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

by Pandora Sykes

How could we have decision fatigue when there were no decisions to make? But this is the great hoax of the pandemic. We are making more decisions than ever before, because the way we did everything – even the most basic things – has been obstructed. You no longer take your kids to school, or hug your mum. It takes an entire afternoon to run minor errands:

The worst time of my life.

what to eat, what to believe in, how to breathe. Without the distractions we used to rely on, we are left with only ourselves.

But how could anyone absorb all this uncertainty, multiple times a day, without spiralling?

Julia Samuel suggests the term ‘living losses’, to differentiate between the loss of a life, and that of a lifestyle.

‘But you cannot qualify loss,’ she caveats. ‘We can’t ever tell someone how great or small their loss is.’ Grief and loss are subjective, and the knowledge of what other people were going through made many feel guilty to be struggling at all.

To some people, the pandemic has been an inconvenience. To others, it has been earth-shattering. It is not up to us to decid...

loneliness is not just a personal feeling, born of physical objects. It is also a political issue; a social crisis. It comes from feeling disempowered, voiceless and purposeless.

Loneliness can bond people together, but it can pull us apart.

Just because it is possible to do things or to live a certain way doesn’t mean we have to.

The paradox of choice is a theory coined by the psychologist Barry Schwartz to describe how choice has become just as much a straitjacket as a liberation.

With more choice, the parameters for what makes a good life – and what makes a good woman – narrow. The grey area is too large to navigate and so we tread the familiar, claustrophobic ground that has dogged women for centuries.

Women have been told for so many years that either they are the right type of woman or the wrong type of woman; that they have the right set of opinions or the wrong set of opinions; and so with what seems a surfeit of choice (and avocados), comes a sort of confidence collapse.

Wellness presents itself as forward-thinking – with its wearable gizmos and performance apps – and yet it is based on one of the oldest principles of patriarchy: that women are dirty and that a woman’s virtue depends on being perfect inside as well as outside.

(The account is not without controversy: the uploading of photographs of women without their permission has a chequered and misogynistic history.)

And why do we want – nay, need – to look like other women?

Inside us as women we have a little harem of female voices, coexisting and competing.

‘I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about,’

FLEABAG!

Fleabag’s ambivalence goes across the keys, from minor (what band to like) to major (what to believe in).

As a way out of this indecision, she begs to be flattened into someone else’s ideal. Screw all my choices, she appears to say, for there are too many to make; tell me how to thi...

A woman’s flattening happens when one of those fragmented parts absorbs the rest of her identity. This can be physical: a woman with big boobs is isolated into just those boobs. Cultural: a single woman is a roving and lonely soul. Sexual: a woman who has an affair with a married man is nothing more than a slut. Racial: a woman who is not white is defined only by the colour of her skin. And biological: she becomes someone who has either produced a child or not.

I have been flattened and, at times, have willingly flattened myself. For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to shave off the louder, messier, more abrasive parts of my personality. And with the bits I cannot change no matter how hard I try, I trail apologies behind me – ‘I’m sorry I’m anal; I’m sorry I’m too sensitive’

In a world where violence against women is still so prevalent, we become aware at an early age that our body makes us visible and vulnerable.

I am ‘lucky’ in that the worst thing that has happened to me on the Tube is when a man cupped my vagina from behind; or that time when another man pressed himself behind me on the escalator,

Perhaps my daughter does not recognise me in that photograph because I did not recognise myself.

‘My life is a mess.36 My mind is a mess. But nobody has been able to convince me that the value of a mind that isn’t a mess is greater.’

Claire turns to her furiously, not, as she suspects, in order to shout at her for fucking up the evening, but to tell her, ‘You just make me feel like I’ve failed.’

Fleabag herself is not and cannot be relatable to everyone. The idea that any woman – real or fictional – could speak for an entire generation is absurd – and yet it persists.

The idea of relatability is ‘flattening and deceptively homogenising’,

relatable is a coded word for likeable.

The woman who celebrates her splinters, or refuses to feel guilt for them, is often described as ‘unruly’.

Pop culture would have us believe that unruliness is something powerful – a radical resistance to the status quo. But the modern invocation of what this unruliness means is often self-fulfilling and banal:

Flattening women into one or other category does not alleviate criticism; it exacerbates it.

She has been flattened into a paper doll. On one side, a victim. On the other, a hero. With nothing in between.

call-out culture flattens. It erases nuance, so that there is little difference between the judgement delivered to a racist corporation and an influencer’s foolish Instagram caption.

50 One of the greatest ironies of womanhood is that the more you resist your fragments, the more they turn into splinters and pierce you.

Kintsugi suggests that when things are fragmented, they are altered but not irreversibly damaged. Rather, they are realigned to create something richer. It is entirely normal to seek wholeness. But what if wholeness is not our most valuable state?

‘Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.’

We should not mistake indecision for helplessness. The series of forks in the road can be overwhelming, but they are proof of our evolving selves.

We are neither broken, nor whole, just creatures muddling through.

2 But even those who are employed, and whose basic needs are met, wrestle with constant feelings of anxiety.

‘Who gets up each morning believing that they’re about to make a meaningful contribution to the world?20 I’ve met doctors who question their purpose,’ counters journalist Andrew Anthony.

‘Are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off?37 Or are we only what we still have left to do?’

I feel like time is running out, they write. These women are, at most, twenty-five years old. They want success within a certain timeframe. Now. And they want that because they see women like Kylie Jenner becoming a billionaire at twenty-one.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.

The implication is that watching extreme content does not nullify our sense of right and wrong; rather, it increases our compassion.

We are wont to analyse every new development in modern life, until we leech all the fun out of it. Can’t entertainment just be entertainment?

No but seriously though

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 psychological theory of The Looking-Glass Self,4 coined by sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in the early twentieth century, suggests we base our behaviour on the perceptions of others, or on what we think others expect from us.

The self, Cooley argues, is not so much shaped by us, as it is crafted and reinforced through social experience.

The era of the sharing self dictates that ‘the more we share [note: no object] the better the world will be’,11 writes John. But self-disclosure is not always cathartic. ‘Online sharing expands the public at the expense of the private.’12 Anything you share online becomes the property of others to distort and comment upon as they wish.