Forward thinking, backwards planning. One of those idioms whose origin is mysterious, its forms many, and its influence difficult to quantify due to its extensive reach. Whether it’s a five-year plan, a weekly schedule, or a slew of iPhone reminders, there’s this basic anxiety to solve, to optimize. To organize our time into discrete portions of activity or interaction, to package our goals into step-by-steps, to look for specific outcomes and select appropriate means. If you control the variables, presumably you control the result. And if you decide the variables from the intended result, the result is all but guaranteed.
There’s a level of honest pragmatism to this that I’m not interested in contesting. Lives are complicated. Everyone is doing multiple things all the time, and most of those things are worthy of intention and forethought. Trying to find practical ways of reaching for those things, then, is not an unreasonable reaction.
But I have found in my own life—especially in the last year, living by myself in a new city for the first time—that these tendencies towards execution in efficient and effective ways tend to play out poorly when applied to the realm of identity, and especially a search for belonging or a sense of self. These attitudes of organization and optimization might work for a busy schedule, might be foundational to meeting your responsibilities, or in some cases do mean we are more free to enjoy the things we are currently doing. Yet, I’ve noticed a kind of dark side to it when the same logic is applied to my understanding of myself. That dark side is quite simple: everything has to make sense.
There has to be a kind of thematic unity between my various loves or hobbies or pursuits. There has to be a certain candor to me in all my activities, a tonal unity to my life. For lack of a better word, my “brand” has to make sense—and not just to me. In fact, mostly to other people. In Guillermo Del Toro’s 2021 remake of Nightmare Alley, charlatan Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) is asked to explain his almost miraculous psychic act, whereby he is able to predict the actions, motives, and inventory of anyone he meets. His reply to the query? “Everyone is dying to tell you who they are.” It’s a phenomenal moment in a largely unremarkable movie, mostly because I cannot shake the fact that it seems true. We are all often trying to communicate a certain vision of ourselves to other people, or to adopt a vision of ourselves we think is appealing to others. And for that vision to be compelling, it has to make sense.
Like I said, I have fallen prey to this. I’ve tried to figure out exactly where I fit, what socially understood brand makes the most sense for me as I deal with the time-honored questions of early adulthood. I like hiking, earthy tones and station wagons—should I go full granola? On occasion, I find some heavy metal that I quite enjoy—is it time for my goth phase? I’m in a Masters degree program for film and media studies—so do I break out the tweed jacket and leather messenger bag, or go find a Pulp Fiction poster for my bedroom?
Truth is, on my desk right now is a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories just inches away from my LEGO Batmobile. In the other room, I have a shelf full of poetry next to two shelves of comic books and Dungeons & Dragons manuals. Today I went for a hike in a nearby state park, and when I got back I listened to a podcast from a YouTube weightlifter and an exercise scientist discussing research on caffeine. Then I spent most of my morning reading Hellboy: The Wild Hunt. Just before writing this, I looked up competitive bodybuilding updates. There’s nothing about that collection of things that makes a lot of sense to me—other than that I did them all, and I enjoyed them all.
I spent the opening of this piece criticizing our tendency to find an ideal to plan backwards from. What I find most troubling about that is often our ideals for ourselves, our identities, aren’t able to include all the things we actually are and enjoy. This need to make sense of something, to qualify it and begin weeding out what is or is not necessary for the development of it (we all know what SMART goals are) has a place, but I don’t think that place is anywhere near the pursuit of hobbies or relationships or general self-ing. You love what you love. Go do that, and don’t think at all about if that places you in an identity that makes sense, one that is compelling to other people or that you can make “optimal” decisions towards. You are the thing that makes sense of it, and the way you do what you love is more than optimal enough, so long as you enjoy it.
Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.
