is there a right way to live?

on perfect days and watching movies

In the summer of 2019, a maelstrom raged in my stomach. I had finally graduated college. I had finally landed the job I had been searching for most of the previous year. I had finally moved to San Francisco, the dream I had had for so long. What was left was uncertainty. I had spent my entire school life trying to get into a good college, my entire college life trying to get a good job. Now what? What was I supposed to do with all my time?

I had a few days before I started my new job. I began to gather my thoughts, trying to figure out how I would fill my time outside of work. The first of my plans was to watch a ton of classic movies, try to fly through Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list. I would continue my film education from the two courses I had taken, become a cultured man. What ‘cultured’ meant was unclear, but sounded good enough to be a guiding principle of a life, I thought.

When I told my brother this, I was sitting on his couch after moving in with him in San Francisco. He asked (somewhat incredulously), “Is that how you want to spend all of your time? Just watching movies?” I tried to think bigger after that.

This memory resurfaced while I was reading Jeremy Cooper’s novel Brian, which follows the eponymous lonely bureaucrat in London. Brian decides to start going to the British Film Institute every night to find some sort of meaning to his life, a decision that seems arbitrary but becomes significant. At length, he describes his experiences watching different films, and falling in with some regulars, who largely remain unnamed and distant.

Decades fly by in Brian’s life over the course of the novel, yet little changes — he stays at the same job, he gets better at making reflective comments about the films to his fellow buffs, he makes a singular friend that he refuses to open himself up to at all.

Over the 180 pages (that feel longer), we learn more about his thoughts on films than we do about any of his feelings or interiority. We slowly learn that he had a difficult childhood, a mother who died young and a father who put him in foster care, without much exploration of his feelings around it. He tells us how he understands more about the world, but only on the surface: he learns a little bit more about what post-war Japan was like, or how strangely sex can be depicted on film. At the end of the book, Brian, now retired, does the boldest action of his life: he buys a gift for his one friend Jack, a scarf that he mails him without a card or a return address — still keeping distance after all of these years.

As you might imagine, the book feels rather dull: Brian’s thoughts on films are shared without giving much description of them, making the endless list of italicized names and their accompanying commentary lose meaning. Nevertheless, I persisted and made my way to the end of the novel, only to reach the unsatisfying conclusion, one where a man had a whole life where he barely grew or changed at all, one where a man dedicated himself to art without letting himself fully be moved by it, and we barely ended up in a different place from where we started. It was so wholly depressing.

While reading the book, I was reminded of a film that I enjoyed, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023). This film follows another man, Hirayama, who works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, adhering to a strict routine defined by paying close attention to his daily work and surroundings. He brings an intensity to his job, takes photos of the lights shining through the trees, has the same meals in the same places. Like Brian, he seems to be running away from some previous trauma, something that is revealed when he sees his sister again after years and is barely able to speak to her about his life, about their father who can no longer hurt him.

Again, I felt depressed by this. In order to cope with this difficulty, the protagonist keeps himself distant from human connection. He embraces literature and routine and a lowly job in place of seeking solace or healing through others. The film is its most interesting when Hirayama is broken out of his routine, when he’s forced to contend with the unexpected quitting of his coworker or his niece appearing at his doorstep after years. I interpret the “perfect days” to be the ones that force him to contend with this human connection, not the beautiful routine ones we see at the beginning of the film.

Both of these works felt jarring to me as they shone light to a belief that I didn’t realize that I had — that I thought there was a right way to live. As I’ve gained more familiarity with the world, I’ve sought to be non-judgmental about the world and how people live their lives. At my young age, how could I know any better than anyone else on how one should live? “Life is hard enough as it is, let people do what they want to do,” I try to tell myself.

But it’s clear to me that I hadn’t internalized these feelings. Because I wasn’t just depressed by these works, I was disappointed and upset. I didn't understand why at first, until I saw myself in these men, living out my fears.

My greatest fear has always been that I will live a worthless life. That I will be knocking on death’s door and be afraid to turn around and face the sheer uselessness of how I spent my time on Earth, however long or short it ends up being. I thought about dedicating my life towards grand visions of changing the world, becoming unbelievably successful at something or another, or just giving up on meaning-making entirely. Yet, whenever I tried to adopt these perspectives, all I could see was the colossal gap between my existing life and the one that I desired; I would always be a failure until I wasn’t.

What allowed me to overcome the fear was to reduce the scope of what a worthwhile life looked like. I decided that a good life was one that centered human connection, that a life that improved at least one person’s day-to-day was one worth living. I soon discovered that I’m greedy — once I found my ability to make people laugh or identify with something I wrote, I couldn’t get enough. I’ve hungrily sought to meet more and more people, to deepen my relationships with those I love, to grow fat with as much human connection as possible.

When confronted with these works, I grew frustrated by the possibilities unrealized. A life is so valuable, so irreplaceable. A life can change everything for another being, can turn darkness into light, magick meals from a field, fashion a home from a hovel, love from hate. What happens when one closes oneself to that potential?

With Brian, he never fully seemed happy, even in his life of film consumption, once saying that he “felt such an idiot in his ignorance about what he presumed must be the relatively ordinary family lives of” two women that he eavesdropped on. Yet, he remained unwilling to change at all. In one incident, he was distraught to find his favorite cafe closed, only to discover that there was a better cafe around the corner. As he pondered the fact that he had considered his existing cafe as a cornerstone of his sanity, he was amazed by his previous sureness of a wrong idea, and wondered what else he had wrong about, what else he could be doing differently. His conclusion, despite all the ways he continued to be anxious and feel disconnected? “Nothing different, was his answer. Essentially things were fine the way they were.”

Knowing the shortness of life itself, how could someone accept their circumstances like this? How could someone accept a complete disconnection from their fellow man, the very basic impulse that keeps us alive? How could someone just fully surrender to their inability to be more than they are?

These fictional men are traumatized and lost, and I’m sympathetic to the feeling. I couldn’t possibly know how to deal with what they’ve been through, but I wonder what their stories would look like if someone were to question them, to ask them if this was how they really wanted to live. But what would they say?

We never hear Hirayama’s thoughts in Perfect Days, so it’s impossible to know what he believes. Despite his mostly taciturn nature and his isolated lifestyle, Hirayama is confronted with opportunities to connect to his estranged niece, with a man dying of cancer. He plays games with a grown man at the end of his life, accepting the connection that came to him. And as he drives to work in the closing shot of the film, he cries. I choose to believe these are the signs of a man changing from when life breaks his routines, questioning the isolated life he had committed to.

What if my brother never asked me that question about how I wanted to spend my time? What if I hadn’t gone back to the drawing board and decided to come up with creative projects and ideas around people to meet and things to do? What if I didn’t try to keep making friends every time I failed at it? Would I be like Brian? Would I not have dedicated so much of myself to writing every week, to the community it’s brought me, to the growth it’s led me to?

In this life, I wake to riches, so many of them. Each day, I can appreciate the shadows of the trees, the slow moving line of the post office, and so many people to share these moments with. I go to a job with people I like to do things that I enjoy. I ride bus lines where I can usually find a seat, overhear conversations between people in love and relish in their familiarity. On the weekends, I meet new people and old, I hear of dreams being realized and tragedies as well. An endless flood of feelings trickles around all of us.

I understand my anger now. There’s happiness in connection, possibility on the other side of pain, and too many people will never realize it. Everyone may not want it, and many will never have it, but I wish everyone could have a life like this.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Night Reign by Arooj Aftab - haunting and beautiful

• POEM - “Limerence” by Steve Leyva - What do we call this desire / to be desired?