A Million Miles In A Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The thing about trying to remember your life is it makes you wonder what any of it means. You get the feeling life means something, but you’re not sure what. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn’t have when you’re actually living it.”

Miller’s uses his own journey of self-discovery to establish his thematic interest in Finding Meaning in Life Through Storytelling. He frames adapting his own memoir into a screenplay as an act of editing his life—one that urged his to reassess and reevaluate his ambitions and goals. Miller argues that people often fail to live life with intentionality, depriving them of a sense of meaning and purpose.

“It didn’t occur to me at the time, but it’s obvious now that in creating the fictional Don, I was creating the person I wanted to be, the person worth telling stories about. It never occurred to me that I could re-create my own story, my real life story, but in an evolution I had moved toward a better me.”

This passage reflects Miller’s inspirational tone throughout his book, underscoring his attempts to blend elements of the genres of memoir and self-help. Miller explains that the screenwriting structure provided a framework for him to reimagine his life. Thinking about himself as a story character, Miller realized he could also be shaped and formed. He suggests that the narrative arc of storytelling can help people develop a new outlook and mindset, adding meaning to their lives.

“If you want to talk about positive and negative charges in a story, ultimately I think you’d break those charges down into life and death. The fact of life and the reality of death give the human story its dramatic tension. For whatever reason, we don’t celebrate coming into life much.”

Discussing conflict in real-life stories, Miller suggests that life and death are key issues in people’s quest for meaning. He indicates that despite the gift of life, the world is fixated on the inevitability of death.