So much of the advice older women receive when we express dissatisfaction involves bringing our bodies in line. I look at the women my age on treadmills at the gym—so determined, grinding away. From morning television to the evening news, experts tell us to make chore charts, to save a certain percent of our income, to clean out our closets, to get our BMI under twenty-five. Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves. And yet: “The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable,” as Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote:
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