What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

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.

We interact in a world curated mostly by commercial forces. We are pulled into a strange, manic, overcrowded realm of technology that taxes our focus. “What should I be doing right now?” is a question that feels more urgent than ever.

But one moral supersedes all others: When things go wrong, we only have ourselves to blame.

Having been raised on simple, emotionally reassuring answers to every question, we are made anxious by any attempt to take a critical look at the complex forces at play in the world.

We have to reject the shiny, shallow future that will never come, and locate ourselves in the current, flawed moment.

We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock. We have to open our eyes and our hearts to each other. We have to connect with what already is, who we already are, what we already have.

We want too much. We don’t need that much to be happy. We can change ourselves, and our world, in part by returning to that simple truth, repeatedly. We have to imagine finally feeling satisfied.

You must be living life to its fullest, always. Even when you are suffering, you are learning important lessons. You are making memories. You are doing this for the experience, which is irreplaceable. Every day is a gift. You are not permitted to sigh deeply, or roll your eyes, or linger skeptically on the sidelines. You are not allowed a little space to be lukewarm, or resigned, or judgmental, or exhausted. Sadness is weak. If you’re feeling bad, you must be making bad choices. It’s time to make better ones.

Maybe being in the military is a different somewhat different culture, but I don't feel like this is the case for me currently.

In other centuries (and in other lands), melancholy and longing were considered a natural part of the human condition. Now they are a moral failing, a way of signaling to the world that you’re a loser and a quitter.

Ok, this I have felt. I'm melancholy about 99% of the time, and expressing that to other people is consistently more difficult. I mean, most of us can't even answer "how are you?" truthfully. We are almost forced to lie.

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?

Probably the most depressing paragraph I have ever read.

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.

I can't help but think that, at least in my generation, we're becoming aware of these emotions in others are trying to step through that thin veneer to try to connect with people. Maybe I'm only seeing that with a small fraction that I've gotten into an echo chamber with, but I do feel that people are being able to see through the noise.

“You’ve been manipulated into thinking you were part of something incredible. You thought you were special, but you’re not.”

I don't know if I really believe this. In one sense, it's correct: life is roughly similar for everyone, there's a whole lot of people, and in the grand scheme you're not special.

Or maybe we’re just being confronted by the disasters that have already started to engulf our world, so omnipresent that no flock of singing birds or merry pirates can distract us any longer.

But no matter how we try to wriggle into some virgin corner of the world free from screens or cameras or phones, unsullied by flashing ads or surveillance, devoid of jubilant ballads or beeping devices, we fail. We’re all plugged into a shiny, down-home, buoyant, authentic-seeming global simulacrum, one that not only doesn’t belong to us, but bleeds us of our sanity, our money, and our privacy and sells them off to the highest bidder. Not surprisingly, the commercialized fantasy of American life has only rendered us more ravenous and impossible to satisfy. The illusory corporate grid of fanciful characters is real; we are the imaginary ones. The Disneyfication of culture is complete.

The problem with the fairy tale of constant growth and constant expansion—the central drive of all publicly traded ventures—is that companies start off with modest goals and creative business plans and then, by dint of their own success, they’re cornered into following the reigning script of high-capitalist world domination, swapping out true, steady innovation for aggressive initiatives and mergers that promise the quickest route to infinity and beyond.

Corporate escapism can’t insulate us from the ugliness of reality anymore. We’ve been ushered, docile as sheep, into a future that’s far from the one we’d imagined. And now we’re left staring at each other in disbelief, asking, “How did we get here? Who stood back and let this happen to our world?”

We no longer need to be encouraged to imagine fancier or better or more. The very existence of a given person, place, or thing now immediately conjures a better, more beautiful, more enticing version of the same. We are so conscribed by the market-driven mind-set that we can no longer experience anything outside of the context of “more” and “better.” We can’t take things as they are. We have moved on to the upgrade before we’ve even engaged with what we have right here, right now.

Undoubtedly, I see that in myself. I'm constantly looking for a better version of everything I have.

Having complete and total control over every single aspect of your experience, including everyone around you, is the textbook definition of alienation—precisely how human beings are severed from each other and from their own humanity.

There is no satisfaction in reckless, excessive accumulation. The more you have, the more you want. There is never enough.

The beauty and the ultimate value of a story like Mad Men lies in its repeated insistence that unless we stop searching for more, we’ll never truly find happiness or peace. Likewise, the danger of Fifty Shades—and the danger of the self-serving myth at the center of the Trump brand—lies in its inability to recognize the pathology at the heart of the fantasy it presents.

When the most prominent love stories of our times also serve as cautionary tales about wealth and ego-driven restlessness, you have to wonder if there’s not some essential sickness encoded in our cultural DNA.

What if that is taken literally? What if there is an evolutionarily driven reason for this kind of behavior?

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.

Instead, contempt and self-doubt and fear are kicked up repeatedly, inciting the frenzied, volatile state that we, in our immaturity, equate with youth and desire and excitement.

His life was constructed in anticipation of an audience.

This is too accurate. How many things do i do expecting (or wanting) someone to watch?

I would try to make things perfect and I would fail, over and over again. I couldn’t just love someone and be loved back. That was too easy. That didn’t feel right. I was more familiar with dissatisfaction. I was more at home with longing. As I moved my things into that dusty, tiny, haunted house, I looked around and thought, “This will never be enough.” It was exactly what I wanted.

Those with money to burn will always find creative ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as enlightened, discriminating, and honorable.

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.

I do feel like this sometimes and I need to check myself.

Because for every local organic farm churning out hormone-free basil butters and heirloom beets, there are countless other elite consumers feasting on foods flown in from around the globe.

Interesting point. I wonder what the comparison is in data.

As easy as it is to be cynical about politically correct, pretentious menus that read more like essays, the choices we make now as consumers will affect how we’re able to eat—not to mention survive—in the future.

As nice as it is to have organic free-range everything on your plate, imbuing that choice with deeper meaning and a larger sense of righteousness without addressing the bigger picture of how humanity feeds itself is like boarding a private jet and then congratulating yourself for not giving the highly polluting commercial airline industry any of your hard-earned dollars.

In a very similar way, I want to think that I am doing the world a lot of good by eating a plant-based diet, yet most of the vegetables I eat are flown in from somewhere else.

“If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives,” Lanchester writes, “perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale.”

Adults are not always so fun. Sometimes I go to parties filled with mature people who know things and act their age and I’m quickly filled with despair. I walk in the door and greet the host and mill about, but in the pit of my stomach I know that leaving home was a huge mistake. I will not be surprised and delighted. I will not learn something new. I will not even enjoy the sound of my own voice. I will be lulled into a state of excruciating paralysis and self-hatred and other-people hatred.

I believe this was wrote about me.

I can’t do it. The quiet restraint, the lack of discernible needs or desires, the undifferentiated sea of dry-cleaned nothingness, the small sips, the half-smiles, the polite pauses, the autopilot nodding. It feels like we’re all voluntarily erasing ourselves, as if that’s the only appropriate thing to do.

It’s the free-floating neuroticism that springs from attempting to maintain a sleek, spare home but always falling short. Because even though we all tend to tell ourselves a story of why we fail—we are lazy, we are bad at cleaning, we don’t have time—the truth is that a clutter-free existence exerts a constant pressure that’s oppressive in its own way.

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.

Not only do modern consumer choices rarely bring us long-term satisfaction, but they’re exhausting. It takes a lot of energy to recognize which signifiers will place you in the dreadful almost-past with the know-nothings who aren’t always moving forward, always casting off and acquiring more, always focused on what comes next.

The digital clutter of our lives doesn’t merely make us anxious, interrupting our train of thought and blocking us from longer periods of silence and the deeper thinking that can go with it. Our digital clutter redesigns our world around the temporary. Constant interruptions turn us into amnesiacs who are required to respond, reply, and react from moment to moment.

I get this feeling, and i've tried to control it by limiting notifications and keeping my phone on silent, but it definitely does not work all the time. Especially in the military, where you're expected to be on call 24/7 and you can actually get in trouble for not being available outside of working hours. You're required to have a phone on you.

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?

mono no aware, which translates literally as “the pathos of things” but means more broadly, “a melancholic awareness of the transience of existence.”

A window into the unimaginable lifestyles of the super-rich now lives in our pockets.

No longer framed as guilty pleasures aimed at distracting us momentarily, the luxury of Instagram is so integrated into our lives that it’s hard not to experience a regular, low-level sensation of injustice from it. Instagram feels designed to incite dissatisfaction. But not only that: We all feel like we deserve luxury now.

In fact, images of other people’s experiences dominate so much of our own lives that we sometimes forget to wonder how it actually feels to live inside of those images.

This is a really good point. Is this a kind of entrapment into social media on a general level, or more specific into how we do social media?

Instead of striving for a life that could somehow match the clean beauty of an image from Instagram or the blurry glory of a trailer for an orgiastically great concert that could never happen, imagine striving for a way to encounter the small details of everyday life as if they were unexpectedly delightful.

All that’s required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: This is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can’t simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable—even divine.

The more I have, the more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the center of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.

Lately this kind of thinking seems to me to be about as romanticized as everything other type of dream lifestyle. I don't feel as if any one type of lifestyle is the best necessarily, but that you can get closer to having a better lifestyle in your own eyes. I'm not sure I have my thoughts together enough, though.

TV reflects our culture’s fundamentalist roots leavened by an almost surreal disentanglement from our long-held standards of behavior. It’s not just a void of ethics that we’re witnessing, though; it’s the celebration of that void. Many of our most popular narratives sidestep unwieldy talk of values, a seemingly outmoded term, in favor of a recurring struggle to dominate, or else to avoid domination. Brutality, mercilessness, lack of concern for principles—these are painted as prerequisites.

No matter how hard you try, someone else out there is taking the same raw ingredients and making a better life out of them.

She is not wrong at all.

And merely muddling through, doing your best, seeing friends when you can, trying to enjoy yourself as much as possible is, according to the reigning dictates of today’s culture, tantamount to failure. You must live your best life and be the best version of yourself; otherwise you’re nothing and no one.

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.

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?