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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.
Hmm
Our self-respect, our pride, and our anger are encountered as personal failings, signs of how far off the path of empowerment and enlightenment we’ve strayed.
Even after we mature into adults, even after we experience heartbreak and nagging doubts and disappointments untold, life is still supposed to be dominated by sunshine and big hugs and warm smiles, lathered up into a bubbly storm of upbeat nothingness. Everything must be improving. If things are bad,
It’s always better not to point out that things might get worse before they get better.
Cult of optimism
The past is reduced to a slide show. The future is a YouTube video that won’t load. And the present is a jumble of jaunty yellow buttons blurting “omg” and “awww” and “tl;dr.” What else can we do but click through?
Start acting like a happy winner or you might become a depressed loser forever.
Sadness is a lonely thing in America. Taking time to reflect means acknowledging that you were once sad, or that you lost something along the way that you might never get back.
It helps Disney’s case that in the last fifteen years we’ve gone from lamenting our insipid cultural artifacts (action movies, misogynistic pop songs, aggressively stupid sitcoms, transparent publicity stunts) to not just exalting them but also admiring the process of their creation. Being a “great brand” or staying “on-brand” is now a high accolade.
Has there ever been a more Disneyfied vision of what it takes to change the world? Ignore all the bad stuff out there and post a super-inspiring
After all these years, Disney still embodies our most dearly held ideals: bravery, honor, and standing up for the underdog. Instead of resistance, we tell ourselves that this must be what happiness feels like: total surrender.
Even in his egocentric plundering of everything in sight, he remained just as vulnerable to the terrors of life as he was to its promises.
Re: Don Draper
only Draper could evoke that terrifying state of having it all but needing more.
The tension of Mad Men lies in the question of whether our heroine (and Draper, in turn) will fall prey to the allure of limitless money, power, and looks, or dig for something deeper and more substantive to sustain her instead.
Pictured next to his stricken-looking but undeniably gorgeous, expensive import of a wife, with the tacky, gold-plated opulence of Trump Tower in the background, Trump repeatedly reminds us that he represents the ultimate American dream.
There is no satisfaction in reckless, excessive accumulation. The more you have, the more you want. There is never enough.
This is the shared fantasy in our bloodstream: An ideal life is one spent in a state of constant titillation, a never-ending foreplay session, an eternal flirtation with “more,” a superhero cliffhanger, the luxury goods that make you crave even more luxury.
But there’s a freedom in never being present enough to feel disappointment, never being connected enough to fear loss, never feeling alive enough to worry about growing old and dying.
Fear means we are on our way somewhere important. Anxiety means that greatness will be here soon. Greed is good because it keeps you restless and hungry.
Like so many other consumer hobbies, such extracurricular foodie activities are easy to engage in, relatively cheap, and come with their own built-in gustatory and social rewards.
Lured into a world of luxe commodities by their taste buds, their nostalgia, and a growing sense of their own insignificance, high-end consumers do much more than simply misjudge a basic exchange of lucre for product. They come to identify intimately with the embrace or rejection of said product
empty self-righteousness has always paired nicely with a rich sense of entitlement.
Oof
What some view as a sudden food revolution is in fact the product of a long, slow evolution of tastes that’s taken place over the course of seventy-odd years,
if your dinner isn’t revolutionary, how can you possibly justify spending a week’s salary on it?
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.
Foodie superiority
we have to learn to appreciate foods that can be grown or raised sustainably, foods that support and enrich the environment.
Food is personal. It’s sensual, it’s nostalgic, it’s political.
Let’s be honest, some days, sensible middle-aged urban liberal adult professionals are the most tedious people in the world.
Mood
You can’t go to a party and act like you’re at a party. You’re too old for that. You might speak out of turn or contradict yourself or offend someone. That’s not how adults do it.
Adulting is whack
Your best life could only be lived against a backdrop as pristine and uncluttered as an art gallery.
Minimalist shame
Because her message, that your things shouldn’t make you feel anxious or guilty or unnerved or uncomfortable, can’t help but sound like a rare drop of truth in a sea of madness.
Re: Marie Kondo
The question isn’t whether or not your stuff sparks joy. The question is: Can you spark joy all by yourself? Do you remember how that feels? —
Oh shit
Imagine feeling the same thing that everyone else is feeling. No thinking is involved; you are perfectly in sync with the music and the crowd.
Keeping Up with the joneses on steroids
It’s odd to send heart emojis when your heart feels not particularly warm, when your distracted brain is too preoccupied with the news and allergies and dog shit to focus on love and motherhood and being amazing.
A life without values, in other words, is a life without meaning.
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
It tells us that no matter what our circumstances might be, we should be dressing like fashion bloggers and vacationing like celebrities and eating like food critics and fucking like porn stars, and if we aren’t, we’re losers who are doomed to non-greatness forever and ever.
Social media woes
there is no “better version” of you waiting in the future. The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment. Shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now.
We recall that privileged but exasperating era when we were transfixing and special but also a little doomed. As a girl, you are a delicate glass vase, waiting to be broken. You are a sweet-smelling flower, waiting for life’s hobnailed boots to trample you. That built-in suspense is part of your appeal.
After prolonged exposure to these smoldering doll-babies, it was hard not to long for some of the stubbornness of Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball), the insatiability and bad temper of Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), or the nerve and self-possession of Mary Richards.
Talking current female tv leads vs past
Because most young women, even the assertive and determined ones, still find themselves, in those forlorn in-between years, apologizing repeatedly, blurting some muddled, half-finished thought and, finally, resolving to take up less space.
“crazy” became my own reductive shorthand for every complicated, strong-willed woman I met. “Crazy” summed up the good and the bad in me and in all of my friends.
Being capable isn’t celebrated or embraced or rewarded handsomely or, often, even noticed these days.
For black girls and white girls and black boys and Asian girls and gay boys and anyone else not viewed as a so-called natural leader, confidence and swagger become leavened by self-doubt.
Sometimes when you are good at hard work, you give yourself too much of it. And with too much hard work in front of you, you might not also have the time and space to be truly brilliant.
Brilliance depends on believing in the hard work you’re capable of doing, but it also depends on believing in your potential, believing in your mind, believing in your heart.
teeth: If all lives include suffering, we’d like to suffer for valid reasons, and not because our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the apps on our iPhones won’t load quickly enough.
People wanted “change”—whatever that was—even if the person promising change seemed capable of burning down the world by accident in his fumbled attempts to bring it.
“What we have now is a populace that is awake.” Presumably she was not referring to the people of color and Muslims and immigrants and Jews lying awake at night wondering how to protect themselves and their families from a president taking his cues from a militant horde of white supremacists, anti-Semites, and anti-immigration zealots.
it’s arrogant to imagine that going it alone is any nobler than collaborating, compromising, working within a community in order to improve it. We need each other to survive the catastrophes to come. But more importantly, we need each other to prevent them.
what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all—is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being.
True romance
