Your Life Should Be a Slow Burn
Sentimental Value (2025) directed by Joachim Trier
Think about the most popular girl from your high school and what she is doing now. “Peaked in high school” is a death rattle, the thought that the best of you has already been performed. No encore performance. Tides never turned for her, instead they lay flatly amongst the other tides. Where does your personal growth go from there, when all the critics in your life – parents, teachers and classmates had labeled you as a teenage success story.
Sometimes a good film or a book will have its own slow burn, a deliberate pacing that doesn’t upload all the juicy bits too early on. Instead you have to walk with the characters, patiently as they sift through emotions and small occurrences that will move them forward into the story’s plotline. And why do you stick with them? Why do you keep watching that movie, reading that book where nothing is happening all at once? Because you know it’s going to get good and so you don’t want to miss a single second of everything that comes before the big thing happens.
Shouldn’t your life be like that? Deliberately paced so that the good parts, when they overcome the bad, you come out as the winner every single time. Everything else comes fast, some of our favorite shows, fast food, social media, children grow up faster these days than in past generations. (Feel like I’ve read a statistical story on that somewhere, but too lazy to google the link) This world is obsessed with the speed of success and the velocity at which they come. Five year plans were something our grandparents/parents had to figure out, their generation came with an actual manual. School, college, an 8-hour a day job, marriage, house, cars, kids, vacation home was optional, but very prized.
