Brain Food #782: The trouble with recipes
"The prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable"
Thoughts of the day
On Monday, I wrote about asking oneself whether our wants are actually our own. It is tempting to follow recipes in a life where happiness, success, or anything else that is to be ‘achieved’ is the end goal. If someone else followed the same set of instructions and reached a certain form of nirvana, then why not us?
Yet, how many times have you tried a recipe you found online, and followed it faithfully, only to end up disappointed with a bland dish? The trouble with recipes is that they are both personal and subjective.
In a piece for Harper’s Bazaar, Rebecca Solnit, triggered by a question on whether Virginia Woolf should have had children, goes on to explore how we are all mistakenly seeking happiness through ‘one-size-fits-all recipes’:
“Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.
We are constantly given one-size-fits-all recipes, but those recipes fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.
The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower — and wither — all around us.”
Unless determinism is true, our stories are the ones we keep writing every day. Good ingredients can make multiple recipes.
A spread from Salvador Dali’s surrealist cookbook, Les Diners de Gala, which almost acknowledges the randomness of cooking, and of life: “The duration of cooking can be different according to tastes.”
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