Remix: I Never Saw The Plots Resolve
this is a remix[^1] of a post I wrote previously.
Most of the plot-lines of my life never resolved. At age 22 there were a few Big Stories in my life, they each felt momentous, and the thing I feared was that they might resolve "against" me. But what actually happened is that they never resolved at all.
Some of the most important people in my life just dissolved from it entirely – whether gradually, or suddenly – and mostly I've never heard from them or about them ever again. The stories we were co-writing stopped in the middle. Often we reached the disaster, but not the transformation, nor the atonement, nor the return.
In the end, the people and organizations I had the most trouble with neither got their comeuppance nor crushed me under their boot, but just.... stopped being part of my life, and I don't know what happened to them, and that's about it.
I wonder how much my original expectations were just a fiction created by fictions. Many of my ideas about life were forged by books and movies – most of the lives I got real knowledge of as a kid were fabrications – and maybe that's why I imagined that the stories of my life would have resolutions, whether good or bad or ugly.
Speculating about The Young is a good sign that you're getting spiritually Old, but I do wonder if the Youth of Today will not find an unresolved life as strange as I do. If you grow up in an age of scrolls and reels, snacking on endless morsels of standalone media from one eternal feed, does that change your expectation of narrative connection between events? Does it free you from the tyranny of a Life Story?
Maybe instead you learn to see life as a garden, filled with interesting and sometimes interrelated things to see and do, but without the expectation that stories should have a happy ending, or any ending at all.
[^1]: I don't think I've seen people write (explicit) remixes before, I thought I'd give it a go. They have three attractions for me:
One is that I get new readers over time, and mostly they've never seen my old posts, and that seems kind of arbitrary – these posts are no more or less timely than they were when I first sent them, so shouldn't I keep trying with the ones that seemed meaningful?
Two is that I think an idea is more likely to affect someone if it goes through spaced repetition. Some of my favourite newsletter writers do this by picking a few lenses on the world and applying them to endless different situations, thereby spaced-repeating the lens. I'm not sure I can do that effectively, so remixes seemed like an intriguing alternative.
Third is just that I want to see if I'm any better as a writer than I was two years ago. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for.