Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. He spent years riding a motorbike, drinks copious amounts of beer, and enters the water, whenever possible, with the belliest of flops. He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.

There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—and then he sends his readers off with a rousing dose of carpe diem. “Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

High self-esteem, they say, can make you freakishly peaceful (or “exceptionally nonaggressive,” as they put it), because you’re so comfortable with yourself that criticism does not threaten your self-worth. They believe it’s the very small subset of people with easily threatened high self-esteem that are the dangerous ones.

This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority.

When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don’t have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block. This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see. There is no ladder.

Scientists have discovered, it’s true, that employing positive illusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside of the tunnel vision of your goals.