I recently read Paul Graham's retrospective of things he had worked on in his life. Though I'm sure there were some embellishment, it was overall a refreshingly candid read. Even the blatantly unproductive times in his life felt well documented and examined, at least for an essay of that length.

It was interesting to see Paul talk about how one of the biggest challenges while writing the essay was to avoid falling into revisionism. I think one of his most valuable skills was the ability to observe world clearly, so I was surprised that even for him, revisionism felt like a threat.

But perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. Most people I know construct some sort of revisionist narrative in their life, and many of them felt necessary to hide once-unwholesome motivations in one's life or to deal with the regret of precious moments lost. I do this myself, and have used it to help others feel better.

There were occasionally times where I wondered whether I should have up and punctured those narratives, like “man, just admit it. Those wasted times and the pains you went through weren't all that valuable”, but then I think that save for a few moments in life that requires extreme lucidity, it's just harmless to pave things over with narrative. Under the surface, most people's life have rough patches that they would rather not look back at. Narratives are like collective songs weaved by community, a lot of times, you probably just need to rely on them to drown out the noises and carry on.

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Categorized under: #irl, #conversations