Life Needs Better Editing

Why I crave cinematic certainty in a wonderfully messy world.

I want my life to be a movie.

And before you ask, no. I haven’t watched The Truman Show. Yes, I get the irony.

But I’ve always felt this strange pull toward the idea of life as a movie. There’s something glorious about the way cinema bends reality. Characters travel the world without a single consular visit: well, except Emily in Emily in Paris, who apparently needed a work visa once. Realism? Not quite.

That show has four seasons, yet she’s only been in Paris for what feels like a year. That’s the magic of cinema. Time becomes modeling clay. Elastic. Sculptable. It makes me wonder: what if my life were a movie?

When I was eight and wanted to be older, I could’ve just had a quick middle-school montage and boom; teenage years. Or when I’m 65, maybe there’d be a season-long flashback of my twenties.

Maybe it’s the music too.
I’ve never liked musicals much. I feel about them the way I feel about pickles and mayo. But La La Land gave me hope. In my movie, Mac DeMarco would always be playing.

Seriously, I’m obsessed. If you woke me up at 7 a.m. tomorrow, I’d say I want to people-watch on a public bench and share headphones, Mac DeMarco playing in the background.
Why?
Because that’s what happens in movies.

This obsession with turning life into cinema stems from my own personal inadequacies.

I overthink. Constantly. My brain races around the track of my skull like a hamster in a RedBull commercial . It scatters, it wanders - hence my last name, Mwangangi, which in Kamba means “wanderer.”
And for wanderers, mental or physical, the ultimate fantasy is total knowledge and control. Two things humans will never truly possess.

I don’t know whether I’ll win the lottery tomorrow, or meet a friendly roadside rhino who bonds with the neighbor’s dog. It sounds ridiculous. But is it possible? Absolutely!

Movies, on the other hand, give us certainty.
We know when the protagonist will elope with her childhood lover, ditch her high-flying fiancé, and end up selling pumpkin spice candles in rural Iowa.

And somehow, that absurd sentence is comforting. Because in a movie, you can break a heart, run away, take huge risks; and you’re still the protagonist. There’s always a “happily ever after” banner waiting, over some lake you’ve never heard of.

Even when stories don’t end well, cinema gives us closure, or at least hope. Like 500 Days of Summer. He meets Autumn. They smile. And maybe it’ll end the same way it did with Summer, or worse. But we don’t think about that. It’s the first day of something new.

That’s the thing.
We crave the impossible: a clean goodbye, a happily-ever-after, a closing monologue or maybe even an Oscar.

Don’t even get me started on sequels.

But real life? Real life doesn’t tie up so neatly.

No, no, no.

You die young and tragically. Or you make it to 60 and finally buy the Porsche you always dreamed of, just in time to learn you’ve got six months left. Or you live long enough to forget your own name.

Sure, movies show tragedy too. But there's no soundtrack when it's your diagnosis, no meaningful glances when it's your memory fading.

Real life is made of the scenes that get cut out in movies.

Covering your mouth when you sneeze.
Picking up the litter on your commute back home.
Folding laundry while listening to a song that almost makes you cry.

And yet those are the moments, as Anthony Bourdain once said, that we’ll ultimately be judged on.

So yes, I’ll keep romanticizing life like it’s a film. I’ll hold on to hope, even when it seems futile. But I’ll also learn to love the unglamorous in-between. I won’t cut the small scenes.
And I hope you won’t either.

The End.