#81: Are you trying to live a final draft life?
Are you hesitant to make certain changes in your life, like changing careers or ending a relationship, because you don't want the time and energy you've invested in your life so far to be wasted? If so, you're not alone - but you're wrong. Recognising that aspects of your life aren't working for you doesn't mean your efforts have been wasted. Your life isn't an essay draft, where bad choices and wrong turns get cut from the final draft. You're holding yourself back, and your imperfect friend is here to put a stop to it.
Episode transcript:
Do you care too much about your life making sense?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi everyone, how are you doing? I’m sitting here at my desk with a cat on my lap, feeling a bit under the weather. Not sure whether it’s something I’ve picked up from my kids, or generally being worn down by winter, or term, or just stuff in general, or what. I’m not great at tuning in to how I’m feeling and noticing when I’m ill - remember that time I recorded a podcast episode when I had covid, but it was before I took the test so I didn’t know that I had covid, and I was telling myself I was fine and to stop making a fuss? I was at it again earlier today, telling myself to stop pretending (to myself, presumably) that I was ill, before needing to go and have a long, hot shower because I kept shivering. Afterwards, I opened the Garmin app so that I could check whether there’s been an increase in my resting heart rate over the past few days, because that would be evidence that I am actually a bit ill, rather than pretending. Sure enough, yes, there has been an increase. On the one hand, yay, an objective measure that I’m not pretending. On the other hand - what the fuck has gone wrong with me that I’ve become incapable of simply introspecting to work out how I’m feeling. So, yeah, don’t be like me. It’s fine to take the advice of Rebecca the podcaster, because she’s sensible, but Rebecca the actual human is still very much a work in progress. Don’t copy what she does. I’m getting better, though, slowly but surely. I’m aware of those times when I doubt myself, in a way that I didn’t used to be. And although I’m not quite at a stage yet where I can confidently recognise and accept when I’m feeling unwell - instead I have to be an observer, and pick up on things that from the outside are signs that I’m not very - I’m at least able to notice that this is something I have difficulty with, and that I need to keep working on it.
I’m not the only person who is a work in progress, of course. I speak to lots of people in coaching sessions who are working their way through making positive changes in their lives. Sometimes they’re in the process of changing careers, ending relationships, becoming more courageous and confident; other times, they’re not yet at the stage of working out what exactly they want to change, and instead they’re exploring - sometimes for the very first time in their lives - what they value most and what they want the next stage to look like. It’s a journey. That’s a cliche, I know, but it’s a good metaphor, because it’s something that can take a long time, even years in some cases, with progress landmarks along the way … which is not to say that it takes years to realise all the benefits. You don’t have to wait until right at the end for that. On the contrary, you get to enjoy the benefits right from the very start, when you first decide that something needs to change. The very start of the process is the realisation that the way you’ve been going about things all this time is a problem. It might not always have been a problem, but it’s just not working any more, even if it once did. Even before making any substantial change, that realisation that something needs to change can be empowering, simply because it’s a way of taking oneself seriously, and plenty of us don’t do this very often. Devoting time and attention to reflecting on what we want and how we want life to go is something a lot of us don’t spend much time doing, and the very idea strikes some people as silly, as if they’re not important enough to themselves to take up energy. When we do give it some thought, it often happens that we realise that certain things need to change. That you need to get better at actually noticing when you’re ill, like me. Or that you’re in the wrong career. Or that you’ve been giving too much weight to what other people think of you. Or that you’re in a dead-end relationship. Realisations like these can come with all sorts of feelings.
What I want to talk about today is a particular sort of fear that can accompany the realisation that things have to change, and which can accompany the process - oh, ok, journey, if we must - of personal improvement in general. It came out in a thought I expressed to someone the other day. I said that the more I realised about my unhealthy habits and thought patterns that I needed to change, the more I worried that by the time I did finally nail it and was ready to embrace my full potential, I’d be at death’s door, and that I’d end up full of regret about the lifetime I’d wasted holding myself back with stupid thoughts and insecurities.
I noticed how similar this line of thought was to certain things that I’ve heard people say in coaching sessions. People who have spent years working in their career before realising that a big change of direction is in order, but who say ‘Whatever I do next, it needs to build on what I’ve done before, otherwise that’s all been a waste’. So, they end up restricting themselves unnecessarily, narrowing their opportunities to ones that build on the narrative they’ve already started, regardless of whether there might be completely new and unrelated things they’d enjoy exploring. I talked about the dangers of taking this view back in episode #47: Is your life story dragging you down? It’s not just about career change, though. I’ve had friends stuck in unfulfilling relationships which they’re reluctant to leave because they’ve invested so much in the relationship and built so much with their partner over the years, and they don’t want to throw it all away. Nobody wants to experience regret. It’s understandable, but it’s also completely bonkers. I mean, is it so important to us that our past life choices make sense that we’re willing to pay with our future happiness?
These reflections raise some fundamental questions. What is it for a life to make sense? Is that really so important? What is it for the stuff we’ve done in the past to turn out to be wasted? The answer to these questions depend on the answer to the question of what makes for a good or successful life, more generally. Obviously, philosophers have had some thoughts about this over the years. For Aristotle, a good life involved developing the right character traits and cultivating the virtues. For the existentialists, there’s no universal sort of life we should be living - instead we create ourselves through our choices, which should be free and authentic regardless of what we end up choosing. Now, I’m summarising here, of course. But it’s interesting how distant these philosophical views are from the surprisingly common view I’ve described in my coaching clients, friends, and myself. Feel free to look up a list of Aristotle’s virtues, but you won’t find anything in there to support sticking doggedly to an unsatisfying course of life because you don’t want to undermine or invalidate choices that you made in the past. The existentialists wouldn’t approve either. There’s nothing free or authentic about falsely believing ourselves to be constrained by what we’ve done in the past. So, where does this all come from?
Well, here’s what it puts me in mind of. It makes me think of the analogy of writing an essay or a thesis or an article or whatever, and realising after investing quite a bit of time and effort that you’ve chosen the wrong topic to write about, or there’s some mis-step in your argument, or you’ve misunderstood the thing you’re writing about, or you’ve just realised that there’s a much better angle you should have taken. Perhaps there’s a deadline looming, and you’re faced with a difficult choice: do I rip it up and start all over again, which is going to be stressful and which will mean all that work I’ve done so far is for nothing; or do I carry on and see it through and try to make the best of what I’ve already done? Neither option is appealing, and it’s not obvious what the right choice is. Every year, I have at least one dissertation student who gets in touch and says ‘I’m not sure about this topic and I don’t know whether to continue with it or abandon it and do something else, what should I do?’ And my answer is always the same: I can’t tell you what to do, all i can do is talk through the options with you, and then y ou have to decide what the best choice is.
Now, that’s all very well when it comes to writing, but it makes less sense when it comes to living. When you’re writing your essay or your article, the ultimate goal is to come up with a good-enough final draft: something that makes sense from start to finish, where ideally there’s nothing in there that you don’t need there in order to support your conclusion, there are no dead ends or tangents, no unexpected sudden plot twists, and so on. But life, on the other hand, is not like that. Your purpose is not to make your life into a final draft, where every choice makes sense in light of what comes later, where there’s no paragraph (so to speak) that needs to be cut from the final version, no mistakes, and there’s a clear and coherent thread of argument running throughout. I mean, let’s take a moment to think about what life would be like if that’s how it was. You’re born, you develop with no emotional hang ups or anxieties or insecurities, you make all your choices in an unbiased, informed, confident, yet not arrogant way, you are appropriately compassionate to yourself, etc. I guess in some ways that’s the perfect life, in that it contains lots of good things that the rest of us have to work hard to realise. But is it a good, successful life, the sort you can look back on in old age and feel satisfied about? I don’t think the answer is necessarily ‘no’ - I think the only plausible answer is that it’s impossible to know, based on that information, because the measure of a good, successful life is not how much stuff you’ve got right. And that makes it a problem that so many of us behave otherwise.
Here’s something that we don’t tend to think is a good approach to writing an essay or a thesis or a book. Realising that you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere - that you’ve gone off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the thing you’re trying to write about, or that you’re seriously confused about something important, or that actually you’d rather be writing about a completely different thing entirely - but instead of ripping it up and starting again, you just change course right in the middle of what you’re writing, and continue in the way you’ve realised you ought to be writing, but without deleting or re-writing the first, mistake-riddled bit. In other words, you don’t remove your mistakes. That’s just not going to make for a good final draft - at least, not unless you’re trying to write something a bit weird and experimental. But, guess what? That’s what we do in life, all the time. Dead ends, diversions, wrong turns, misunderstandings - these are things you want to eliminate from the final draft of your essay, but you don’t need to eliminate them from your life. For one thing, you can’t. And also, even if you could, you don’t need to, because - with very few exceptions - whether or not you have those things is just not relevant to whether you are living a good, worthwhile, successful life. What makes a good life is not analogous to what makes a good essay.
So, let’s return to that fear I talked about earlier - the fear that leads us to shy away from making important changes in our lives because we don’t want what’s gone before to be a waste. I want to invite you to think seriously about in what sense it would be a waste to make some dramatic change in your life in order to make it more fulfilling. Do you think that, ideally, it would be better to go back and eliminate certain choices from your life history? And if so, what about the fact that the person you are now - the person evaluating their life and reflecting that certain things need to change - is a product of the choices you’ve made and the experiences you’ve had? Alternatively, maybe - as seems to be the case with some people - you think that you should try to like the sort of life that you have now - that you should stay in the unsatisfying relationship or career, for example. But sticking your head in the sand is not a recipe for a fulfilling life either. For one thing, it stops you from experiencing new things that you might find fulfilling, which, if you’re really concerned about waste, ought to bother you. And for another thing, the changes in you - such as the realisation that things need to change - are as much a part of your life as the choices you make and how things look from the outside, and so denying that those changes are happening is, if you like, another form of waste. That’s another respect in which good essays differ from good lives. What makes an essay a good essay has nothing to do with the changes that went on in the person who wrote it - what they learnt, how they grew, and so on. All that’s completely irrelevant. But it’s not irrelevant to what makes a good life.
Now, I’m not here to tell you what makes for a good life. There are plenty of people who have already written about that over the millennia, and you can feel free to dive into all that if you fancy it. I’m focusing on the much narrower issue of whether making certain choices, specifically those that involve making certain changes so that we hopefully end up happier and more fulfilled, renders the efforts we’ve made in the past wasted. And, honestly, I’m really struggling to think of examples of choices that would render our past efforts wasted. At least, I’m struggling to think of the sort of examples that are the focus here: cases where, as a result of changing or growing as a person, and/or gaining greater insights into what matters to us. We need different things at different times in our lives; we gain courage to try new things; we learn that options we never realised were open to us are actually open to us. Those things are not symptoms of a life gone wrong - they’re just part of life, full stop. Is there any change you’re afraid to make because you’re afraid of the wrong sort of regret - the sort that has to do with confused ideas about waste? Are you living your life as if you’re working towards a final draft of an essay? What would happen - what new opportunities would open up for you - if you stopped?
Take care, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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