This Is Not The Essay I Sat Down To Write
Our lives are defined by the juxtaposition of the mundane and profound
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When my first child was born, there was something incongruent between the way I imagined becoming a father and the reality of it.
I don't mean that there was anything particularly strange about it. But the experience of it was filled with all kinds of weirdly mundane details. When I drove my wife to the hospital, there was traffic on the road. I had to stop at stop lights. When we got to the hospital, I dropped off my wife, then I had to go find a parking spot. During this event that was one of the biggest of my life, I still had to do the same old “moving my body from point A to point B”. There was no dramatic music or scene cuts to the eventful bits.
In the movie La La Land, there was a song and dance number for just being stuck in normal commuting traffic, and I didn’t get one when on my way to become a dad? Life’s unfair.
When we got back from the hospital, an enormous amount of our lives changed. But many things didn't. It turns out, even after your world has been completely turned upside down by one of the most momentous events a human can experience, you still have to do all the normal human stuff—go to the bathroom, eat, brush your teeth, and sleep (just kidding, as a new parent you don't sleep anymore). I would go pick up food from our favorite restaurant for lunch and the person at the counter would just give me the food and ask me to pay, as if nothing had changed.
I wanted to shout at people "Hey, our lives just profoundly changed over here, stop everything", but they just went on with their lives. It felt surreal. My life had just been turned upside down and it feels like that should have been the only thing that mattered. Yet the world kept turning.
When Our Abstractions Face Reality
I think the reason big life events have this funny disconnect is because we know, in the abstract, the significance of what is happening. We may have imagined this moment, seen dramatic depictions in movies, or know of others who have gone through the same big event. We know it will be a defining milestone in our lives. Yet when we're in the midst of it, real life comes with specifics. The particular textures that shape all of our everyday experiences are still there. This clash between the abstract image of the event and the mundane specifics makes the event feel different than we imagined it would. It feels like there should be a spotlight on you and every moment should be focused on The Big Thing.
But it isn't just big life events where we focus on the abstract image of an event. According to Construal-Level Theory, the further away an event is, the more abstractly we think about it. If we are planning to go to a concert, we will think of it in pretty abstract terms (how much we'll enjoy the music, how cool it will be to see our favorite artist live, etc.). If it's tomorrow, we'll tend to think more of the logistics—the specific plan for getting there and getting back, what we're going to do about food before or after, etc.
We do this for good reason—if an event is far away, the specifics (like how we might get there) might change, but the more abstract parts (like the band that's playing) won't.
We imagine future events as a kind of sterilized abstraction. When we imagine hiking up a mountain, we imagine it in the abstract—how great the view will be and how accomplished we'll feel. But when we do it for real, the textures of life interfere—sure, the view is nice, but also your feet hurt, your back is feeling tight, and you're thirsty. Reality interferes with the abstract essence of how you imagined the experience.
People expect events (negative and positive) to affect their mood for longer than it actually does. Imagining your favorite sports team winning or losing feels like it would linger. But when it happens, well, it happens and then you have to go to work the next day and get on with your life. In real life, there's more you need to pay attention to than the one event in your imagined reality, so the impact becomes diluted.
This tendency to construe events at a more abstract level the further away they are from us is general. It goes for all forms of psychological distance, not just events that are far away in time.
I sometimes wonder if this is why I hate cooking. When I eat food I've cooked, I can taste the specifics. I can feel the poor cutting job I did on the broccoli as a specific texture in my mouth, and the whole thing tastes too much like the individual ingredients I used instead of the abstract dish they're meant to become when combined. When someone else cooks, I can abstract all of that away and just enjoy the food as a unified dish and not notice the small specifics and imperfections.
When the Specifics Push Back
The above feels like I'm saying reality always ruins the abstract. That the specifics intrude and ruin every experience, and so no experience can ever be all that great because boring old dumb material existence wrecks it.
But I don't think that's the case. The details are what make up life and add the texture to our overly abstract imaginings. We read books instead of summaries of them because the specifics of what happens enriches and adds depth.
I have a confession to make: this is absolutely not the essay I intended to write. I was planning to write about how both Construal Level Theory and expertise involve increasing levels of abstraction, and how that comes about due to the limitations of working memory. I had bullet-points and everything!
But, as is often the case with writing, things didn't go as my abstract plan foresaw. I tried to think of a good opening to connect to Construal Level Theory, and ended up focusing on big life events. Then I realized we sometimes abstract while we're in the middle of a big event. CLT doesn't address that—but suddenly CLT was just one example of the deeper tension I was feeling between the abstract and specific. My thoughts on expertise were forgotten and suddenly I had a very different essay than the one I had outlined.
For me, writing involves taking abstract ideas I've thought through and putting them into concrete words. When I go to make this transformation, sometimes (often) the abstract connections I thought I had between ideas become hard to articulate. The words just can't quite make the connections my thoughts did during brainstorming—often because the connection itself was vague. As I'm putting down words, new connections form that weren't so clear when I was focused on the big questions. It's only by grappling with the granular pieces that certain things can be seen.
I can't hold a whole essay in my mind. The limitations of working memory mean I plan at a more abstract level, plotting out big ideas before going more granular. But life doesn't just flow downward from abstract to specific. Sometimes the specifics push back and reshape the abstract entirely.
Signposts
Parenting isn't about the big milestones. Hell, the milestones aren't about the milestones. People make such a big deal about first words or first steps that I thought these were discrete, concrete moments in time. But the reality is, for most of the parents I know, that's an abstraction. When a kid starts babbling, they only have a few different sounds they'll make. Eventually they'll start copying some sounds, being more likely to make it after you've made it (but only slightly more likely because, as you'll learn as they get a bit older, they are chaos incarnate). When my first kid was in this phase, I would try to figure out if he was using sounds to refer to something, but it's surprisingly hard. When they're only able to make 5 different sounds, and are always around mama or dada, it isn't surprising they sometimes say "mama" or "dada" around their mom or dad. Instead there was an extended period of evidence accumulation—slowly trying to infer, with each new utterance, whether my kid was, in fact, saying "mama" or "dada" more often when with mom or dad. No single moment was definitive proof of it being his first word.
But that's what it's like with a lot of big events. When we imagine (or remember) it, we focus on the significant happening, and abstract away the particulars. We compress something that happened over weeks or months to a moment we can hold in our limited memories, focusing on just a few specifics.
Big milestones are important. Abstract goals keep us striving. We talk about the big milestones because they are recognizably big events—having a child is a big deal, both emotionally and in the impact it has on one's life, for almost everyone who goes through it. These invariant aspects of life are easy to talk about and share, so they loom large, signposting a part of life we can share with others.
Life At Different Levels of Construal
When I think back on different phases of my life, I'm often proud of the big abstract shapes of what I did. As an undergraduate, I formed multiple clubs, creating communities, some of which still exist more than a decade and a half later. When I was in academia, I published a lot of papers, contributing to cognitive science. When I think back to working on any specific paper, I remember all of the little flaws and caveats in our analysis and conclusion. But zooming back out to the abstract, I can see how they add up to something, even if each individual one is imperfect.
The little moments are what make the big events unique to us and give it special meaning. They make our lives a story, not just a bullet list of events. We live at all these levels at once. We dream in abstractions, act in specifics, and later try to make sense of the result. The big milestones give us a way to tell the story—but the story is made up of the ordinary little moments we almost forget to notice.
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Just wait for the (possibility) of being a grandparent...
This was a joy to read—and not in the dopamine-fueled scroll-hit kind of way, but in the slow-burn, “make-you-sit-with-your-humanity” kind of way.
Your reflection on the surreal mundanity of major life moments popped me right in the forehead. When my first child was born, I remember being stunned by how ordinary it all felt in real time—stoplights, parking spots, receipts—and how incongruent that was with the seismic emotional shift happening inside me. There should’ve been an orchestra! A spotlight! Instead, it was stale cafeteria coffee and filling out forms in ballpoint pen. Your line about wanting to shout, “Hey, our lives just profoundly changed over here, stop everything!”—I’ve lived that moment.
And this bit about construal level theory and the tension between the abstract and the specific? Just brilliant. I’ve always felt that as we age, the illusion of time’s acceleration is partly due to how each new moment becomes a smaller percentage of our whole life—a shrinking denominator that makes the days feel faster and thinner. Add to that the reality that memory is a compression algorithm—we remember abstraction, not texture—and it’s no wonder the past feels like a highlight reel while the present feels like a mess of errands and mismatched socks.
Your description of writing—starting from abstraction, then wrestling with the specifics until the original idea either crystallizes or mutates into something better—is exactly the creative process I wrestle with daily. What you described isn’t just how I write essays; it’s how I metabolize life!
Anyway, thank you. For sharing something thoughtful, vulnerable, and resonant. It’s posts like this that make all the chaff of Substack worth wading through. Posts that remind us that meaning isn’t found in echo chambers or viral takes—but in the shared mess of being alive, thinking too hard, and trying to make sense of it all with other curious humans.
Looking forward to reading more. - Pete