This post spoils the plot.

Recently watched La La Land, a movie released in 2016 featuring Ryan Gosling (Sebastian) and Emma Stone (Mia). It won 6 Oscars, 242 wins and 307 nominations.

It was beautiful and touching. The arts were stunning: beautiful songs, aesthetic coloring of the scenes, artistic dances, etc. Parallely, the story is deeply touching. It is a love story started as prettily as a dream, with two attractive people finding out their interest in the other person and quickly falling in love. They were happy together. Then things went down. When the first few appeared, they fought and stopped talking and resolved and came back. Until one point, a huge “problem” appeared where the only sensible thing to do is to end the relationship. In other words, it just happened that the relationship must end. Nothing could be done to keep the couple together without ruining one of their dreams.

The look of Mia when she knows they had to break up despite their love for each other.

In the end, five years after the breakup, being in very different lives, they saw each other again but couldn’t talk due to the situation. At that point, they both think about the life that they could have had together, which could be beautiful. However, they realized that such life can only be an imagination, and they did not choose it for a reason. And moreover, their happy time together in the past was real. Perhaps that was enough for them.

thoughts

What do we want in life? A marriage with a person we love, a successful career, or something else? On the first two things, they both require luck and tremendous efforts. However, I feel that career is a bit more controllable – you get as much as what you give in. Furthermore, your career might be more important than your romantic relationships in your 20s. We can fall in love almost anytime in our adult life. However, due to our biology, the best time to all-in to our career is in our 20s, because we have the most energy here. And as our parents said, career first, then relationships will come. Furthermore, the more successful we are in our career, the better people we will attract in our social lives, which perhaps result in a more fulfilling relationship.

Having personally experienced being a Sebastian, I wonder why it hurts so much to lose a deep connection with someone else despite knowing we can have that same level of connectedness with so many other people. A few hypotheses:

  1. We have emotional attachments. We crave familiarity because it is safe.
  2. We haven’t fully developed our internal sense about the fact that we will grow our social connections, close connections, and deep connections over time, to a point where we can say it is sufficient to make us happy.
  3. Without a familiar connection, we are afraid of sitting with our own thoughts for an unknown period of time. (For this, I have an effective method called the Timer to Panic. When we don’t know how long an uncomfortable situation will last, instead of crashing down right away, set a timer to panic. 5 minutes, 5 days, or 5 months, depending on the situation. You can eventually panic, get help, sacrifice other values. But now, we will sit with it, learn to be with ourselves, and meditate on our thoughts.)