What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

Only by recognizing the absurdity of our guiding assumptions can we cultivate a more organic, enthusiastic, complex relationship to our lived experience.

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

We have a lot of work to do. We have to fight for this world, but we also have to fight for our ability to experience this world more fully. We have to rediscover how to navigate each day. We have to learn how to embrace the imperfection of the present moment and accept the wide range of experiences that fall between happiness and sadness, success and failure, true love and hatred, popularity and invisibility.

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.

All we have are the numbers: likes, retweets, more followers, fewer followers. Everything we have to offer is assigned a number. The number tells us how popular we are, and how popular our thoughts and experiences and opinions are.

We are emptying out everything in our lives in exchange for meaningless figures on a screen. We are disappearing in plain sight.

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.