We have made consistency a virtue. We reward it in others, demand it of ourselves, and grow suspicious when human beings refuse to remain who we expect them to be.
We want our feelings to agree with one another, our desires to align with our commitments, and our choices to confirm the stories we tell about ourselves. When they don't, we assume something is wrong.
We want to know who we are. More than that, we want to remain who we believe ourselves to be.
A coherent life is easy to explain. Its choices follow an intelligible pattern. Its emotions seem appropriate to its circumstances. Its contradictions have been resolved, preferably into lessons that demonstrate growth.
But who decided that coherence was evidence of a life well lived?
We can love someone deeply and feel anger toward them. We can be satisfied with our lives and still long for something we do not have. We can make a choice willingly, knowing its consequences, and continue to feel the pain of what we relinquished.
We treat these experiences as competing truths, as though one must invalidate the other.
I wonder how much of our insistence on coherence has to do with understanding human nature, and how much has to do with making human beings easier to understand, predict, and control.
The Lives We Construct
We are remarkably skilled at turning our lives into narratives.
We give our experiences beginnings, turning points, and conclusions. We assign meaning to suffering. We interpret decisions as evidence of character. Looking backward, we construct a story in which the person we have become appears to be the inevitable result of everything that came before.
There is comfort in this. A coherent narrative gives us a sense of identity and control. It also makes us easier to explain.
We describe ourselves through our professions, relationships, convictions, accomplishments, and carefully cultivated personalities. We become recognizable characters, both to ourselves and to the people around us.
But life is not a novel, and we are not characters written to serve a single plot.
We are biological beings, shaped by our environments and continually adapting to them. Our circumstances, bodies, desires, and capacities change. What once mattered enormously may become irrelevant. Something we never imagined wanting may become central to our lives.
Courage doesn't make us immune to fear, and generosity doesn't eliminate selfishness. We may be entirely certain of a decision and still feel saddened by its consequences. None of this necessarily makes us dishonest or confused. It is simply part of being human.
Yet we continue trying to reduce ourselves to something more consistent.
We want happiness without sadness and gratitude without dissatisfaction. We expect confidence to displace fear, as though one feeling should cancel out another.
When it doesn't, we search for an explanation.
Perhaps we haven't healed. Perhaps we haven't found our purpose. Perhaps we are with the wrong person, living the wrong life, or failing to become the person we were meant to be.
We are so accustomed to interpreting discomfort as evidence of a problem that we struggle to imagine it might simply be part of being alive.
The Demand to Be One Thing
Our intolerance for contradiction extends beyond our relationship with ourselves.
We want other people to be understandable. Predictable. Consistent with the roles we've assigned them.
We want someone to be only one thing. We want them to remain inside the boundaries within which we feel safe.
We admire independence until it introduces uncertainty. We admire honesty until someone tells us something we'd rather not know. And we admire complexity until that complexity complicates our own lives.
We want to love another person in their fullness, but often struggle with the parts of them we cannot understand, approve of, or control.
Sometimes people genuinely need to change. Love does not require us to excuse cruelty, dishonesty, or destructive behavior. Challenging another person's harmful habits can be an expression of care.
But there is a difference between asking someone to change because their behavior causes harm and demanding that they change because their individuality makes us uncomfortable.
We do not always distinguish between the two.
The same impulse operates on a much larger scale.
Society assigns roles and rewards those who perform them convincingly. We are expected to behave in recognizable ways, pursue approved ambitions, express acceptable desires, and remain intelligible to the people around us.
We celebrate individuality most enthusiastically when it has already been rewarded.
Success can turn eccentricity into genius, defiance into leadership, and behavior once considered unacceptable into evidence of originality. The same behavior, without the protection of status or achievement, may be treated very differently.
Wealth, race, gender, and social position influence who can defy convention and survive the consequences. The freedom to disregard expectations is often greatest among those who possess the resources and power to withstand disapproval.
For everyone else, belonging can become conditional.
Conformity is not always cowardice. Sometimes people understand perfectly well what they are surrendering, but the price of refusing is simply too high.
That fear is useful to those who hold power.
Control does not always require explicit prohibition. Sometimes it is enough to establish the conditions under which someone will be accepted.
Eventually, people begin enforcing those conditions upon themselves.
They conceal their desires, moderate their ambitions, soften their opinions, and edit their personalities until they become recognizable within the roles available to them.
We become manageable.
And because conformity is often rewarded, we may mistake that manageability for maturity, goodness, or a coherent identity.
One of the things I love about New York is its capacity to accommodate contradiction.
It is a city of extraordinary ambition and profound loneliness, staggering wealth and visible deprivation, fierce individuality and relentless social competition. People arrive from everywhere, carrying histories, beliefs, desires, and identities that might have made them outsiders elsewhere.
New York belongs to everyone and no one.
There is a peculiar freedom in its anonymity. You can be surrounded by millions of people who have no particular interest in who you are supposed to be. Yet the same city that offers that freedom imposes its own demands for status, achievement, wealth, and belonging.
New York does not escape the contradictions of human society. It makes them impossible to ignore.
Of course, societies need rules. Shared obligations and ethical boundaries make collective life possible. Not every expectation is an instrument of oppression.
But there is an enormous difference between a standard that protects people from harm and one that merely protects others from discomfort.
The distinction is not always convenient for those who benefit from the existing order.
The Experience of Being Alive
We have become remarkably uncomfortable with uncomfortable feelings.
Sadness is something to overcome. Anger must be managed. Anxiety must be regulated. Grief must be processed. Even happiness becomes a project, something to cultivate, measure, and sustain.
There is value in understanding our emotions and seeking help when suffering becomes overwhelming. But the language of emotional improvement can carry an assumption we rarely question: that difficult feelings are problems awaiting solutions.
I think a life in which we feel is a satisfying life.
Not necessarily one filled with extraordinary experiences, constant pleasure, adventure, or intensity.
A life in which we experience what is actually happening.
Where there is joy, there is joy. Where there is anger, there is anger. There are moments of grief, tenderness, boredom, desire, comfort, uncertainty, and neutrality.
The neutral moments matter too.
I remember riding through Manhattan with my husband one evening after dinner. Traffic was terrible. Miley Cyrus, Adele, and Lana Del Rey were playing in the car, and a light drizzle had begun. The city lights surrounded us, stretching above the car through the moonroof. I slipped off my shoes, and my husband held my feet in his hands, gently rubbing them as we sat in traffic.
It felt like a scene from a movie. Romantic, a little indulgent, and unmistakably New York. There was the pleasure of the music, the beauty of the city at night, and the quiet intimacy of being with someone I love. I was in no hurry for the traffic to clear.
We have become so accustomed to measuring life by its exceptional experiences that we sometimes overlook the pleasure of simply inhabiting it.
But being alive does not require every moment to justify itself.
Nor does every painful experience indicate that something has gone wrong.
Consider someone whose partner has died.
Years later, they may have built a beautiful life. They have accepted that their partner is gone, formed new relationships, and found happiness in circumstances they once couldn't imagine.
Yet an ordinary moment—a familiar song, a particular smell, an empty chair—can bring the grief back with astonishing force.
Does that mean they haven't accepted the loss?
Or is grief sometimes simply what remains of love?
We are quick to interpret persistent emotional pain as evidence of resistance, unresolved trauma, or unfinished psychological work.
Sometimes it is. There are experiences that benefit from examination, treatment, or change.
But not every sorrow conceals a problem waiting to be solved.
The persistence of pain may tell us something about the significance of what we've lost, rather than our inability to accept its absence.
The Lives We Do Not Live
Our awareness of mortality may intensify this compulsion to make life add up.
We know our time is limited. Every decision excludes other possibilities, and eventually those possibilities will disappear.
We want to have everything while we can.
We pursue experiences, achievements, relationships, and identities as though enough accumulation might protect us from the knowledge that life will end.
Even the pursuit of an extraordinary life can become another demand for performance. We must travel enough, love enough, accomplish enough, discover enough, and become enough before our time expires.
But no life can contain every possibility.
We can choose one path and still wonder about another. We can love the life we have without believing it is the only life we could have loved.
Longing does not necessarily indicate dissatisfaction.
Desire is unpredictable. What we cannot have may become an obsession, while something we've wanted for years can lose its fascination almost immediately upon attainment. And satisfaction doesn't always quiet desire; occasionally, it makes us want more.
Nor does every desire require action.
We make choices, establish commitments, and accept responsibilities. Sometimes we relinquish possibilities that remain meaningful to us.
I find it strange that we can make a decision freely, with full awareness of what it will cost us, and still question its validity simply because the sacrifice continues to hurt.
A meaningful decision can have painful consequences even when we would make the same decision again.
Yet we are tempted to interpret the continued existence of longing as evidence that something remains unresolved.
Perhaps we chose incorrectly. Perhaps we have not fully accepted our circumstances. Perhaps a different life would finally eliminate the contradiction.
But the possibility of another life does not invalidate the one we are living.
We are not guaranteed a life in which all our desires can coexist peacefully.
And perhaps we do not need one.
The Completeness of Existence
Much of contemporary culture treats the human being as a project awaiting completion.
We are encouraged to become better versions of ourselves. To heal, optimize, evolve, achieve, transcend, and discover our highest potential.
There is always another level of development, another deficiency to correct, another version of ourselves waiting somewhere beyond the present.
Improvement has become more than an aspiration. It has become a condition of our relationship with ourselves.
We live as though the person we are today is merely a preliminary draft.
I have never been entirely convinced by the premise that human beings are unfinished projects. It assumes that existence begins in a state of deficiency, and that enough personal development might eventually correct it.
Kashmir Shaivism offers a philosophical challenge to the idea that reality must progress toward completeness.
In this nondual tradition, Śiva represents consciousness, and Śakti its inseparable creative power. Manifestation is not something fundamentally separate from consciousness, nor is the diversity of existence evidence of an original deficiency.
The concept of spanda describes the intrinsic dynamism of consciousness, the living vibrancy through which reality manifests.
And pratyabhijñā, recognition, concerns the recognition of one's deepest identity with that consciousness.
These are metaphysical claims, not simply techniques for emotional acceptance. They do not imply that individual human beings possess unlimited freedom or that suffering is unreal.
What interests me about this philosophy is not the promise of transcendence. It is the possibility that there was never anything fundamentally missing in the first place.
Our lives are conditioned by biology, environment, history, and material circumstances. Our possibilities are not infinite. We experience genuine limitations, inequalities, and loss.
But there is a distinction between the completeness of existence and the conditions through which existence is expressed.
The act of existing does not require an achievement to become complete.
Love, achievement, and personal growth can enrich our lives, change us profoundly, and improve our circumstances and relationships. But they do not transform an inherently deficient existence into a complete one.
Existence is already complete. Its expression is continually changing.
That does not mean human beings are perfect.
We have limitations, harmful habits, and capacities that can be developed. We can learn, change, repair damage, and become more responsible for our behavior.
Growth is part of living. But growth need not be understood as the correction of some fundamental inadequacy.
The Problem with Purity
There is an obvious objection to all of this.
If we accept our contradictions, what prevents us from using them to justify our behavior?
The answer is ethics.
Acknowledging anger does not justify cruelty. Experiencing desire does not entitle us to act upon it. Recognizing the contradictions within ourselves does not excuse dishonesty or harm.
Ethics matters precisely because our impulses do not always align with our commitments.
But even ethical living is not free from contradiction.
It is impossible to participate in the world without affecting other living beings.
What we eat, purchase, consume, produce, and discard carries consequences. Ordinary existence involves compromises that cannot always be eliminated.
We can reduce unnecessary harm, consider the consequences of our choices, take responsibility for our actions, and change our behavior when we recognize that it causes suffering.
But the complete absence of harm is not a realistic condition of human life. And the inevitability of some harm does not make all harm equivalent.
Intentions matter. Circumstances matter. Necessity and available alternatives matter. The degree of suffering we cause matters.
Ethical responsibility requires judgment, not an impossible claim to innocence.
Yet we remain drawn to the reassuring simplicity of moral categories.
Good people and bad people. Right choices and wrong choices. Acceptable desires and unacceptable ones.
We want to believe that ethical living will produce a coherent moral identity, one in which our values, actions, and consequences align neatly.
But moral life is rarely that accommodating.
We participate in systems we criticize. We make choices that benefit some people while disadvantaging others. We hold convictions that circumstances sometimes force us to reconsider.
Some contradictions reveal hypocrisy and demand accountability. Others arise because living ethically involves competing responsibilities and imperfect alternatives.
We should not confuse social acceptability with ethical conduct, nor should we mistake defiance for virtue.
A person can be entirely consistent in their cruelty. And a person can be ethically serious while living with unresolved conflicts.
I am less interested in whether someone's beliefs and impulses align perfectly than in what they do when those things come into conflict. That seems a more meaningful measure of integrity.
A Life Without Resolution
We spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to make our lives add up.
We search for explanations that will reconcile our feelings, look for lessons in suffering, and expect emotional pain to diminish once we have understood it sufficiently.
We want to arrive at a place where everything makes sense.
And we expect other people to do the same.
We want them to become consistent with the roles we've assigned them, to resolve the qualities that unsettle us, to become easier to understand and less difficult to love.
We call this growth, maturity, healing, or self-awareness.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it is simply conformity dressed in more flattering language.
Some experiences will never fit comfortably into a single story.
Desires may remain unfulfilled. Losses may continue to hurt. Decisions may carry both gratitude and regret. Relationships may contain love alongside feelings we would rather not acknowledge.
There may be nothing to resolve.
This does not mean we should remain passive in the face of suffering or injustice. Some circumstances demand action, some patterns need to change, and some conflicts require decisions.
But there is a difference between responding to what genuinely needs our attention and treating every uncomfortable experience as evidence of a deficient life.
We do not need to make grief disappear to have known love, eliminate longing to appreciate what we possess, or become emotionally consistent to live with integrity.
Nor must every painful experience become a lesson.
I wonder how much of our pursuit of coherence comes from a genuine desire to understand ourselves, and how much comes from the fear of being unacceptable.
And how often do we demand coherence from others simply because their complexity inconveniences us?
Yet human life continues to resist the categories we impose upon it.
Regret may accompany a decision we would make again. Anger may survive alongside love. And accepting what has happened does not guarantee that it will stop hurting.
The demand for coherence does not make us more human. It merely narrows the range of humanity we are willing to acknowledge.
Perhaps that is what deserves our scrutiny—not the contradictions we experience, but our insistence that they should not exist.
