TAL

Today’s highlight was a long walk during which I listened to a This American Life podcast. I have long wanted to master the art of listening to podcasts on my phone. I wouldn’t say I have mastered it. I have an app on the phone where I can look up podcasts. But I don’t know how to manage the gazillions of podcasts on offer. How do I keep track of what I’ve heard and what I haven’t heard within the TAL archive? And all the other channels, or whatever they're called?
Anyway, the story I heard was of a Bosnian muslim who emigrated to the US during the war. He put down to luck everything that happened to him in Bosnia, Croatia, and the US, including having a temporary teacher help him escape from a failing public school in Atlanta to a private school where he thrived. Her help was based on an essay he plagiarised--so his luck was based on a lie. TAL hired a detective to find the teacher. She remembered everything differently. The high school wasn’t that bad. She didn’t remember the plagiarised essay. She helped him because he was brilliant and kind.

The gist of the story was that we all have a story that we tell about our lives. Rather than being factual, the story reflects something about us--in his case, his belief that he is incredibly lucky and he is indebted to other people. The narrator, the author Michael Lewis, asks why a scientist, of all people, would cling to his story, despite evidence that it isn’t true. Lewis concludes that the scientist is an unusually happy human being. When you insist you are lucky and indebted to other people, you are prepared to see life as a happy accident. That’s different from thinking you deserved everything you’ve achieved because you worked hard for it--"just like every miserable bond trader at Goldman Sachs or every other asshole who walked the earth,” Lewis said.

The Bosnian scientist’s wife chimes in. She says his happiness is down to how he filters the world around him, the way he decides not just what to think about but how to think about it. He gets news, and decides how to feel about it. A practiced decision.

Lewis advises us to be careful of how we tell our stories, or at least be conscious of how we talk about our lives. Because once you’ve built that highway, it’s very hard to move it.
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