Be Someone Else
image: Jaroslav Devia for Unsplash
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Oliver Burkeman, the former Guardian columnist, once devoted an entire day to mimicking the rituals of famous artists and scientists. He got up at 5:30, a la Hemingway; sat around naked in the morning, a la Ben Franklin; downed a cocktail at noon, a la V.S. Pritchett; gulped strong coffee all afternoon, a la Balzac; and took to a scalding bath in the evening, a la Flaubert. If these were the habits that made some of history’s greatest minds cook, surely combining them would produce a thermonuclear creative event.
That didn’t quite happen – nor, frankly, was it the point of the experiment.
Burkeman got the idea of a greatest hacks mash-up from Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work. Burkeman admits he couldn’t try every trick in the book: “Oddly, my girlfriend was unwilling to play the role of Freud’s wife, who put toothpaste on his toothbrush each day to save him time.”
There are writers for whom this is their whole dodge: If we emulate the rituals of titanically successful people, a little of their mojo will rub off on us. Burkeman isn’t one those writers. But he used to be. His own shtick at the time was field-testing productivity tips and tricks and separating the wheat from the chaff. After his Big Day of aping famous creatives, he conducted a postmortem: What things that he’d tried felt patently stupid and what things might be worth repeating? He quickly kiboshed Franklin’s naked “air bathing,” and Pritchett’s lunchtime martinis. But he became a convert to early rising, and long walks.
Be someone else. This strikes me as a useful fancy – not as some kind of growth hack but just as an imaginative experiment. What would it feel like to be … not you? This is of course the fuel of fiction – writing it or even reading it. In idle moments who hasn’t wondered who else they might have become, had the universe rolled the dice differently, or those sliding doors stuck shut?
In Carl Dennis’s poem “The God Who Loves You,” a middle-aged real-estate agent is marooned in a life he’s not entirely sure about. What would have happened, he wonders, had he gone with his second choice in college? Swiped right on a different roommate, different spouse, different job, different city? Might any or all of it added up, on a scale of satisfaction, to “a life thirty points above the life (he’s) living?” Luckily for you and me, this is all angels-on-a-pin stuff – you made the choices you made and that’s it. Be glad you’re not God, Dennis suggests, “pacing his cloudy bedroom,” saddled with the task of weighing all those innumerable alternatives for you … and maybe putting a thumb on the scale once or twice, because, you know, he loves you. That’s the real work. You and me, we get a pass from all those machinations. We are “spared by ignorance.”
I’ve written about attempts to slip into the skin of another, or even a different species! It’s fun stuff. But I do think it’s worth keeping things light around this topic. We can so easily get sucked into a morass of handwringing, full of regret over more promising paths we were too chicken to take, unlived lives dancing in a ballroom just on the other side of the wall.
Amy Summerville, a psychologist at the University of Miami in Ohio who studies regret, says it’s totally natural to run the mental tape of “I wish things had turned out differently.” But it’s important to remember that while, yeah, they could have turned out better, they could just have easily turned out worse. I like the idea that when we find ourselves envying someone else’s glamorous or successful life, it’s worth asking ourselves: Would we really swap places with them … if it meant we had swap in their whole life, not just the juicy bits? That’s usually enough to tamp down envy.
One of the secrets of life, it seems to me, is about managing regrets. We can train ourselves to regret less, or to regret better. To see a regretful outcome as a useful data point in the project of our own betterment. To consider the worse fate we dodged, rather than the sweeter fate we missed out on. To be honest about where the fault lies in the regrettable thing, and cut ourselves some slack if it doesn’t lie with us.
Friend, this life is all you’ve got, all you know, the only lit-up runway. Thinking this way is a good strategy for getting past regret. Forgive yourself. And then double down on the choices you have made, on the person you actually are.
