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What if you could do it all over? (2020)

The uncanny allure of our unlived lives.

Unlike other kids, who were what—socializing?—I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. “The elevation of choice as an absolute good, the experience of chance as a strange affront, the increasing number of exciting, stultifying decisions we must make, the review of the past to improve future outcomes”—all these “feed the people we’re not.” Advertisers sell us things by getting us to imagine better versions of ourselves, even though there’s only one life to live: it’s “ YOLO+ FOMO,” a friend tells Miller, summing up the situation nicely. Maybe he would have been born female, and “grown up in San Francisco as a girl, / a tall, serious girl.” If all that had happened, then today, walking by the sea in Mexico, he might be able to meet a sailor, have an affair, and “give birth at last to my son—the boy / I love.”

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