we all have secret lives like walter mitty

content/post/2023/05/we-all-have-secret-lives-like-walter-mitty.md

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+---
+title: "We All Have Secret Lives Like Walter Mitty"
+date: 2023-05-18T17:27:00+02:00
+categories:
+  - braindump
+tags:
+  - book
+  - TV shows
+---
+
+In James Thurber's _The Secret Life of Walter Mitty_, a husband frustrated with his dull live dreams up fearless alternatives where he can be a more exciting and perhaps better version of himself: an amazing doctor, an airplane pilot, and so forth. Most people will probably be familiar with the 2013 movie adaptation where Ben Stiller provides a very different atmosphere compared to the book, but still, the main premise remains: Walter ultimately ventures off into the real world exploring unusual nooks and crannies he never could have imagined. 
+
+The most remarkable part? No-one knows just by catching a glimpse of Walter or by walking by. Walter has a secret life. We all have secret lives. 
+
+My friend Peter made me think about Walter's life when he mentioned "the human costs of so many artifacts in our lives, where we only see the finished product and are unaware of the stories and efforts of the people who create such things". He meant my book [The Creative Programmer](/post/2023/05/the-creative-programmer-is-in-print) that for me was a big struggle to get to the masses, which Peter knows more about than others. 
+
+But isn't that true for a lot of things in life? When we talk to each other about our lives---hey how's it going? Great! You? Also great!---we only catch a glimpse, if that, of that person's daily inner struggles. Most of these glimpses are tiny fragments of warped (or in case of social media, completely inverted) reality that we in our brains unconsciously glue together to get a holistic view of the current state of someone's life. A very very incomplete and inaccurate view. We all have secret lives like Walter Mitty, and only our inner circle knows a thing or two about these secrets. 
+
+Yet for me, it's very difficult to turn off the automatic piece-together-system and stand still to try and imagine how something like a book came to be: did the author struggle a lot? Was it perhaps their fourth manuscript? Could it have taken a decade to gather all that knowledge? Were they satisfied in the end? How was the struggle with the publisher? If our brain did that for every book, it would explode. When I pick up a book, I just want to read it---or not. If we're just interested in the contents, we don't care about the author's secret life or struggles to get it published. 
+
+The same is true for the people I interact with. It is so easy to simply assume that fantasized view to be a correct one, but if you stop and think, you realize it's not, far from it. We should do that more often: to stop and think. It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 in our brains: one system is very quick to judge and can efficiently assess the current situation---at the cost of making a lot of judgement mistakes---and the other system is the deliberate but slow and energy-burning thinking mode. 
+
+I have always known that people struggle, but never fully realized it. They struggle to get out of bed, to get their kids to do the same, to face that stupid commute, to suppress that yawn in a boring meeting room, to keep on writing even if there's no energy left, to come up with a meal later that day, to somehow do the dishes while entertaining the kids, to keep up with the ever-growing list of TODOs and appointments, ... But none of that is visible. Until you decide to get kids yourself, struggle to get them out of bed and keep them entertained. Or perhaps it's the other way around, and someone you know comes across as very tired, but once home takes of that mask to be a very energetic person.
+
+When we want people to do something for us, be it professionally or as a friend request, we forget that they're leading a secret life, perhaps not the life they want to lead, but one that's most definitely shielded from us---exactly like we do ourselves when talking to others. 
+
+The more I think about this, the more fascinated I am when I read the stories behind a game, book, painting, or piece of furniture. Jason Schreier's _Blood, sweat, and pixels_, for example, showcases the enormous struggle of game studio employees trying to get their game out of the door. If you read the review after its release, watch a video, or decide to play it yourself, you catch a glimpse of that story---a tiny glimpse with the internal struggles neatly shaved off. And of course, even reading about the inner world that Jason depicts is still just a fragment of reality. 
+
+This is another reason why I love reading disjointed personal blogs such as this one: instead of simply reading boring technical post upon post, we get to peek into someone else's life. It's not just the peeking, it's the trying to understand my own life by trying to understand others' lives. By the way, who says a blog has to be focused on a single topic? With my blog, I can decide which part of my secret life I want to share. 
+
+Next time you play a game, pick up a book, a painting, or even a simple wooden chair, dream up the story behind it: what secret life does its creator have? By trying to notice and understand all these secret lives, we can learn which secret live we want to lead ourselves.