We have arrived at the end of another year. Many of us use December 31 each year as a time to take stock of how our lives are going. It is more or less arbitrary where we mark the end of the year, but because the convention is shared, our lives have a rhythm that is marked by the calendar, and the length of the year makes it a good unit for assessing some aspects of our life. We might ask whether we sticked to the resolutions we made twelve months ago (almost none of us do). We might ask more general questions about how our life is going: have we been good parents, children, followers of God? Have we pursued worthwhile goals? Have the steps we have taken toward those goals between well-designed?
Socrates is credited with saying “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The idea that we can and should reflect on our lives and their trajectories remains deeply attractive to us and finds expression in psychotherapy and self-help books, as well as the annual year-end ritual of taking stock.
I suspect, however, that taking stock has costs. To see what I mean, think about an experience you may want to share with me. Suppose you’ve had a recent vacation that you enjoyed greatly. Perhaps you went for long walks that revitalized you; perhaps you read books you’ve been putting off; perhaps you just watched a TV marathon of your favorite series. You had, you realize, a good time, maybe even a meaningful time. But none of this is really reportable. It doesn’t make a good narrative. If someone asks you about your vacation, you might find you have nothing to report, or that you report something that really didn’t much matter to you one way or the other but happens to make a better story than the events that did matter you (I sometimes suspect that’s why people go to the famous tourist spots: to have something they can report to others). The events and activities that make your life worthwhile may not be the ones that make the best stories.
This is a problem not only when we report to others, but also when we report to ourselves. When I look back on my year, the really important things – the quiet moments of reflection, say – may not stand out for me. Standing out in my memory and really mattering may not track with each other very well at all. The many small events that actually constitute our lives – shared jokes with a loved one; a beautiful sunrise or sunset; a nice Christmas dinner with family and beloved friends – and which give them their texture and their value may be repeated many times, and hard to distinguish one from another. They may not be captured by the narrative net, and what we recall, and recount, may be both unrepresentative and relatively trivial.
The danger of reflection, then, is that we may find ourselves imposing shapes on our lives that actually misshape them. Because our story gets its value from events that are relatively rare, we may think it is going badly when it isn’t, or that it needs reshaping in ways that would actually detract from what makes it valuable to us. The memorable and the quantifiable might crowd out the genuinely valuable. Academics like me might count publications or grant money, but not count actual teaching, or intellectual satisfaction, and that may have effects on how we attempt to live in the coming year.
Of course, reflection has benefits too. I haven’t argued that the costs are greater than the benefits. I would need to be able quantify each, which I cannot. Nor have I suggested that the costs are inevitable. Perhaps there are ways of reflecting, of balancing reflection with other kinds of activities, that minimize these costs. As the year comes to an end, perhaps we need to reflect, but not too much.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!