The Bear is not a TV show about a restaurant. It’s a show about the ways in which people are broken. That there is the possibility of any confusion is why the show appeals to me. Food and trauma are two of my favourite things.

For some people, psychic injuries are barriers to moving forward. For others, they are both engine and fuel. Unless I missed something, I don’t get a clear sense of what pushes Carmy to be so good at what he does. Though the death of his brother pervades the show, Carmy is skilled because he has worked hard and he moves forward because he appears to only have his work and nothing more.

What is the purpose of achieving things? It’s a question I think about frequently. There is a point in season three of The Bear in which the characters discuss legacy. Carmy says that he wants his to be “panic free.” It’s an interesting little moment: rather than accolades themselves, he wants what he thinks accolades will eventually bring.

I can relate. It seems better to feel that one has a thing in one’s life that gives it shape and meaning. For writers, that is often an audience, success, or at least dialogue with what one imagines as one’s ideal readers.

In the meantime, one looks for bylines. True, we say to one another that no byline will bring you happiness. And yet: Not once, but twice in my life I have whiffed when the New Yorker came calling, either unable to perform (sorry) or incapable of coming up with a compelling idea in time. This still nags at me, as if a few hundred words for a few hundred dollars in a storied publication would have changed my life.

Alas, I am someone prone to regret. The achievements most us strive for tend to only have weight because we are forced to give them importance. We must perch ourselves atop a cliff of memory, look out upon it like the wanderer above the sea of fog and say to ourselves, yes, what we did mattered.

When you write in the 21st century, you can punch through occasionally, sparking a conversation or two amidst the din of social media. But mostly, things appear as a flash, one frame on a screen that flickers sixty times a second.

There’s an emptiness to that haunts me, a lifetime spent tap-tapping words out on a keyboard only to watch them mostly evaporate. An image that sometimes lingers in my mind is that of the Greenland shark, which can live for up to 270 years. After a lifetime of battles, scars, near misses, we are supposed to look at its pockmarked body and feel a touch of awe. This shark was alive before the American civil war? But there is something awful about it to me. An automaton-like being, silently gliding through the ocean, unthinking, decade after decade — it seems so terrifyingly empty.

My bias is that life only matters when one makes meaning from it. It helps sometimes, though, to violently rend apart that couplet of “meaning making” to assert that meaning comes from making itself. There must be poesis of some kind to give shape to the shapeless. Why does Carmy cook? Because you have to create or else. This at least is the damage I have done to myself and had done to me.

In a 2017 BBC documentary, Dame Judi Dench explored her love for trees. In the introductory clip, the venerated actor, now in her 80s and far closer to the end of her time here, says of her charmed life that it is now is “mostly trees… and champagne.”

It inevitably went a bit viral. Why shouldn’t it? It connotes the ideal denouement of a life well-lived. Is that not what Carmy also says he wants — to finally find peace after enough frenzied making? It is the fantasy of retirement itself. Judi Dench appears to have won at the game of life.

Lately I’ve been collecting little snippets of how and why people make peace with their lives. In a recipe video for pasta alla gricia by Bon Appetit alum Carla Lalli Music, she asks “How long am I going to be on earth? I’m over the part of my life where we didn’t do things because we thought we were saving it up for something else.”

While watching her make the rich, fatty dish, we learn that no bottle of wine is off limits in the Lalli Music household anymore. This also has its own sort of appeal. You can make meaning in life through work, after which you rest. Or: you can find peace in mortality and lean in, enjoying whatever there is to enjoy for as long as you can enjoy it.

Another snippet: In a review of Tár, Zadie Smith spends some time talking about middle age, a stage of life I am shocked to find myself in — inevitably so, because shock is the only feeling anyone ever has about middle age.

Smith imagines what it’s like to witness this completely predictable terror from the outside and asks:

“When we are young, how absurd does the midlife crisis seem? Pathetic! What is wrong with these people?

What’s wrong with these people is that they are going to die, and for the first time in their lives, they really know that.”

Yes! Like, actually die. You spend a lifetime repressing your own mortality until you can’t anymore. You watch people who once seemed invincible decline and degrade, emaciate and die. So after each funeral you recommit to trying to live, deciding to make things or to give in open a bottle of wine — one a futile attempt to extend oneself beyond mortality, the other an abandonment to it.

It’s all so very stupid, so completely futile, and thus so absolutely necessary. You have to tap-tap-tap on some stupid keyboard covered in crumbs at a coffee shop in a city that is falling apart because you, like every single person around you, are terrified of dying. In the meantime, you can write or cook or just open that bottle of wine. I do. And I will, for as long as I can. But even these things can sometimes remind me of calloused, trembling fingers, desperately gripping rock on a sheer cliffside. It could be that the release is in the letting go.