In Composing a Life, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argued that we often shoehorn our lives into neat, linear stories of decision and then commitment: I decided to become a doctor and pursued my dream. She argues that many lives are not like that. They are nonlinear. They have breaks, discontinuities, and false starts. Young people, she wrote, need to hear that the first job they take at twenty-two is not necessarily going to lead in a linear way to what they are going to be doing at forty. I’m always intrigued by people who see their lives as a surfing story: I caught a
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