Why Fish Don't Exist, a hit on Threads, is actually a gentle love letter to the heartbroken

When everything in life starts to go off the rails – a relationship ends or your job is filled with uncertainty – we instinctively try to hold on to some sense of order and make sense of our daily lives again. Yet Why Fish Don’t Exist, published in Taiwan by Tsai Shih Culture this March, offers a very different answer. Written by Peabody Award-winning journalist Lulu Miller, the book quietly holds the anxieties that so many people don’t know where to place.

Who would have thought that a book about science and history could generate such discussion on Threads, even moving so many readers to tears?

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It may seem like a biography of an ichthyologist, but it is really a love letter to the heartbroken.

In the first few chapters, you might think you’re reading a serious scientific biography. Its subject, David Starr Jordan, was Stanford University’s first president and an avid taxonomist. He devoted his life to creating order in the natural world, naming nearly one-fifth of the fish known to humankind at the time. Even after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shattered countless glass jars of specimens, he refused to give up, even taking a sewing needle to stitch their names directly onto the fishes’ scales.

At first, Lulu Miller approached this history with admiration. Her own life was falling apart after a series of setbacks, and she desperately wanted to know how this man maintained such an uncompromising will in a universe full of chaos. Yet as she dug deeper into the historical archives, the book took a heart-stopping turn.

“We work desperately to label the world, forgetting that the universe is, by nature, a beautiful chaos.”

Let go of your attachment to order and discover more possibilities in the universe

The latter half of the story introduces a deeply disruptive scientific fact: under strict cladistics, “fish” is not a valid category at all. To preserve the logic of fish as a single category, humans have made biased divisions on the evolutionary tree. When we think we’ve grasped the rules of the world, we’re really viewing nature through a lens of arrogance.

“Sometimes, acknowledging that the old order has fallen apart can open the door to unexpected freedom.”

What makes this book so thought-provoking isn’t the difficult scientific knowledge it presents, but the way it gently dismantles our fixation on control. If you’re at a low point in life, it doesn’t ask you to blindly pull yourself together. Instead, it allows you to accept chaos, which is especially precious amid the anxiety of modern life. Rather than desperately rebuilding the old rules amid the ruins, letting go of our attachment to particular labels can leave us with the whole ocean.

Who it’s for: Anyone looking to find meaning again

Find a free weekend afternoon, order a warm latte, and quietly let the words help you untangle the knots within.

When you’re willing to let go of your attachment to a particular outcome and accept life’s unknowns and lack of control again, you may begin to see the small glimmers of light you once overlooked. Could this reading journey, full of tears and surprises, also give you a reason to see life differently?

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