What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

The world takes no responsibility for the sicknesses it incites in us. We are told repeatedly that our destiny is in our hands. 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.

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 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.

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.

Rabbit Angstrom sought salvation from his domestic and spiritual trap, but he never achieved it. He knew there was more to life; he just couldn’t find it. And every time he tried to look for it, everyone around him treated him like he was being selfish, or stubborn, or hopelessly uncooperative.

As George Clooney’s character tells a young optimist at the start of Disney’s Tomorrowland, “You’ve been manipulated into thinking you were part of something incredible. You thought you were special, but you’re not.”

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.

Somehow, the little things—the eavesdropped-on conversations, the tense family dynamics—take on a special kind of heaviness when you’re visiting Disneyland. As Joseph Conrad put it in Heart of Darkness, “They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.” The semi-hypnotic state of helplessness you enter is central to the experience of Disney. All of your membranes become porous; the sadness can enter your bloodstream directly. You are removed from all familiar signifiers, and it makes you all the more vulnerable. You are trying to be a good parent, but there you are, defenseless, in a vast sea of human beings, huddled in their desperate gaggles, squabbling, regretful, sweating profusely, scarfing Mickey Mouse–shaped beignets and cups of frozen lemonade and hot dogs bathed in oily chili, all of them simultaneously beating back that inevitable feeling of melancholy that comes from being at The Happiest Place on Earth, and discovering that they’re deeply, inescapably unhappy.

It was the sudden sense that Disneyland gives us such a clear and disturbing snapshot of where we’ve landed as a culture. We have collectively surrendered all personal agency and control for the sake of a safe, smooth fantasy. Yet in spite of our efforts, here we are living in a world that’s louder, more jarring, and far more dangerous than we had ever anticipated. 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?” Long

All of which points to the dark, unspoken moral of the series: Fifty Shades offers not just the eroticization of extreme excess, but the commodification of love itself. Christian and Anastasia encounter each other as the most precious of high-end possessions.

To Christian, every man alive wants Anastasia. To Anastasia, every woman alive wants Christian. In the logic of the market, each of them must thus be in demand, rare, and highly coveted.

Armed with an apparently limitless will-to-commodification, our narrator recognizes that anything and everything in the world—objects, people, qualities one would like to appear to have—can be bought for a price. And the qualities of each owned thing reflect more glory back on the owner.

We are meant to believe that her possession of this high-end man and this high-end world—and her status as a high-end possession—will be an endless source of deep satisfaction.

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.

As the philosopher Alan Watts puts it in The Book, “When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another.”

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. As your stature grows to that of an oligarch or a demigod, you require bigger prizes and distractions. This is why Gatsby sets his sights on Daisy Buchanan: a goal worthwhile precisely for its impossibility. Eventually, though, Gatsby is subsumed by his own talent for self-invention. Like Draper, he becomes a cipher, a shadow of someone else’s idea of happiness.

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. Our ghosts—and our villains, which are the same as our heroes, which are the same as our leaders—are those who have a knack for perpetuating this titillation. They loom forever in a state of near-erotic agitation without ever arriving at their destination.

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. 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. In an age of narcissism, it’s only fitting that our heroes be deeply jittery, with an unconscious wish to remain that way. Their elaborate game of make-believe can be found at the heart of every conquistador’s tale. By focusing on a receding, elusive goal, we have the luxury of remaining haunted forever.

But it almost felt satisfying to hate him. My disappointment had a clear source. 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.

This incoherence of self goes straight to the heart of what makes foodie culture such a vibrant manifestation of consumerist bewilderment. 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 (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen). They do so as if the world turns on their appraisals, awaits their Yelp verdicts like an anxious crowd in Rome waiting for the cardinals to elect a new Pope.

the second that those locally sourced lamb chops run out at the foodie farm-to-table restaurant of the aspirational classes’ fever dreams, the obliging restaurateur must secure a backup source that’s perhaps less local and less blessed by the purist foodie gods.

Not only has the elevation of food to luxury created absurd expectations around a dimension of survival that might otherwise involve as few exotic elements as possible, but it’s also warped our understanding of how we exist on the Earth and how we coexist with our fellow earthlings, the cuddliest and cutest of which also tend to taste really good the younger and lazier and the more stuffed with organic hazelnuts they

Before we dive into another dish of bluefin or veal brains or carrots with a 15.2 Brix reading, we should consider how we’ll look fifty years from now to the inhabitants of an overfished, polluted planet: decadent, callous, delusional, and above all, deeply unsavory.

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.

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.

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.

Can I step away from this digital maw? Will my voice still matter if no one can hear it? Can silence feel more pressing and important than a ping? Instead of imagining the next text, the next tweet, the next Instagram post, the next flash of what my cousin did over spring break or what my neighbor ate for breakfast, what if I could imagine living in this moment, without wanting more? 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?

That’s sad, but it’s also a reason to wake up to the enormity of the moment, to the unbelievable gift of being alive, right now. You don’t need more than this. All of heaven is within you.

In fact, believing that you belong in paradise—and that paradise will somehow feel as good as a picture of paradise looks—has a way of emptying out the joys of paradise pretty rapidly.

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. Isn’t that how luxury is supposed to feel, after all? Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this.

Imagine, instead, a day of quiet wandering. Imagine tuning in to what’s around you, instead of getting distracted by events and sounds and messages that have nothing to do with where you are. Imagine taking some time to notice the wind in the leaves, the sunshine on the grass, the smallest seedpod drifting through the air, the oddly shaped stone resting at the edge of the creek. Indye’s hobby wasn’t just gluing junk together. Her hobby was the search itself. Every day’s walk held new promise.

In other words, power is admirable no matter the source. If being terrible makes it possible to win, then it makes perfect sense to be terrible. Terribleness itself becomes admirable.

Because no culture has conflated knee-jerk defiance with heroic independence and tenacity quite like America has, from John Wayne to Marlon Brando to James Dean to Elvis to Fonzie. We’ve metabolized decades of stories in which the day must always be saved by a renegade who exists above the law. The heroes of our dramas, movies, reality TV—and now our celebrities and political leaders—share a lack of respect for traditional limits guiding their behavior. Rules are there merely to be broken.

we’re supposed to think, admiringly, “This guy truly gives zero fucks.” The show’s creators may have misjudged the moment. Because instead of looking cool, Axelrod just looks like a prematurely old man, one whose worldview is expiring before his eyes.

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. No big deal, time to finish your sandwich.

What amazes me is how thoroughly this filter of numbers has invaded my worldview and the worldviews of those around me. I am asked to give a signal boost to almost every creative person I know, because my identifying Twitter number seems high enough that I could make a small difference. My number is privilege. I can tweet something stupid and a few people will like it, despite the fact that it’s stupid. My number means I am seen. I am not being ignored. There is hope among professionals whose fortunes are linked to mine that my number will continue to grow, and my endeavors will continue to succeed.

What I discover in my email in-box each morning are dispatches from young people who feel guilty and inadequate at every turn and who compare themselves relentlessly to others. They are turned inside out, day after day, by social media. From my vantage point, it looks tougher to be a young person today than it has been for decades.

“When I am happy, it only takes moments before I feel guilty about it—I feel desperately unworthy of my happiness, guilty for receiving it out of the pure chaotic luck of the universe.”

But I also want to say to them, time after time, that 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.

The fact of someone’s premature death shouldn’t make everything they ever did seem tragic, but sometimes it does anyway. I wish I had a slightly more uplifting story at the ready whenever I shuffled through these laminated cards.

You don’t see my hands shaking as I crush up pills, trying to help my friend die a peaceful death, wondering if there even is such a thing.

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.

When you’re young, being sloppy and cynical and spaced-out looks good on you.

“Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember that. 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.”

Because one day, we wake up ready—not to wag our fingers in someone’s face (which is just another way of twirling when you get right down to it) but to present our true selves without apology.

The crazed antics of male characters like Don Draper, Walter White, or Dr. Gregory House are reliably treated as bold, fearless, even ultimately heroic (a daring remark saves the big account; a lunatic gesture scares off a murderous thug; an abrasive approach miraculously yields the answer that saves a young girl’s life).

Why should instability in men and women be treated so differently? “If you don’t pull it together, no one will ever love you,” a talking Barbie doll told Mindy during a fantasy on The Mindy Project, reminding us exactly what was always on the line for her. Don’t act crazy, Mindy. Men don’t like crazy.

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 doesn’t depend only on talk and flair, even though we’re sometimes tempted to believe so. 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.