters to bind stories in a unified and linear way can be a trap.
Perhaps it is. But there are countless ways to make sense of yourself, even through stories, without picturing your decades as a quest. Why not bricolage, the character study, the riff?
What’s more, there is a downside to unified, linear narrative: it is by squeezing your life into a single tube that you set yourself up for definitive failure. Projects fail and people fail in them. But we have come to speak as if a person can be a failure—as though failure were an identity, not an event. When you define your life by way of a single enterprise, a narrative arc, its outcome will come to define you.
As a side note, when I ran across the word bricolage, I had to look it up. It’s now one of my current favorite words. I love that it could be used as a metaphor for so much in life. Anyway…
Setiya suggests and I agree that this tendency to try to fit our lives into a sequential, logical narrative should be resisted. Perhaps there are those few whose lives are quite happy and fulfilled taking just one path, but I don’t think that applies to most of us.
If you try a dozen careers, you’re not a failure. If you pick up and put down countless subject areas of study, you’re not shortchanging your education. If one day you wake up and want to try on an entirely new identity, a new way of being in the world, that doesn’t somehow signal failure or negate the success of your previous iteration of self.
As Joe Moran insists: “To call any life e a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives … A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.”
On a personal note, having left my longstanding corporate job as of September 1st, I am now in the process of reinvention yet again and I’m honestly not sure what’s on the horizon for me, at least not in any detail. My guess is that when I’m a decade older from today I’ll look back on my life and say “Well, that was unexpected.”
I hope you empower yourself with the permission to follow your heart, mind, and passions in any directions that seem worth exploring. I believe the best lives are those defined by an ongoing mindset of exploration and creativity.
I’ve mentioned this many times, but this article made me think yet again of my favorite quotation of all time from Dr. Seuss.
Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.
Be you. Be you even if to others it looks like your story is a mishmash because the only life story that matters is the one that makes you happiest.
Kieran Setiya has an interesting new book out, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, that combines philosophy with personal essay. The book has chapters on infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity – and hope. I’ve added it to my reading list.
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