The Art of the Unlived Life

The human psyche is a fragile thing, isn’t it? On our best days—when dopamine and serotonin flow just right—we wish ourselves a longer, fuller life: one filled with laughter, love, and a kind of imagined immortality. But on darker days, thoughts rot quietly in the mind—imagining tumors growing within our bodies, or anticipating wars on horizons we can’t quite see—as we remember our mortality, and how utterly small our existence is against the vast, indifferent backdrop of the universe. 

Existential dread is inescapable. Whether you’re a driven woman chasing a bright career in your thirties, or a young father swept up in dreams for his child’s future, the awareness always lingers: that we will end, and that the roads we didn’t choose might have led us elsewhere—perhaps somewhere brighter, or perhaps a bleak future filled with shame and regret. 

Now, imagine yourself an aging man: isolated, exhausted, working a menial job, tethered to routine. If the world stopped noticing you, would you notice too? When the unlived life begins to speak louder than the one you're living—how do you survive that realization? We might begin to imagine a life truly lived: of a certain someone beside us—who loved us for who we are; or simply an opportunity for a passionate life—taking on a harmless hobby, or professing your interest in a lovely young man from a long time ago. But most of us opt for a safer route, don’t we? A boring job, an agreeable spouse, or living in our parents’ house for the rest of our lives. 

In Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), we are asked to imagine ourselves as this aging man. He is Jake, an old school janitor with a withering bodyand a withering life—writhing through his day cleaning a massive school, enduring silent mockery from those around him. In between these mundane rituals, he escapes into fantasy: imagining a life truly lived. A young girlfriend he never had. A visit home to parents he never really left. Winning a Nobel Prize. Receiving admiration from people who’ve never met him. 

In true Kaufman fashion, we are slowly drawn into the janitor’s delusion, until it is our turn to project ourselves onto him. As the song from Synecdoche, NewYork says: “I’m singing this song, but it’s about you. Whoever is listening—it’s always about you.” Regardless of your gender, your age, or how much money is in your bank account, this film is about all of us. It is a cinematic reimagining of our mortality—of missed chances, unlived versions of ourselves, and options we will never reclaim. 

Jake the janitor’s story is the purgatory of Camus’ Sisyphus. We hear the echoes of alife that might have been: Jake the artist. Jake the quantum physicist. Jake the gerontology student. Jake the poet. And yet, he is a janitor. These unlived paths embody the absurd: the confrontation between the human longing for clarity, meaning, and permanence, and the silence of an indifferent universe. Jake’s hunger for meaningis met with a life of obligation, compromise, and quiet failure. When the world fails togive us meaning, but we continue to demand it—that tension, as Camus reminds us, is where the absurd is born.

If Camus shows us that life has no inherent meaning, this prompts us to consider the very nature of the 'self' that longs for meaning. Here, the insights of Jacques Lacan become particularly illuminating. Lacan shows us that the 'self' who longs for that meaning is already a construction — a fiction composed of fantasy, misrecognition, and social mirrors. The girlfriend in Jake's fantasy is not a person, but a mirror. She refracts the selves he could have been, the lives he yearned for. She is poet, physicist, gerontologist; each identity a mask Jake puts on her to reflect his unlived selves. 

Jake is trapped in what Lacan calls the Imaginary: a hall of mirrors filled with unattainable ideals. He can no longer exist comfortably in the Symbolic world —thestructured, repressive world of jobs, relationships, and names. Hence, he invents a new order, governed by a fantasy. 

But all fictions must eventually break. When Jake’s Imaginary no longer holds, the Real emerges: a grotesque, unspeakable void. He walks into the darkness, and finds himself in the presence of a fantasy — a maggot-infested pig. This pig, once a memory from Jake’s childhood, becomes a grotesque symbol of decay —and perhaps of Jake himself. No longer shielded by fantasy, he must face the unbearable truth: the body ages, dreams fade, and no imaginary girlfriend can save you from the slowunraveling of the self. 

This realization is mirrored in Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. In it, the main character, Caden Cotard, also crafts a fantasy through his massive theater—in which he hops between many roles—desperate to be seen, loved, and recognized. But just as Caden’s theater grows beyond his control, Jake’s imagined girlfriend begins to shift, unravel, and dissolve. In both works, the self is not revealed but dispersed —brokenacross roles, timelines, and imaginary lives. And when the performance ends, what remains is not truth or salvation, but the quiet persistence of decay and regret. 

And these realizations mirror our own reality. Our position as viewers is nowdisrupted. We no longer see Jake and Caden as mere characters. We are them. Theyare us. We actively engage in the reimagination of our own lives—of missed chances, and the inescapable truth of aging and perishing. Jake and Caden are not just characters born from the minds of their creators; they are the representation of our own inevitable fate. 

And maybe that’s what honest art does: it dissolves the line between the subject andits audience. Like a song sung to a crowd of strangers, yet felt as if written for one heart alone.

Consider this song from Synecdoche, New York: 

I'm singing this song, but it's about you 

Whoever else is listening, it's only about you 

See there's just one story, and everyone's the star 

And it goes like this: 

No one will ever love you for everything you are 

And so you build up layers of deception 

And you leave out things to alter the perceptions 

Of the ones you love, who would never love you back 

If they knew all about you, every solitary fact

And the sadness of your life is built upon this lack 

Of really knowing anyone or having them know you It's the sadness of the world, there's nothing left to do 

And so just go to sleep, just let the hours pass 

Sleep it all away, none of it will last 

Soon it's all over, you're under clover 

And none of it matters anymore 

The relentless honesty of the song speaks to each of us. The longing for meaning andconnection, for recognition and unconditional love — it is a beautiful ideal, yet one inevitably undermined by the fact that we are mortal and impermanent. 

Jake’s story. Caden’s theater. These are stage sets for our own quiet catastrophes andunanswered what-ifs. And perhaps, in surrendering to those fictions —in seeing ourselves in their fragments — we are not escaping life, but witnessing it more clearly. Even unlived, even imagined, life speaks.