Although fragments of a person's life may be congruent with certain notions of aesthetics, like those we see in books and movies, why not go all the way and assume that the entirety of a person's life may be made into a movie? If fostering fragments is desirable, surely having the entirety of a life composed of these fragments as to make a whole is the ideal. As espoused upon in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, there is difference between what we experience as ourselves, and what we see when viewing ourselves through a glass, or, a scanner. Likewise, the aesthetic life, meaning, a life that one would want to watch, cannot be complete unless we both experience it (as the actor), and watch it (as a spectator). But this is physically impossible.
If one's life was a movie, there would
hardly be enough time to watch it. You would essentially be splitting your life
in half, the "actor" part, and the "spectator" part. One could never live a movie-worthy version of a lifetime, and watch it at the
same time, except for a movie about you making and watching a movie of your
life half the time, but would this be a movie that you'd like to watch? It
would be like looking into a glass, with half the time you watching the movie
wishing you were acting out what you'd like to be, your wish half the time unfulfilled. The aesthetic life thus remains unlived. To aim for it would be escapism, a denying of reality.
This is of course assuming the time needed for replay of a
situation is equivalent to it. A solution would lie in dreams, where time is
malleable. A dream lasts less than an hour for most people, but in the space of
an hour one can traverse across days and continents. With enough psychological training, one could conceivably train the self to remember the details of the day, and then synthesize them into a narrative by night. Perhaps our dreams are evolution's imperfect tendency to the aesthetic life, where one spends the waking life living it, and the night reflection of it, resulting in the movie of a lifetime, albeit with the reels stained with rust, slides missing or parts manipulated into error, the projection onto the screen yellow and strobing.