“How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life.”
Thus begins a gimmicky yet revealing speech Ryan Bingham has delivered countless times, standing in front of countless middle-aged Americans waiting to be inspired by his startling life philosophy. In case you don’t recognize his name, Ryan Bingham doesn’t actually exist—he’s the protagonist, played by a gracefully aging George Clooney, of “Up in the Air,” one of those other movies that came out this holiday break (no, really, “Avatar” wasn’t the only one).
Continuing with his speech, Bingham instructs listeners to fill their backpacks with the people in their lives: siblings, parents, significant others—the list continues. Then, in a move that we saw coming all along, he asks us to feel how heavily our backpacks lie on our shoulders. He insists that our relationships—“[a]ll those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises”—weigh us down, make us move slower, live slower. Some beings, he admits, “are meant to carry each other, to live symbiotically over a lifetime.” Some are meant for this, like swans, like star-crossed lovers.
Then he delivers his punch line: “We are not swans. We are sharks.”
Bingham is a consistent man. He lives his life in accordance with the advice he gives others, delights in a sharkish career flying around and professionally firing the employees of various corporations. He travels light, avoids obligation.
I don’t want to spoil the movie, but suffice it to say that if Bingham’s shark lifestyle were to proceed swimmingly without conflict, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. On the other hand, his mindset is one that has become increasingly pervasive in our modern/contemporary/“Bowling Alone” society.
He’s not the sole champion of independence either—Bingham’s message is distinctly Nietzschean, distinctly Randian. After all, Ayn Rand’s morality of selfishness was the focus of a house course I took last semester. She’s a woman to whom the “objective” truth necessitated a rejection of altruism, who once said that civilization was “the process of setting man free from men.” To Rand, the greatest threat to a human being was an infringement upon his freedom.
Few would go as far as buy Randian (and now Binghamian?) thought completely. We all aww at cheesy Hallmark cards, profess to love our siblings, collect friends on social networking sites. No one would call himself a shark, per se.
But a commitment to independence is a thread that runs through contemporary culture, the outcome of a societal education that has taught us the importance of individual rights and self-autonomy. Our responsibility to each other as family members, as friends and as fellow human beings oftentimes rubs our belief in our existences as self-governing beings the wrong way.
We’ve all fallen victim to Ryan Bingham’s train of thought, especially when we’re feeling invincible: the people in our lives temporarily seem like hassles—or, to adopt the metaphor, excess baggage. I’ve complained about my stifling mother, friends who step on my toes with their expectations, commitments I’d rather not have made. If we could be our own masters, indebted to no one, we think we’d be happy. No more messes, no more fights, no more compromises.
But it’s a fallacy to mistake these transient irritations for a viable life philosophy. The symbiotic, mutualistic relationships Bingham pooh-poohs during his speech are essential precisely because they’re mutual, reciprocal alliances—because we exist in sinusoidal fashion, and no one can stay invincible forever.
At some point or another, we will all need someone to carry us. Even though our weight will be a burden on the shoulders of those around us, we trust and hope that their compassion will overrule this momentary inconvenience. In “Up in the Air,” when an acquaintance tells Bingham that he’s just “a parenthesis” in her life, he can only blame his own philosophy of independence.
Likewise, some may say that Ayn Rand weakened in her later years: she fell in love—not the kind of self-glorifying love that she once espoused in “Atlas Shrugged,” but the kind that breaks hearts, ruins lives, incapacitates its victims. When her lover left her for another woman, she was devastated. Was it an artistic flourish when she eventually died of heart failure?
Rand teaches us a lesson worth remembering. If she wasn’t able to maintain her stubborn misanthropy, we can’t either. In a sense, we are all star-crossed lovers, swans in need of companionship. Human connections don’t constitute the nuisances weighing us down—life itself is capricious and inconvenient. We all need more than fair-weather friends with whom to ride out the storm.
Forget this, and we may end up like Rand, trapped in the stingy seclusion of our selfish philosophy, a mere parenthesis in the lives of those around us.
Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Tuesday.
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