279 - peakness ⛰️
peaks and troughs and life, oh my!
Hey there, !
Recently I had a conversation with my friends where somehow the question came up in the conversation: "Do you think you've peaked?"
It was an interesting one to ponder, especially as I'm approaching my 32nd birthday in a few weeks. My flippant 5-second response was "I have obviously already peaked because I was a super cute baby / primary school kid and it's alll been downhill from there".
Trust me guys, I was very cute.
The question itself makes a big assumption - that there's one peak in your life that you're building towards, or you're devolving from. I reckon that belief has been trained by the media and the stories we watch - many of them, by constraints of the form, show relatively simple story arcs for ease of watching; that is, one where you get a story circle or a three-act structure that looks a little bit like this:
You start somewhere normal, you go into some conflict, you overcome it and end up better than when you started.
When you think about it, though, that kind of structure is a bit...lacking when you look at a life. George R.R. Martin, though he can't finish a book for shit, had a really fun observation on the simplicity of Lord of the Rings, but I think it also has to do with how we select where we start and stop our stories:
Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs?
What was Aragorn's tax policy? - I mean, imagine a LOTR series post-ROTK that went into the day to day governance of Middle Earth. How many other little conflicts would there be in that world? What other stories could we be missing? Was the One Ring going to be the peak experience of all their lives?
That's also the difficulty of writing stories, I guess - you want to have a satisfying conclusion for what a character wants, and so you choose a particular place to start the story, and a particular place to end it, that illustrates that arc.
In reality, life just continues. Once you've satisfied one of these desires, another one will crop up pretty quickly, and you go and satisfy / overcome that one. And then another one. And then another one.
As our conversation developed, it turned more towards the number of peaks and troughs that we go through in our lives. Maybe I did peak in primary school as a cute kid. But I also had some peak experiences in my high school years, in university, and then even in my years at work.
Even now, being able to write this newsletter for 280 or so issues! That's pretty damn cool.
So I think that there are more like...local minimums and maximums on the graph of peak-ness:
The box is really just where we select our start and ends, when we're telling our stories. Or what we see in a movie. Or in a book. And so it might look like there's only one peak or trough that you've experienced...
But when you step back, looking at this all together, you get a better perspective. As Kierkegaard says, "Life can only be understood backwards" - you can't see what the shape's like 'til it's come and gone.
Whether you think you're working up to your peak, you're peaking, or you think you're post-peak - you just can't know where you sit on the graph above. Maybe there's higher peaks to come. Maybe there are lower troughs to come. Who knows??
Enjoy life while you got it.
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
📋Today's Question
No survey today, just a literal question (hit reply on the email!):
What's your most memorable peak experience? I want to know so I can have a bigger list of things to choose from as I gather my thoughts for what my 32nd year will look like :D
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The Talented Mr Ripley - 4 stars - what a CLASSIC. Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow at their best and prettiest and hottest and amazingest. Super enjoyed this movie.
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A Few Good Men - 4.5 stars - again, a banger classic (these were both plane movies lol). Jack Nicholson has as much impact and charisma as Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, in just about the same amount of time. It was a bone-chilling performance but also amazing to watch such amazing restraint. It's mainly a courtroom drama, but DAMN it was captivating. Also features Tom Cruise being a classic cocky lawyer playing against Demi Moore (who I can't unsee as The Substance girlie). Highly recommended!!
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F*ck Run Club, Join Sit Club - big lol
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Revolutionizing Dairy Farming: How Robots Benefit Cows & Farmers - IEEE Spectrum - super fascinating article about how robots are helping with dairy cows and farmers. The jobs really are being stolen by robots, but like...for a good reason?
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Three intriguing findings about pleasure and happiness - a bit of hope, a bit of fun to read. Psychology is infinitely interesting to me.