Human Life as a Crappy Book | An Illustrated Column By Ezra W Smith
One of my favorite things to do is reading. I love good books. In the past year I discovered a few great authors and enjoyed quite a few great books. However, last year I also decided once and for all – I don’t like the majority of biographies.
I think biographies, as we write them right now, make us question whether our own lives have any purpose or meaning. Which for many people might lead to deep dissatisfaction. Controversial? Hear me out.
Very often (definitely too often) biographies are written by the rules of fiction books. Authors use all of the same devices, the same sudden turns and plot twists. The author, whether or not they are also a main character of the story, takes imperfect, flawed, raw material, such as someone’s life, and forces it into The Story. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end. And that, I think, is wrong. There is no “end” of the story, even if the person whose biography is being written is dead. People usually don’t plan their death. And they don’t summarize their life right before. Even old people don’t finish all the things they were planning to do. Even if the literal end of someone’s life has already occurred, it wasn’t The End in the sense that we usually expect from the book. There is no closure, no satisfaction at the end of a human life. And making it look like there is on paper is a mistake.
The other day one young woman I happen to text sometimes on Instagram (let’s call her Clare) started to tell me the story of how she moved to another country. She met a foreign boy, she said, and fell in love instantly. She was so sure he was the one, she sold her apartment and all the stuff she had and moved to a country she had only visited once before. I thought: “Wow, amazing story to tell her grandchildren”. I happened to know that Clare was in a relationship, so I assumed that was the guy. So I congratulated her on such a clean, fairy-tale-like love story.
But it was not. Apparently, after a year in a new country, after spending most of her money and after burning all her bridges, Clare met someone else. There is no explanation for it. The first guy didn’t treat her badly, he also wasn’t completely different than she thought, there was no major conflict or unexpected evil twist. And still, Clare met someone else and left that first guy. Try to make a nice story out of it. Well, you can, but you would need to adjust it quite a bit.
Which means – change it. Which means – lie, or at the very least significantly manipulate reality.
Clare wrote to me that she still feels incredible shame and doesn’t like to tell this story to anyone. Because… she can’t really justify her decisions and can’t anyhow explain why things happened the way they did. But does she really need to feel shame? She didn’t lie to anyone. People break up. I don’t think we actually need a reason to do so, other than an unwillingness to be in the current relationship for any longer.
My theory is that a typical human life doesn’t make a good story. There are too many shades, too many random events, too many detours that take us off the main storyline. And there is also no Main Storyline. Or any storylines that you can take out of your life and tell as a nice, smooth narrative with a moral and structure.
And that is another thing I wanted to say. In the beginning I wrote that biographies make us question whether our own lives have any purpose or meaning. We are right to question it. Because I don’t think our lives have purpose or meaning. And neither are they supposed to.
Have you ever felt like you know what you want to do in life and then, a few years later realized that it is absolutely not what you want to do in life? Almost anyone has. Very few people find that One Thing (or That One Person) and stick with it forever. But that isn’t bad. Life is in constant movement, constant change - chaotic, very often random motion in time. Events of our lives don’t have to be a part of One Perfect Story; they don’t have to contribute to the Grand Purpose; they don’t even have to teach us anything.
We live our lives like they are meant to be written about later. I don’t think this is healthy for the majority of us.
The only absolute purpose of life is life itself - no additional meaning needed. If you stop looking at your life as a Story that someone has to write after your death, a lot of pressure will get released.
You no longer have to justify random detours and “wasted years”. Your every step no longer has to be a step in the right direction. And maybe you can just finally relax and be in the moment.
