The Taxonomist, the Earthquake, and the Great Lies We Tell to Stay Sane
Reflections on Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist
PAPER AND PERCEPTION
Anannya
11/1/20264 min read
While I write this reflection, I would want you to know that I'm currently looking at a sea of trees; there are piles of journals on my table, with color-coded scripts for my every life platform. Now, let me get your attention to this reflection: Human beings are obsessively neat creatures. We construct elaborate morning routines, color-code Google Calendars, build multi-tiered organizational apps, and cling to the comforting delusion that if we just buy the right planner, the universe will finally stop throwing curveballs at our heads. And I have done it all this year! Yet here I am! We love categories. We love structure. We love neat little drawers where everything sits in its proper place.
Then along comes Lulu Miller’s breathtaking, part-biography, part-memoir, part-existential-crisis masterpiece, Why Fish Don’t Exist, to gently hold our hands while burning our organizational charts to the ground.
At the heart of Miller’s book sits David Starr Jordan, a late-nineteenth-century taxonomist, founding president of Stanford University, and a man obsessed with discovering, naming, and categorizing thousands of fish specimens. Jordan was a man who believed that order was the supreme law of the cosmos. He spent decades travelling the globe, preserving marine life in glass jars of alcohol, labelling them with meticulous care.
Then, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit. In a matter of seconds, hundreds of his glass jars shattered on the laboratory floor. Decades of scientific work melted into a chaotic, slippery heap of unlabeled fins, scales, and broken glass. Most mortals would have collapsed into a puddle of existential despair.
Do you know what David Starr Jordan did?
He picked up a sewing needle, dipped it in ink, and began physically stitching the cardboard name tags directly into the flesh of the ruined fish. It is a moment that is simultaneously heroic, absurd, and deeply unhinged. It is the ultimate real-world manifestation of human stubbornness in the face of entropy.
As I am a psychotherapist, and you are reading this on Therapy with Anannya, I have to connect this to psychology. So, from a psychological lens, David Starr Jordan is a fascinating case study in Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (yes, I was aware of it, but then I did a Google search to be more aware of it) and defense mechanisms under threat.
When the universe aggressively refuses to match our internal mental models, our brains panic. Uncertainty registers in our primitive nervous system as a physical threat. To cope, we build elaborate cognitive defense mechanisms.
The Perfectionist works eighty hours a week to prove they are in control.
The Anxious Over-thinker mentally rehearses every worst-case scenario so nothing can surprise them.
The Taxonomist stitches labels directly onto dead fish while the building collapses around him.
We label things because naming them gives us the illusion of mastery. If I can name my feeling, outline my career path, or categorize my relationships, I don't have to face the terrifying truth that the universe is vast, chaotic, and completely indifferent to my afternoon schedule.
But Miller’s book takes a sharp, brilliant turn.
Jordan’s obsession with ordering the natural world didn't stop with fish. His unshakeable belief in natural hierarchies and rigid categories eventually led him down a dark, dangerous path: he became a leading figure in the American eugenics movement.
When we become obsessed with neat categories, we risk stripping the world of its messy, beautiful complexity. We start deciding who belongs, what is "normal," and which lives hold value based on arbitrary metrics we invented in our own heads.
In therapy, we see this all the time: Black-and-White Thinking (Splitting). When we force reality into binary categories, success vs. failure, good vs. bad, safe vs. dangerous, we destroy our capacity for nuance, compassion, and psychological flexibility. Rigid categories feel safe, but they eventually become psychological prisons.
The ultimate punchline of the book, and of modern evolutionary biology, is that taxonomically speaking, "fish" do not actually exist.
If you look at the evolutionary tree, a salmon is more closely related to a human than it is to a hagfish. Humans invented the category of "fish" as a convenient mental bucket because those creatures all happen to live in water and swim around. It is a category built on surface appearance, not structural truth.
When Miller learns this, it causes a quiet, profound shift in her perspective.
If the neat categories we constructed to understand the world are just made-up stories, then we are no longer bound by them. The labels we carry- the failure, the damaged one, the unlovable outcast- are just arbitrary tags stitched onto us by culture, circumstance, or our own anxious protective parts.
Why Fish Don’t Exist is essential reading for anyone who has ever watched their life plans get smashed by an unexpected earthquake, a breakup, a health diagnosis, a career pivot, or the quiet ache of existential confusion.
It teaches us that Psychological Resilience isn't about maintaining absolute control or sewing labels onto broken pieces. Resilience is the willingness to open your hands, let go of the rigid expectations you built for your life, and trust that beauty, meaning, and connection are waiting for you inside the chaos.
The next time your plans fall apart, your schedule explodes, or life refuses to fit into your neat little categories, take a deep breath and remind yourself: The glass jars are going to break sometimes. Chaos is going to show up uninvited. But you don't need to sew the labels back on. You can just let the world be messy, drop the need for perfect order, and swim anyway.
Now staring at my Journals,
Anannya