![]() We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain-hypothetical, paradoxical. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes. ![]() Miller quotes Clifford Geertz, who, in “ The Interpretation of Cultures,” wrote that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.” We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices because society constrains us because events force our hand most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. Miller’s book is, among other things, a compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been. Still, phrased the right way, the thought has an insistent, uncanny magnetism. “The thought that I might have become someone else is so bland that dwelling on it sometimes seems fatuous,” the literary scholar Andrew H. Miller writes, in “ On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives” (Harvard). I’m me, not him-whoever he might have turned out to be. We got married, I became a journalist, and we had a son. We started dating, then went to graduate school in English together. A few days before graduation, when I went to pay my tuition bill, a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation, then got off at her floor on my ride down, she stepped on for a second time, and our conversation continued. We closed our business and moved out of the office. But, as the dot-com bubble burst, our client’s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn’t want what we’d made. I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech. I liked this entrepreneurial existence-its ambition, its scrappy, near-future velocity. Often, I slept on the office futon, waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock, where a homeless man lived with his cart. After my client work was done, I’d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops. Unlike other kids, who were what-socializing?-I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. Newly confident, we hired our friends, and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “business dinner” at Nobu. We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo, which we built. We were terrified that we’d taken on work we couldn’t handle but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative. ![]() ![]() It was a huge project, entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity. A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers: Slack, avant la lettre. In 1999-our sophomore year-we hit it big. ![]() I lived large, spending the money I made on tuition, food, and a stereo. We made Web sites and software for an early dating service, an insurance-claims-processing firm, and an online store where customers could “bargain” with a cartoon avatar for overstock goods. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. ![]()
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