Life seems to strobe on and off for me and to barrage me with input. And so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it. Unlike the way that—maybe I’m very naïve—I imagine Leo Tolstoy getting up in the morning, pulling on his homemade boots, going out to chat with the serfs whom he’s freed, sitting down in his silent room overlooking some very well-tended gardens, pulling out his quill and, in deep tranquility, recollecting emotion.
Stuff like that I enjoy reading, but it doesn’t feel true at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that I received five hundred discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important, and now I’ve got to try and sort those things out.
My life and self doesn’t feel anything like a unified developed character in a linear narrative to me. I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed not by the amount of stuff they have to do but overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them—the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions.
In summary: Life is messy; beware of stories.
I remind you again of Tyler Cowen’s beautiful articulation and defense of the same point.
