What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

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.

Those with money to burn will always find creative ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as enlightened, discriminating, and honorable. And those who provide such indulgences are probably wise to collude in this fantasy.

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 are.

It’s time to acknowledge that our enthusiasms have taken us too far. We can’t continue eating most of the animals we’ve overbred and forced into short, filthy, miserable lives.

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.

But beyond the fantastical idealism of foodie culture, there’s the simple fact that cooking a decent meal or dining at the right restaurant is an act of leisure-class consumption rather than a heroic or courageous feat to build your entire identity around. As former food critic John Lanchester asserts in The New Yorker, our choices about food are nowhere near the most important political choices we make. “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.” He takes it a step further. “Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, ‘I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal.’ ”

We live in a world that wants us to replace the hundred bags of worthless stuff we just threw out with a hundred more bags of worthless stuff—not eventually, not next week, but today. Capitalism is exquisitely designed to remind us at every turn that not only is our happiness contingent on our ability to purchase more stuff, but our inability to do so makes our unhappiness all but guaranteed.

Figuring out how to sort our belongings might sound trivial at first, but it forms part of our guiding modern religion, one that binds us to lifestyles built around excess while failing to meet our most basic human needs. 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.

Our minds, in other words, are filled with the clutter of what comes next: messages and tweets and texts yet to be received. We live in a world of past and future clutter. We are boxed in. There is no space for where we are right now.

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?

Just when you’re starting to get comfortable, you disappear. And

maybe only one or two of your things will seem important to someone else when you’re gone. 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.

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. 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 sky is gray. A fly lands on your hand. Your cocktail is lukewarm. And still, for some reason, if you slow down and accept reality enough, it starts to feel right. Better than right. You are not comparing reality to some imagined perfect alternative. You are welcoming reality for what it already is. And what if you have no cocktail, because you’re sober now? And what if your neck is aching? Maybe you’re running late. Maybe you feel anxious. Still, you pay attention to each little fold, each disappointment, each impatient attemp...

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.

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.

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.

This is the shape my mid-life crisis is taking: I’m worried about what I have time to accomplish before I get too old to do anything. I’m fixated on what my life should look like by now. I’m angry at myself, because I should look better, I should be in better shape, I should be writing more, I should be a better cook and a more present, enthusiastic mother.

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.

Being capable isn’t celebrated or embraced or rewarded handsomely or, often, even noticed these days. We prefer to celebrate the valiant, charismatic leader who speaks confidently of his vision of what should come next. We don’t always care who is doing the concrete work to which his grand gestures allude. We don’t demand that he demonstrate a clear understanding of the practical tasks and hurdles that lie in the path he’s laid out. “Just make it happen” is what he tells anyone who asks, and that sounds bold and brave to us. Somehow, daring to insist that someone else do the work is admirable and just. Because he seems entitled to his visionary position, we are inclined to believe that he deserves it.

The sound of pointless competitiveness, an awkward grab for glory, is a little bit like a major chord being played sloppily but with great force on a church organ, by a small, angry child.

But no one should have to choose between becoming a capable, pragmatic handmaiden who tries not to take up too much space and a disorganized dreamer with a bloated ego who steps on everyone’s toes. And I can see now that other people have ego rewards built into their daily lives—meetings, conferences, watercooler talk, accolades, long mutually congratulatory conversations with their peers. As shallow as those things can feel, after years of packing my days with as much efficient work as possible and treating any moment of self-satisfaction as shameful, it’s about time I gazed at a bookshelf filled with leather-bound journals. I want to be unabashedly proud of my work for once in my life. I want to hold my ground and acknowledge that I’m an adult now and I know some things. Instead of apologizing for being too proud or insisting that my accomplishments aren’t that big of a deal, I want to sigh contentedly as I lean way back in my swivel chair.

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. Brilliance sometimes relies on believing in your talents before you have any evidence that they’re there. What a luxury, to take such an enormous leap of faith, without hesitation!

If all lives include suffering, we’d like to suffer for valid reasons, and not because our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the apps on our iPhones won’t load quickly enough.

But most of all, this dream of purity and separation feeds the delusion that isolation is the most honorable choice, that dropping out is somehow more valiant than working slowly to reform the system and help those who are truly in need. Sometimes hope

doesn’t offer the same sense of comfort that closing the cabin doors does.

Ultimately, though, it’s arrogant to imagine that going it alone is any nobler than collaborating, compromising, working within a community in order to improve it. We need each other to survive the catastrophes to come. But more importantly, we need each other to prevent them.

This goes back to the core religion of the guru, of course: More than anything else, the modern guru denies the existence of external obstacles. Racism, systemic bias, income inequality—to acknowledge these would be to deny the power of the self. They are sidestepped in favor of handy modern conveniences, or the importance of casting off draining relationships, or the constant quest to say no to the countless opportunities rolling your way. What an indulgence it must be, to have your greatest obstacles be “sugar” or “anger” or “toxins.”

Because once we learn to cultivate compassion for ourselves without improvements or upgrades, we also learn to have compassion for other people, as broken and flawed and different from us as they might be. And if we’re ever going to recognize that our survival is

Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our heads, growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will be better—more successful, adored, satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, “This is how I am,” in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside. It requires conscious effort not to waste your life swimming furiously against the tide, toward some imaginary future that will never make you happy anyway.

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. There will always be more victories to strive for, more strangers to charm, more images to collect and pin to our vision boards. It’s hard to want what we have; it’s far easier to want everything in the world. 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. We are hurtling forward—frantic, dissatisfied, and perpetually lost.

Our bewildered state doesn’t just injure us individually; it impedes our ability to work together for a better world. We can’t stand for justice and effect change until we’ve learned to push away empty temptations, shiny dead ends, and trivial distractions. As long as we’re perpetually assaulted by a barrage of

news and tweets and texts, as long as commercial messages and smooth brands and profit-minded discourse are our only relief from our insecure realities, we’ll never develop the ability to live in the present moment. We have to cultivate compassion for ourselves and each other. We have to connect with each other in genuine and meaningful ways. But we also have to relearn how to breathe in the late summer air and feel the sunshine, to admire the swelling pink clouds and shut out the his...

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. All magic is lost to our sad economies of survival. Competition always supersedes connection.

If we didn’t succumb to our culture’s perplexing, destructive messages, something might shift. We might find ways to support each other more radically, more selflessly, without distractions, without anticipating a celebratory end point:

We are living in a time of extreme delusion, disorientation, and dishonesty. At this unparalleled moment of self-consciousness and self-loathing, commercial messages have replaced real connection or faith as our guiding religion. These messages depend on convincing us that we don’t have enough yet, and that everything valuable and extraordinary exists outside of ourselves.

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. Our shiny robot soldiers do battle with other shiny robot soldiers, each side calling the other side “terrible,” because in a world that can’t see poetry or recognize the divinity of each living soul, fragility curdles into macho toughness and soulless rage. All nuance is lost in a fearful rush to turn every passing thought or idea or belief into dogma.

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.

We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities. We are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering in an enervated, anxious state over our value and our popularity. We are called to view our actions as important, with or without consecration by forces beyond our control. We are called to plant these seeds in our world: to dare to tell every living soul that they already matter, that their seemingly mundane lives are a slowly unfolding mystery, that their small choices and acts of generosity are vitally important.

Here is how you will start: You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of “best”ness that will finally bring you peace. You will see that you are as much of a miracle as Mozart was. You will remember that bit of advice lurking inside one of Shirley Jackson’s dark novels: “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.” You will feel this and know it in your heart and pass this feeling along to the people around you. You will breathe in this moment—this imperfect, uncertain, not-quite-right, heavenly moment. You will say to yourself, “It is enough.” And it will be.