The story's never over

Contains spoilers for a show that ended in 2014

1

A possibly-controversial opinion I have: I really liked the finale of How I Met Your Mother.¹

Sure, they messed some things up. Barney and Marshall’s post-ending timelines end up kind of empty and a bit depressing. And Tracy doesn’t get enough screentime. But they did something beautiful, which is to change the way you see the whole show in retrospect: It’s not a story about finding love. It’s a story about coping with grief.

And once you realize that, a lot of things suddenly make sense. Why does a show called How I Met Your Mother barely talk about its title character, and instead spend most of its time talking about the protagonist’s life before her? Because it’s not a guy excited to talk about his wife, not really. It’s a guy trying to remind himself that he could be happy before her. The series gets pretty dark and lonely in the last few seasons, which is weird if you think it’s about how he’s finally going to meet his wife and be happy, but makes sense if he’s psyching himself up to deal with his most painful memories. And there’s this scene about letting go, which is beautiful, and you suddenly realize is (from the narrator’s perspective) about letting go of something entirely different.

The finale twist is the biggest case of this, but it’s not the only one. The show’s weirdly good at showing things that get read differently in retrospect². Ted’s relationship with Stella in the fourth season seems like it failed when she ran off with her ex out of nowhere, but when you look back at it after you realize how much of it was him trying to convince himself a relationship could work with her because she was nice and smart and pretty and liked him, even though it was never going to.

Because there’s another point to the whole thing: Narrator Ted talks about his life as a story with a point, with destiny and true love and a conclusion. But the actual show shows that it never is. When something happens (Ted gets into a new relationship, Marshall making his peace with getting a job at a bank instead of being an environmental lawyer, Barney finally getting into a serious relationship, Marshall leaving his job at the bank to go be an environmental lawyer…) It feels like the conclusion to a story. But life doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t reach a big dramatic conclusion and ends with living happily ever after. It doesn’t even have a destiny. It’s just things that happen, and we all try to make the best we can of them, and sometimes we even mange to make things a bit better. And sometimes we try and fail. And for all of narrator Ted’s big talk about destiny, his life goes like that too. He got married, then after a decade or so his wife died, and he was back to trying to make the best of things. It happens.

2

When I was five or six years old, I realized something: Life is about waiting. That’s all there is to it, really. You’re waiting to go home at the end of the school day, then waiting for your favourite TV show to come on, then waiting for the cool fight scene, then waiting for the ending song to be over so you can go have lunch. And there’s never any real moment of satisfaction, you just keep waiting for the next thing.

This depressed me whenever I thought of it for many years. It reminded me that no matter how excited I was about something, at the end of the day it was all just about waiting for it, then I’d just be waiting for the next thing. And life, was, in the end, empty.

Many years later, when I started thinking about things in terms of integrals and probability distributions, I found a way to make my peace with it: In an integral, no single point has nonzero mass, but if you integrate along a line you’ll find you got a sum of real meaning in the end. Why couldn’t meaning in life be like that? And even if each specific moment was predictable from the previous one to the point of being empty and boring, in the grand scale life contained a lot of genuine uncertainties you have to figure out over time. Turning the uncertain future into a certain past is a real meaning, one way or another. You just have to figure out how to make it a good one.

There was another thing I learned about myself, a few years later: I don’t like actually doing things for themselves.

For example, I like dance classes a lot more than I like just going out to dance. I like reading about new math theories, but I don’t really like just doing the same kinds of math I’ve done a thousand times before (which probably made me a worse researcher). I like learning new things, because what I really want is to maximize my ability to deal with new types of things in the long range. Life, I figured, is like a game of civilizations, when you’re playing for the first time and don’t actually know how to win: You only see a few steps ahead at a time, but you’re trying to make your civilization strong and resilient and advanced and figure that if you succeed enough at that, eventually you’ll hit the end of the tech tree and win or something. If you have a good enough civilization, if you yourself are strong enough, it doesn’t really matter what the exact victory conditions are; you’ll figure out a way to win. And growing stronger is kind fun³.

3

There’s a shared point here, which is this: Life doesn’t get to a goal and then stop. You can never be satisfied. There’s no specific point, no one achievement, that you reach and suddenly feel contented. Like Ted, I’ve wanted for years to be able to meet someone I could marry and have kids with, and like Ted it feels pretty unreachable sometimes⁴. But if I did - well, I think it would be good and make my life noticeably better. But I don’t think I’d wake up one morning and go “well now my life is complete”. Life just keeps going on.

I’ve been pretty depressed for the last year or so. Before that, there’ve been times when I was happy. There’ve been times when I thought getting the perfect new job, or the perfect new relationship, or the perfect apartment, was all I needed to feel complete and settle down.

But I’ve found out it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you find a great new job and it helps you feel better about life. Sometimes you get your heart broken and feel pretty bad for a while. I’ve gotten a bit better at making friends and finding places I belong, so my life really is better now. But it’s not over yet.

I’ll probably get over my current dark place, one way or another, in a year or two. Maybe it’ll happen because things get better. Maybe things will get worse in some way I don’t expect, and I’ll have a whole new set of problems to worry about. I don’t know. But the point is that my dark place is where I am now, but it’s not where I’ll be forever. So it’s okay to be here in it, for a little while.

I think I’d like to live forever, or at least for a few thousand years. I don’t know if medical technology will advance that far in my lifetime, or even if it’s theoretically possible. But if it did, I’d like to try. The concept used to either bother or excite me, because I thought I’d reach the conclusionary settle down point in my life and then stop, and then the majority of my lifespan would just be me in the same position, either really happy or really bored with it. But now I just think thigns would keep changing, even if I lived ten thousand years. And I’d like to have enough time to see what it would be like, if I could.

1. For people who haven’t watched the show and don’t mind spoilers because come on, at this point it’s been a decade and you’re not gonna suddenly watch it now: The finale twist is that the Mother died six years ago and the narrator’s telling the kids the story as a way to cope with it and get their approval to try dating his ex Robin.
There’s a possible interpretation of the show that actually he loved Robin all along and Tracy (the mother) was just another placeholder that wouldn’t have worked out if she’d lived. I’ve never liked that one (I don’t know whether the writers meant it; I suspect at least some of them were divided on it). But it makes sense from the narrator’s perspective to be trying to remember her that way on purpose, if what he’s really trying to do is move on.

2. Am I reading too much into inconsistent sitcom writing? Maybe a bit, but a lot of it is done well enough that I’m pretty sure it was preplanned.

3. Less helpfully, this is probably what makes Number Go Up games addictive. I’d like to be able to get over that lure someday.

4. I feel this scene pretty hard.