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

by Pandora Sykes

We need fixing and wellness tells us that this fix can come from within, if we find the right tools, or listen to the right gurus. Self-optimisation challenges the idea that we are trapped in our own bodies – instead, our bodies can be upgraded like smartphones, if we just commit to the change. By 2030 we will all be ‘regularly going into body shops for upgrades’,7 insists the transhumanist campaigner Zoltan Istvan.

Is life better at 100%? It sounds exhausting. What are the consequences of living – or of trying to live – a fully optimised life?

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.

what we should be seeking is not self-care, but self-respect. Dignity and faith in ourselves which is more than skin-deep. Something that does not offer a dream catcher – a false protection against ambivalence or trouble – but that seeks a sense of peace and private reconciliation.

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? It is spectacularly freeing to think of our jostling parts as bound together by fortune rather than shame; to see that a frangible self can offer more than an unbroken whole.

The unpaid work of the home has been historically thought of as ‘hallowed’ work, too holy to measure. (Sure.) But if unpaid work is not added to a country’s GDP, then it remains largely invisible – and as women still take on the bulk of housework,66 then it means that much of what we do remains invisible. This is an obstacle to equality.

Stendhal syndrome. A psychosomatic condition causing rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion and hallucinations that strikes after consuming too much beauty,