How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?: Essays on Modern Life

by Pandora Sykes

No one’s life was ever improved by 175 different salad dressings, or scrolling through 88 pages of black dresses.

The difference is now we no longer compare ourselves with our peers past whom we stroll, but the perfect strangers past whom we scroll.

A whopping 83% of women say that social media negatively impacts their self-esteem.3 Quelle surprise. We are drowning in a sea of comparisonitis.

As we splash in the lives of others, options begin to fee...

Wellness feels like the manifestation of everything we have been heading towards: a seven-chakra band-aid to cover our fears, desires and unedifying habits.

There are plenty of challenges facing us right now – the housing crisis, the mental health crisis, the political crisis – but the ‘obstacle’ that modern self-care often addresses is minuscule. That being tired, for instance, can be overcome with the ‘self-care ritual’ of taking a long bubble bath.

It could very well also describe modern self-care, which is frequently thrown around as a Get Out of Jail Free card. ‘Doing it for my self-care’ has become a phrase that makes anyone challenging your choices cruel and unfeeling. Cancelling on someone an hour before you are meant to meet doesn’t make you a shitty friend, but a woman who is prioritising her self-care.

Don’t get me wrong, prioritising self-care over socialising is not necessarily a bad thing.

I think a lot of women struggle with religion because it fails to support so many of our rights, particularly those around family planning.

Various studies have shown that women are less likely to be taken seriously in A&E than men;27 that they are less likely to be prescribed painkillers, and that when they are, they have to wait longer to receive them; and that they are more likely to be referred to psychologists for unexplained pain than given medical tests.

We are so terrified of things slipping from our grasp, that we think having a bad day is a reflection of our failure to harness something – rather than a shitty day being a life staple, often to do with uncontrollable external conditions and not some inner failing.

(The most recent proposal from the MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee – to tax every garment by 1p in order to raise £35 million to improve garment sorting and collection – was rejected by government ministers in June 2019.)

There’s no denying that excessive consumption is a middle-class problem. But in twenty years, the global middle class is expected to grow by 3 billion people – making it a very large problem indeed.15 Leaving aside the pressing issue of sustainability and the impact of fast fashion on the environment – for which I thoroughly recommend the work of Lucy Siegle and Orsola de Castro

‘Woman racks up $10,000 debt after trying to become “Instagram famous”’

‘Your grandparents did World War II, like, buck up. But at the same time, the way that life is hard for millennials is that it’s not necessarily more or less hard, it’s hard in a different way.’ Anna Codrea-Rado, the co-host of Is This Working?, a podcast about modern work practice,22 defines burnout as the accumulating expectation to do more more more.

The influencer economy plays a significant role in perpetuating the myth among young people that careers are not progressing fast enough. Why bother to intern, or train, or work as an assistant, when you can get money, fame and fortune through a photographic grid?

Many people like to believe that work is no longer gendered; that ‘the fight has been won’. Women can do anything men can! We can, it’s true – just for less money and typically with a lot more out-of-office work. The gap is closing in one sense – 75% of all British mothers are now in paid work,62 compared to 92% of fathers – but not in another: a woman earns only 81.6p to the man’s pound,63 despite there being tangible proof that companies with women in board positions make more money.

When I read for two hours without distraction, I don’t feel marvellous because I am specifically shunning technology; I enjoy it because I am indulging in a single narrative, made of equal parts focus and imagination.

As Laura Freeman, the arts journalist and author of The Reading Cure, puts it, rather beautifully: ‘A book never bothers.59 A book doesn’t wheedle. No one has asked you to subscribe, sign up, enter your card details, your username, your password. The battery never dies. The WiFi never cuts out. In an age when we are ever more targeted and profiled and mined for information, reading a book allows you to be, for so long as the covers hold you, truly quiet and undisturbed.’

‘The woman who does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet,’

That was the charge levied at Missguided in 2017, when shoppers accused the faster-fashion brand of photoshopping stretch marks onto models’ bodies. Rather than booking a model with stretch marks, Missguided decided to paint on their own, so they could ensure the striae were placed just so. This creative manipulation of a woman’s flaws is no more authentic than photoshopping them into oblivion, so that she is smooth like an egg. (The brand vehemently denies any photoshopping took place.)

How do we expect to live present and clear, if our minds are addled by other people’s holidays, hangovers and new shoes first thing in the morning?

Diana herself was a woman governed by her emotions. She ‘legitimised the role of feeling in the public space’, writes d’Ancona: speaking about her bulimia; shaking the hand of an AIDS patient in 1989; that ‘there were three of us in this marriage’ Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. Diana traded in feelings – they were her legacy.

Distilling ourselves into every cause and every conversation renders them meaningless. You can be annoyed by someone or something without feeling duty-bound to express it. It sounds obvious and yet it seems like we’ve forgotten it’s possible.