Playing in the Ruins

Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter always makes me think, and a recent issue contained this phrase: Playing in the ruins.

The idea is that you go into a stage of life with a mental image of the ideal outcome, and you rarely achieve the perfection of that mental image. What happens next is a release from that concept of perfection and the chance to play in the ruins of that ideal.

That sounds much better and full of possibility vs. saying, “I tried to build my family and ended up having the whole thing go tits up, and this is how it happened instead.”

He writes:

You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?

Because those ruins are constructed out of the ideal building blocks. All of the same impulses are still there, and you now get to go metaphorically pick them up and see what you can do with that creativity or love or whatever building blocks are left over after the ideal is destroyed.

I think it is hard to enjoy the ruins at first. Ruins don’t look like Instagram-worthy spaces. But making a life for yourself in the ruins and playing there means that you are still surrounded by all of the impulses that drove you in the first place vs. losing all those impulses altogether.

I like the idea of giving up the perfect dream and making yourself happy with what comes next.