It’s August and it’s hot. Holiday time. Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Robert Musil from his novel The Man Without Qualities:

'What sort of life is it that one has to keep riddling with holes called ‘holidays’? Would we punch holes in a painting because it demands too much from us in appreciation of the beautiful?'

Musil is making fun of the breathtakingly popular and influential idea that we should turn our life into—or treat our life as—a work of art. Everyone who is anyone in Western modernity endorsed some version of this metaphor, from the Earl of Shaftesbury to Goethe, from Nietzsche to Duchamp. And these days the self-help industry also tries to make the most of it. For my part, I'm on Musil’s side and think that this is one of the most overhyped ideas in Western thought.

If you squint, you could see how this life as a work of art idea could make some kind of sense in the 19^th century, when works of art were well-constructed coherent wholes. I can see someone striving to turn their life into a Stendhal novel. But turning your life into a Robbe-Grillet novel, where literally nothing happens, or a Bolaño novel, where lots of terrible things take place, would be a very dubious enterprise.