Canon Event: What Spider-Man Understood About Becoming a Person
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On a phrase from an animated film that became the most honest thing the internet has said about growing up.
In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, released in 2023, a Spider-Man from the year 2099 named Miguel O'Hara stands in front of a wall of screens and explains the rules to Miles Morales. Every version of Spider-Man, in every universe, loses someone. An uncle. A police captain who was close to them. These moments are fixed. He calls them canon events, and he says that interrupting one can unravel an entire world. Miles has just worked out that his own father is about to become a police captain. He is being told, by a man with a very serious face, that the responsible thing is to let it happen.
The film, written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham, treats the idea with real weight. The internet did not. That summer, "canon event" left the cinema and became a caption. The bad haircut at nineteen. The flatshare with the person who labelled their yoghurt. The festival where someone broke your heart in a field at four in the morning. Getting dumped by text. Missing the last tram and walking home across Zurich with your shoes in your hand. It's a canon event, people wrote, and let it be.
The joke worked because it said something nobody in the self-improvement aisle was saying. Some of the worst things that happen to you are not detours. They are the plot.
Psychology reached a similar idea without the multiverse. Dan McAdams at Northwestern University has spent decades studying what he calls narrative identity: the internalised, evolving story a person tells about how they became who they are. His work does not suggest that good lives are free of low points. It suggests that the people who seem most at home in their lives can name theirs, and can tell you what happened next. The low point is load-bearing. Remove it and the story does not get happier. It gets thinner.
A second finding is quieter. Ask older adults for the memories that matter most and they reach, disproportionately, for the years between roughly ten and thirty. Researchers including David Rubin call this the reminiscence bump. One explanation is that those are the years of firsts. First flat, first job, first person you could not stop thinking about, first time something went badly wrong and you were the one who had to deal with it. Memory keeps those because they were the moments a self was being assembled. Nobody's reminiscence bump is full of nights they stayed in to protect their sleep score.
Which is the problem. Longevity culture is a project of avoidance presented as a project of improvement. Its promise is that with enough data, enough supplements and enough discipline, you can route around the bad night, the wrong decision, the hangover, the heartbreak, the risk. Every unpredictable event is reframed as a threat to be mitigated. It is Miguel O'Hara's wall of screens with the purpose reversed: not to protect the canon, but to delete it.
The trouble is that a life with every canon event engineered out is not a safer version of the same life. It is a different, smaller one. You do not become the person who survived the terrible flatshare by never living in one. You stay someone who has not met that person yet, and now never will.
It is worth being precise about what the film argues, because it is not as simple as fate. Miles refuses. He says he is going to do his own thing, and the story is plainly on his side. He is not rejecting the idea that things will happen to him. He is rejecting the idea that someone else gets to decide which ones, from a control room, on his behalf.
That is the distinction that matters. Nobody should go looking for grief, and the meme was always kinder than the film on that point. The canon events worth defending are not the tragedies scheduled for you. They are the messes you walk into with your eyes open. The move to a city where you know no one. The person who is clearly a bad idea. The late night that turns into a story you will still be telling at sixty. The plan says no. The person you have not become yet says go.
At some point you will look back and find that the parts of your life you would least want to repeat are the parts you would least want to lose. That is not a paradox. It is how a person gets made. Every system that promises to keep you safe from the unexpected is also, quietly, promising to keep you exactly as you are. You cannot optimize your way around a canon event. You can only avoid becoming yourself.