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.