Want to Learn How to Live? Read Biographies
After trudging through a biography, some dense and upwards of 1,000 pages, you learn a lot about its protagonist. But this person isn’t a fictional character who lived through make believe situations. (Though fiction is important and many authors are capable of getting to the bottom of the human experience in their fiction writing.)
In a biography you’re able to see how a character develops over a lifespan. If the author is especially keen with description, the character will be described in such a way that that their flaws and highest marks are revealed.
In our day-to-day lives it’s difficult to see the compound interest of our decisions. How do the small things we do add up over time? Are we putting our eggs in the right baskets? Are the things we’re doing what we should be doing with our time?
Biographies allow you to see how a person’s decisions panned out. You get to see how long bouts of events are summarized. I’ve written before that it’s dangerous to think of our lives as grand narratives — it can cloud our judgement, force us to believe in an importance we don’t have, or make objective events appear to have a greater cause— but stories are how humans make sense of the world. A situation that we’re living through right now could feel like the most taxing and draining of all life circumstances, but if a biographer were writing about our lives after their culmination, how would the writer describe what’s taking place? Would he summarize this long and dire circumstance into one sentence? It’s possible that he would. And this act of summarization is a reminder to us that whatever we’re facing will quickly pass and be but a blip of our lives. That applies to both the good and the bad.
We learn how characters interacted with other people in the real world. We see which decisions didn’t work and where there should have been more foresight. We get a firsthand look into the lives of people we admire, and we can apply the lessons we learn to our own lives.
If we’re reading a biography of a character long gone, we’re also reminded of the triviality of life. Even a once magnificent character, a sage or president or visionary, is reduced to words on a page. The larger than life hero becomes nothing more than a book capable of being destroyed. Ink on a page. It isn’t obvious that the story of their life will stand the test of history, no matter how fresh their story appears now. Even if the story does survive, will it be but a sentence in another book?
The likelihood that the biographical book itself survives is proverbially zero — no matter how great the character was. If the odds are stacked against the main character to survive, what about the rest of the cast? What about the passerby's in the character’s life who are nothing more than unmentioned audience members in the text? These unmentioned people have no chance of being remembered.
In our own lives, social media gives us instant and constant opportunities to connect to the world and let it know what we think. Those with followings likely feel even more important and as though their thoughts should be shared. And of course, here I am doing the same.
But what’s important is that while we use social and the internet to engage, share, work and connect, we also remember that whether or not we are the lead role or the side character of a much larger hypothetical biography, we too will be forgotten. We should engage with the world accordingly. Devote our time to serious effort, but never think ourselves too important.
