Most of us have reached a point in our lives where we can look back on the life we’ve lived, considering whether or not we’ve made the right choices. We’ve looked back on relationships that didn’t work out, wondering what we could have done differently and what life might have looked like if we’d stayed together. We’ve wondered what it might be like if we had taken that job in that far-off city. Or if we did take it, we would contemplate what our life would look like if we had stayed home, close to family and friends. Those of us with overactive imaginations play out these scenarios routinely in our heads, constantly agonizing over every decision that we make, whether they be grand or minuscule. In our age of social media, nearly all of us have had the thought: what would it be like to be either somewhere (or someone) else, while remaining fully ourselves? 

While for some it may be a banal question, for others it’s a constant internal conversation. Faced with a never-ending array of choices throughout life, we cannot help but wonder what our lives would look like if we had chosen different paths. We can only live our lives once, and so faced with a sense of radical contingency, we often wonder about the true consequences that our choices have, and whether life may have turned out any differently if we had chosen differently. To be sure, this is not a new question, though it is one that seems to fixate the modernist imagination, especially in literature. In his 2020 book, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, Professor of English at John Hopkins University Andrew H. Miller takes us through a wide array of art, literature, psychology, and philosophy in the modern era, highlighting common themes of relief and regret that emerge in each. Along the way, Miller encourages us to contemplate how the alternative lives we never lived can still speak to us and force us to confront ourselves, as we come to terms with who we truly are.

Overview:

Why do we care so much about the lives which we will never live? In a culture where we see ourselves as individual human beings who are wholly responsible for our choices (without reliance on an external Other), we are typically racked with anxiety when faced with such freedom (as Kierkegaard would note, anxiety is the consequence of the “dizziness of freedom”). The more options we have to choose from in life, the more we agonize over the “correctness” of our choices. Not only do we agonize over the choices that we do make, but we also come to regret our instances of inaction as well. These branching paths in our lives tend to rear their heads and manifest themselves in mid-life crises when we realize that the opportunity to live a different life is becoming less and less likely as we inch ever-closer to our inevitable end. As the novelist Hilary Mantel wrote in her work, Giving up the Ghost, 

When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.

At the same time, under the conditions of global capitalism and political cynicism, we also live in a contemporary space where we often feel like our individual actions have little to no meaningful impact on the larger world around us. These conditions, Miller argues, lead us to reconsider the impact of our lives and “engender thoughts of our unled lives” (99). One of Miller’s friends, when discussing the concept of his book, summarized it as YOLO + FOMO, when we realize that we can only live our life once and also have a fear of missing out on better alternatives (162). Miller claims that we can see these themes of regret and relief poignantly in modern literature and art.

Using Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” as a seminal example, Miller retraces these central themes (“one person, two roads, retrospection, comparison”) through a wide range of poetry (A.R. Ammons, W.H. Auden, Carl Dennis’s “The God Who Loves You”), literature (Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Austen, Ian McEwan’s Atonement), visual art (Pieter Bruegel), and film (Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”). Through the myriad examples he explores, Miller identifies and explores some key tropes that bind these works together: singularity, wistful longing and regret, the critical moment of decision-making, the foreclosing of choice due to racial and gender identity, motherhood, familial relations, and more. 

Miller combines these observations from literature and culture with psychological research and philosophical pondering as he ruminates on the theme of regret. For example, according to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, when we fail, the closer we come to reaching the goal, the more we feel the sting of failure and amplify our self-criticism. According to Miller’s reading, it feels worse to come in second place in a competition than third; the bronze medalist feels relief for making it onto the podium while the silver-medalist just missed out on the top spot. Also, regret can serve as a form of self-flattery, in which punishing ourselves by regretting our decisions allows us to believe in our exalted potential that is endlessly unfulfilled and perpetually out of reach. These examples guide Miller’s thinking as he ruminates on the ways that we imagine our alternative selves and question whether these decisions had any meaningful impact at all. At the end of the day, while Miller has no definite answer for these conundrums, he ultimately hopes to provide the reader with some solace in the fact that we are not alone in having these thoughts. 

Commendations: 

Miller is a gifted and beautiful writer, as he weaves together the varying themes of regret and relief through this work, highlighting that the beauty and sorrow of the world are held in tension with one another to help to give life its color and depth. Miller’s insights are often poetic and can be rather profound at points. Miller stitches together several insightful analyses of art and literature with personal ruminations and musings, combining the analytical with the intimate. He gives us a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a human subject and our images of selfhood (are we one, two, or more people?), emphasizing that we exist as relational beings who construct ourselves through our interactions with those around us (parents, siblings, lovers, spouses, children (both born and unborn), etc.). Equally fascinating are how literature and experience inform and influence one another, and how our present experience retroactively changes our perception of the past. 

As a reader, we get an inside look into how a well-read scholar works his way through a wide range of literary sources to ponder what it means to think about missed opportunities and the lives we’ll never lead. Miller seamlessly incorporates insights from psychology and philosophy into his textual criticism, using them to anchor his thoughts. The book is unconventionally written in short sections, with breaks every few paragraphs, so the chapters can be read relatively quickly. Ultimately, Miller’s object of inquiry is incredibly interesting and serves as a jumping point into further thought and study. 

Critique: 

Yet, while Miller’s central topic of exploration is fascinating, it is also rather underdeveloped. It was difficult to find a robust, well-articulated thesis, as Miller seemed more interested in exegeting texts and comparing them than drawing any substantial conclusions. There’s not much holding these various pieces of art and literature together other than the vague commonalities of how they contemplate unlived lives. 

This disparate nature of the book is also not aided by its structure. It is written in short passages and bubbles of thought, some of which are connected, but many of which seem isolated and disconnected from what came before. Miller often bounces around from poem to art piece to short story without much connecting thread to keep them all together, which makes for a rather disjointed reading experience. It ultimately feels more like a skeleton of a book without a lot of muscle to hold it together, and it reminds me of what bothers me about much of literary criticism in academia: it’s very soft and flighty, retreating to vague interpretations and dead-end “what-ifs.” Now, while I do appreciate open-endedness in literary interpretation, it can also be frustrating when there’s nothing solid to land on.

To be fair, I think the journey itself is part of the point for Miller. There’s a bit of heady weightlifting to do in places throughout the book, and his interpretations of these texts allow us to pause and reflect, even if some of Miller’s thoughts seem rather scattered. Unfortunately, as a result, I came away from the book without it leaving too much of an impact, which is a shame because the thesis is so interesting. Perhaps I’m imagining an unwritten book and lamenting the possibilities that were lost therein. But maybe Miller is less interested in giving us a clear thesis and more invested in offering comfort. Miller wants us to explore these ideas alongside him, hoping together that while we can make wrong choices, they might not be as monumentally impactful as we might think. I think this palliative offering is more important to Miller, as he shows us that we can find a sense of relief in knowing that our fears and regrets are often inflated and unmerited. 

Conclusion:

We are currently living in a time of radical uncertainty and liminality. Thoughts of our unled lives often spring up in times when our lives are upended, and what we take for granted comes speedily into crisp focus. In a time of quarantines, lockdowns, global pandemics, frustrations, and losses, there is plenty of fertile soil for thinking about our alternative lives. On Not Being Someone Else, while often disjointed, fragmentary, and repetitive, still serves as a reminder to reconsider the way we think about ourselves and the choices we make. Yes, we only live one life, and we shape that life out of the many lives we leave behind along the way. Those unlived lives may indeed haunt us from time to time, but, if we take Miller’s words as a guide, these ghosts speak to us from a distance, allowing us to focus clearly on the one life we do live with a greater sense of vibrancy and acceptance.