What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

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.

we learn to treat our humanity itself as poisonous, to treat our most human desires as a kind of sickness that can only be cured with outside help.

Through the devices in our pockets, we are reminded of our limitless freedom, limitless opportunities, limitless ways to indulge our interests. And yet, our lives feel more difficult to navigate than ever.

“What should I be doing right now?” is a question that feels more urgent than ever.

Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.

Our culture exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other.

Despite what we’ve been taught, we are neither eternally blessed nor eternally damned. We are blessed and damned and everything in between. Instead of toggling between victory and defeat, we have to learn to live in the middle, in the gray area, where a real life can unfold on its own time. We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock.

Everything must be improving. If things are bad, they are always about to get better. Reluctance to see it that way will be encountered as willful misery.

Yet this chirpy insistence on positivity has a strange way of enhancing the dread and anxiety and melancholy that lie just beneath the surface of things:

Refusing to smile, refusing to agree, refusing to comply: These things mean that you are difficult and you want to be unhappy.

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. You have to change your attitude and play nicely with others, even if that means bullshitting your way through every interaction. Everyone wants to see you turn that frown upside down. Smiles, everyone, smiles! Like you mean it this time.

You don’t feel proud of yourself for delivering the dream of Disney to your offspring. Instead, you feel like you’ve yanked your impressionable kids straight into the tyrannically cheerful cult of consumerist culture. 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.”

Don Draper sums up this process when he tells some Dow executives: “You’re happy because you’re successful, for now. But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”

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.

I started to notice that everything he said came out of a book he’d read. I started to see that he couldn’t improvise. He needed his script. He was angry all the time.

Then he’d laugh a tight laugh. He’d throw his head back—everything he did was theatrical—but it was still tight, still angry. He was obsessed with relaxing, but he never seemed relaxed.

But if one trait characterizes upper-middle-class citizens with lots of disposable income, it’s their tireless compulsion to dispose of that income in fresh new ways. The more pedestrian the product in question, the greater its seeming potential to evoke untold volumes of feeling and meaning.

A few years ago, I had an acquaintance inform me that I had a “texting problem” because I didn’t drop everything and text back at any hour of the day. I tried to explain that I’m a writer, so I need several hours of uninterrupted silent time to do my job. But because I work from home, this was met with eye rolls. You must answer more quickly, was the response. Everyone present agreed. I had a problem. Waiting four hours is too long. You must not mute the constant pinging. You are on call to everyone at all times.

He believed “that his son should be displayed ‘to the glory of God,’ as he put it.” Imagine being told that your talent is a miracle, and you have just one job. You don’t have to be happy or successful or attractive or well-balanced as a human being. You don’t have to accrue wealth or maintain lots of friendships or seem impressive in any other way. You don’t have to tweet or share photos of your latest sheet music on Instagram or start a podcast about composing to increase your visibility and expand the size of your platform. You just have to do your one job to the best of your ability. Imagine being told that you have been given your talent by God, and you must honor God’s will by manifesting that talent in your creations.

It takes hard work to say, “This is how I am,” in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be.

And maybe when he died, he didn’t think, “Is this all I get?” the way we, the narrow-minded living, might imagine, in the face of such a premature death. Maybe he thought, “I lived a rich life. I embraced what I was given, and it was incredible.”

Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want, but we’re never taught how to enjoy what we actually have.

So this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry.

It’s not surprising that in a culture dominated by such messages, many people believe that humility will only lead to being crushed under the wheels of capitalism or subsumed by some malevolent force that abhors weakness. Our anxious age erodes our ability to be open and show our hearts to each other. It severs our ability to connect to the purity and magic that we carry around inside us already, without anything to buy, without anything new to become, without any way to conquer and win the shiny luxurious lives we’re told we deserve. So instead of passionately embracing the things we love the most, and in so doing reveal our fragility and self-hatred and sweetness and darkness and fear and everything that makes us whole, we present a fractured, tough, protected self to the world.

But we should also aim to create a self and a life and an artistic vision that aren’t an escape from ordinary life, but a way of rendering ordinary life for people of every color, shape, size, and background more magical to them. In order to do that, we have to see that every human is divine. We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes. It will fuel us, once we see it. The ordinary people around us, the angry ones and the indifferent ones, the good ones and the bad ones, will start to glow and shimmer.

The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?