The Best Of All Possible Worlds

If you don’t do anything else today, read Tim Kreider’s funny and dazzling blog post in the Times about how we view the lives of friends and families through the prism of our own past choices. Since it’s impossible for us to go back in time and follow a different set of forks in the road, we quietly assess our peers’ stations and life and congratulate or berate ourselves for making similar or wildly different choices. Kreider refers to this sociological phenomenon as the Referendum and suggests that it can sometimes result in people gazing at each with incomprehension, jealousy, or smugness from across a yawning chasm of experience and circumstance. He writes:

I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.

Kreider’s observations are similar to my own. Beginning in my early thirties, friends began making remarks to me like “You’re so lucky to live alone.” or “It must be fun to be a bachelor living in the city.” And I would listen to their stories about spouses and partners and imagine how nice it would be to come home and have someone to talk to. Our capacity for imagination is one of our greatest assets, but it can also be a huge pain in the ass. You don’t see dogs coming home from an afternoon in the dog park and yearning for a bigger yard or feeling thankful that their master isn’t a jerk.

We use each other as the inspiration for the stories we tell ourselves, inserting our own dreams and fears into the narratives of lives that followed a different path than our own. It might not seem like a noble impulse at first because–let’s be honest–there isn’t much that’s ennobling about envying someone’s fortune or pitying their burdens. But most great works of fiction are only a couple steps removed from this kind of late-night musing.