Beware of the ‘Life as Narrative’ motif

In my line of work (development), I often come across stalwarts. The defining feature of a stalwart, in most cases, is a grand narrative arc that explains their lives. There’s drama, chance encounters, promotions, higher studies, periods of wilderness, feathers in their caps and a culmination in the position they find themselves in today. If the person is a stalwart-in-the-making, there’s also a neatly conceptualized career trajectory planned out and ready for deployment.

While there’s nothing wrong in this, not having a coherent story to explain your own life can make you feel like a loser.  And each encounter with a neatly delivered story ends up becoming a source of anxiety fueled by a brooding sense of inadequacy and failure.

For the consciously alive individual, falling prey to this ‘Life as Narrative’ ploy should be avoided through introspection. Life needn’t always have to be a neatly compartmentalized story. It can be a collage, a bricolage or a khichdi with no discernible crescendo. It could be bland but peppered with little deeds of kindness, bonhomie, ascetic intellectual pursuits, ‘useless’ hobbies and much more. When we define our raison d’etre by a single project or outcome, we’re already lining ourselves for ‘failure’ when life has other plans.

The philosopher Kieran Setiya explains this in ‘Life is Hard’ in the following way:

What makes the narrator’s life worth living is not some grand narrative, running from conception or birth to inevitable death; it is the countless little thoughts and deeds and gentle, joking interactions that occupy day after day after day. If you pay attention, Baker intimates, there’s enough in a single lunch hour to fill a book.

The more you appreciate the sheer abundance of incident, the more you’ll see any life as an assortment of small successes and small failures, and the less prone you will be to say, despairingly, “I’m a loser”—or with misplaced bravado, “I’m a winner!”. Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive.