What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

In spite of the growing uncertainty and anxiety of our current moment, we are meant to sidestep inconvenient emotions and fearlessly conquer the future. The slightest hesitation dooms us to the ranks of failures and losers. No wonder our capacity for nuance and subtlety has been lost, as our opinions and ideals increasingly take the shape of fundamentalist religions. Poetry and art, expansive intellectual discourse, the odd unfiltered moment—these are either misinterpreted as moral litmus tests or else they’re upstaged by bold claims and extremist rhetoric. The blustery overstatements and exaggerations and lies of talk show hosts, pundits, social media firebrands, and politicians drown out all attempts at refinement, restraint, and grace, and seep into our everyday interactions. Thoughtfulness is misread as uncertainty; melancholy is misunderstood as a stubborn refusal to play nicely with others. A century ago, survival was the main event. Longing was an accepted part of existence. Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure.

Day in and day out, through aspirational products and heartfelt-seeming commercial messages, in the psychobabble of gurus and the motivational rhythms of Facebook testimonies, between the lines of pop songs and the dialogue of TV comedies, we are taught to communicate triumph while privately experiencing ourselves as inadequate and our lives as disappointing. Instead of recognizing these ingested messages as toxic, we learn to treat our humanity itself as poisonous, to treat our most human desires as a kind of sickness that can only be cured with outside help.

We are fed the illusion of self-determination, day after day, then treated as insufficient when we don’t overcome the formidable forces working against us.

The foodie identity can be so completely constructed by its various deeply felt products (the broths of Santouka! the roasted chickens of Waxman’s!) that it transforms itself from a statement of allegiance—like the sports teams you follow or the bands you like—and enters into the realm of the political. Being a foodie means taking a vow to save the Earth, to save small organic farms, and to save poor, overweight, undernourished people from themselves. But then, empty self-righteousness has always paired nicely with a rich sense of entitlement. That earthy taste of stone soup, drizzled in an unctuous snake oil.

A few minutes in a pricey cheese shop, speaking to a smart person who spends all her time thinking and talking about cheese, has a way of convincing you that high-quality fromage is one of the primary pleasures of life, worthy of its price, particularly if those dollars go into the hands of smart enthusiasts and the gorgeous, enlightened, loving dairy farmers of your vivid imaginations. (This seduction is a big piece of foodie culture’s appeal: We aren’t just shoving tasty stuff into our faces, we’re embracing and supporting some down-to-earth farmer who might count as a kind of a neighbor.) It’s all so sexy and sensual and honorable-seeming: We care about our bodies and we care about the Earth and its products, we tell ourselves. Not like those corn-syrup-swilling slobs sitting next to us on the train, gorging themselves on the products of unsustainable industrial monoculture. This is the ugly class subtext of our earnest adoration of that Humboldt Fog chevre wheel with a layer of “edible vegetable ash.” Our hard-won locavore connoisseurship satisfies our senses and bestows upon us, via its $25-a-pound price tag, the feeling that we’ve paid tithes to the church of gourmet eating. But more than that, it separates us from the less sainted, the less antioxidized, and, meaningfully, the less wealthy among us.

These are the sorts of unrealistic social pressures that keep the stock market on its perpetual upward march. The economy expands to infinity only if our desires and expectations expand proportionately. Standards must always be shifting like unsteady ground beneath our feet. The manufacturing of shame dictates that every mundane thing we do that is currently seen as Acceptable and Good will eventually be deemed Not Good Enough by the cultural marketplace.

Many of these anxieties take the same shape: An external mob is watching and judging and withholding approval. It’s impossible to matter, to be interesting enough. Many young people describe others as “a better version of me.” This is how it feels today to be young and fully invested in our new popularity contest: No matter how hard you try, someone else out there is taking the same raw ingredients and making a better life out of them. The curated version of you that lives online also feels hopelessly polished and inaccurate—and you feel, somehow, that you alone are the inauthentic one.

Very few people tell you anymore that those doubts in your head are part of the noise you hear when you’re alive, full stop. Very few people explain that success rarely happens quickly, and that even if it does, there are still lingering worries and bad days and hours and hours of tedious work involved. There aren’t many inspirational quotes about how discouragement will plague you as you work and that’s just how it feels to work at something difficult. There aren’t many memes reminding you that you won’t get everything you dream of—and that getting everything you dream of might not make you happy anyway, no matter what that constantly scrolling feed of highly curated “best lives” seems to imply.

A lot can happen in ten years. You can’t be carefree forever. But when I was just thirty-three, I thought that I would never have the bad taste to grow old, let alone allow it to depress me. I thought I was better than this. What is youth, but the ability to nurse a superiority complex beyond all reason, to suspend disbelief indefinitely, to imagine yourself immune to the plagues and perils faced by other mortal humans? But one day, you wake up and you realize that you’re not immune.

Dear sweet merciful lord, deliver me from these deliriously happy parents, frolicking in paradise, publishing books, competing in triathlons, crafting jewelry, speaking to at-risk youth, painting birdhouses, and raving about the new cardio ballet place that gives you an ass like a basketball. Keep me safe from these serene, positive-thinking hipster moms, with their fucking handmade recycled crafts and their mid-century-modern furniture and their glowing skin and their optimism and their happy-go-lucky posts about their family’s next trip to a delightful boutique hotel in Bali.

While so many aspects of the green movement—farmers’ markets, composting, gray water, solar power—represent commendable efforts to improve life within a community, there’s a spirit of separatism that can’t be disentangled from these things. The allure of hard work and self-reliance, when paired with a distrust for modern institutions, can curdle into an impulse to divest from society altogether. Whether this impulse is manifested in the suspicions of disaster preppers or the purism of the homeschooler, there’s a sense that the more independent you are, the safer you are, that total control of our environments is the ideal, and that the institutions designed to protect us might be those from which we require protection. But our fear of the “other” is also more mundane than that. It’s a way of choosing the inconveniences of self-reliance over the indignities and sacrifices of compromise. Perhaps it’s better (this thinking goes) to acquire the skills to face down a hungry bear in the woods or trudge through the snow to buy a few bolts of calico than it is to expose your child to a teacher who doesn’t inspire her, or to a doctor who doesn’t listen closely enough. That’s a pastoral fantasy that easily overshadows our hunched, bleary-eyed, flickering-screen lives—but the fantasy is also a product of those lives, which create awkwardness and fear of direct confrontation in a population unaccustomed to face-to-face contact, accommodation, and collaboration. But most of all, this d...

We think romance is a mystery in which you add up clues that you will be loved. Romance must be carefully staged and art-directed, so everyone looks better than they usually do and seems sexier than they actually are, so the suspense can remain intact. You are not better than you are, though, and neither is your partner. That is romance. Laughing at how beaten down you sometimes are, in your tireless quest to survive, is romance. It’s sexy to feel less than totally sexy and still feel like you’re sexy to one person, no matter what. Maybe suspense yields to the suspension of disbelief. Maybe looking for proof yields to finding new ways to muddle through the messes together. But when it’s 10:00 p.m. and you crawl into bed like two old people and tell each other about the weird things that your kids said that day and crack stupid jokes and giggle and then maybe you feel like making out or maybe you just feel like playing a quick game of Candy Crush, all the while saying things like “This game is stupid, it sucks” and “Your feet are freezing” and “My ass hurts”—that’s romantic. Because at some point, let’s be honest, death supplies the suspense. How long can this glorious thing last? your eyes sometimes seem to ask each other. You, for one, really hope this lasts a whole hell of a lot longer. You savor the repetitive, deliciously mundane rhythms of survival, and you want to keep surviving. You want to muddle through the messiness of life together as long as you possibly can. T...

Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want, but we’re never taught how to enjoy what we actually have. There will always be more victories to strive for, more strangers to charm, more images to collect and pin to our vision boards. It’s hard to want what we have; it’s far easier to want everything in the world. So this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry. We are hurtling forward—frantic, dissatisfied, and perpetually lost.

We must reconnect with what it means to be human: fragile, intensely fallible, and constantly humbled. We must believe in and embrace the conflicted nature of humankind. That means that even as we stop trying to live our imaginary, glorious “best lives,” we still have the audacity to believe in our own brilliance and talent and vision—even if that sometimes sounds grandiose, delusional, or unjust. We have to embrace what we already have and be who we already are, but we also have to honor the intensity and romance and longing that batter around inside of our heads and our hearts. We have to honor the richness of our inner lives and the inherent values that are embedded there. But we should also aim to create a self and a life and an artistic vision that aren’t an escape from ordinary life, but a way of rendering ordinary life for people of every color, shape, size, and background more magical to them. In order to do that, we have to see that every human is divine. We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes. It will fuel us, once we see it. The ordinary people around us, the angry ones and the indifferent ones, the good ones and the bad ones, will start to glow and shimmer.

We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities. We are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering in an enervated, anxious state over our value and our popularity. We are called to view our actions as important, with or without consecration by forces beyond our control. We are called to plant these seeds in our world: to dare to tell every living soul that they already matter, that their seemingly mundane lives are a slowly unfolding mystery, that their small choices and acts of generosity are vitally important. Here is how you will start: You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of “best”ness that will finally bring you peace. You will see that you are as much of a miracle as Mozart was. You will remember that bit of advice lurking inside one of Shirley Jackson’s dark novels: “Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.” You will feel this and know it in your heart and pass this feeling along to the people around you. You will breathe in this moment—this imperfect, uncertain, not-quite-right, heavenly moment. You will say to yourself, “It is enough.” And it will be.