What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

be more polite in your email messages, and not point out the obvious sloppy work and bizarre groupthink and passive-aggressiveness and corner-cutting madness that unfold every day without comment.

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.

Spending more money ensures greater happiness. This is the confused thinking of the duped consumer.

Echoes of this belief system are found in the self-mythologizing compulsions around us. 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. Everything our imperial patriarch surveys is tremendous. He surrounds himself with people he describes as “high-quality.” According to his first-person myth, no matter what he does, he can’t help but win, and the only people who disagree with that assessment are losers. But his face tells a different story. Embedded in the orange-spray-tanned folds of his brow, we discover the hidden moral of this tale of luxurious excess and limitless power: There is no satisfaction in reckless, excessive accumulation. The more you have, the more you want. There is never enough.

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.

But if we envision a life of perpetually staying up-to-date with the styles, the trends, the sounds, the smells, the looks—let’s not even say “the ideas,” since ideas have come to feel as onerous and beside the point as file cabinets or Rolodexes, when compared to memes or screenshots or tweets—we are committing to a life that is cluttered but also disposable, a life in which it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between passions and trivia.

part of our guiding modern religion, one that binds us to lifestyles built around excess while failing to meet our most basic human needs.

Our minds are so filthy with noise and anticipated interruptions.

Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this. Feeling that way doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require the perfect scenery. 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 chance to soak in this mundane, uneven moment is the purest luxury of all.

Does the world even feel real to powerful men? How else do two world leaders with nuclear weapons capable of murdering millions trade juvenile insults on Twitter like kids battling over a video game?

When you really slow down the tape on Weinstein—or Donald Trump, or Bill Cosby, or Bill O’Reilly, or Roger Ailes—what you see more than anything else is a profound lack of connection to other human beings. It’s not just that women, or strangers, or people of color, or children of immigrants, or Muslims (or a combination thereof), don’t rate in their world. It’s that these people are utterly irrelevant. A person is either useful and part of the club, or else that person is cast out like trash. The second someone ceases to be useful, they are forgotten.

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.

Heather, you can help yourself. You don't need god for this. Opt out.

She isn’t afraid of falling short. No one can tell her what she can and can’t do, what she should and should not expect. She’s not losing sleep over the mid-century-modern furniture she doesn’t own, or the organic dairy farms in Wisconsin she hasn’t visited.

she doesn’t view these things as verdicts on her character. She knows how to savor what she has. She doesn’t ask herself whether or not she has it all. She has more important things to do.

Individuals might have unseen talents and untold potential, but groups, under the sway of pernicious traditions and narcissistic leaders, inevitably become unruly, self-serving, and hostile.

But for those of us who retain some sense memory of twirling and hearing others coo, spotting the word “girl” in every other title these days (Girls, Gone Girl, 2 Broke Girls, The Girl on the Train, The Girl Before, New Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to name just a few) can bring on a faintly nostalgic twinge. Or is it a shudder? We recall that privileged but exasperating era when we were transfixing and special but also a little doomed.

The aim is always to maximize your own gains while thoroughly expunging the inconvenient humanity out of yourself. Ideally, we will all evolve into disease-free, highly efficient, healthy, joy-seeking low-body-fat robots, safe in our bunkers, free to snack on cashew cheese and sulfate-free wine and peruse inspirational quotes as the world burns down outside our doors.

We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else. We are to view ourselves as unique snowflakes only as it facilitates more efficiently melting ourselves into bottled spring water. Our ultimate value is always quantifiable.