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

by Pandora Sykes

@AnnieKNK quipped on Twitter, we ‘use self-care language to justify increasingly sociopathic behaviour’.

Ron Purser, the author of the brilliantly brutal McMindfulness, notes that the mass-marketing of Buddhist practice wouldn’t be tolerated with any other

I am like a bloated spider, dangling off the web of the dream catcher, convinced that it is too fragile to bear my weight.

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

Fragmenting a woman is a way to keep her at bay; to allot her a certain space.

Logically, we know that Freud’s madonna-whore complex (whereby women are either maternal or promiscuous) is a fallacy, and yet women are still often flattened into either/or – and even worse,32 pitted against each other.

Nora Ephron’s response: ‘Here’s what a parent is.33 A parent is a person who has children.’

The depressing truth is that to many – unwilling to acknowledge that a woman can be, and do, more than her worst mistake – she will forever and only be that.

‘Women need to be broken,’51 says Carty-Williams, simply. ‘Because to be “together” is a fool’s errand.’ The dictionary would have you believe that to be broken is to be wrecked, crushed and damaged. But it also means to be mutable and autonomous; to have the chance to form into something better, something more valuable.

The Japanese art of kintsugi joins broken pieces of pottery back together with bright veins of gold lacquer. The fractures are transformed from unwelcome fault lines into something to be highlighted and celebrated.

The office and home were once strictly separated by physical distance, but now – thanks to the internet and smartphones which mean you are always available, always on – the walls

The omnipresence of work in our lives can lead to burnout, a syndrome that exploded into public conversation this year after Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen’s piece on millennial burnout went viral.

There is a prestige to the agony of busyness. If success was once measured by how much leisure time you had, it is now linked with how much of it you lack.

Instead, it is better to think of our work not so much as something we need to nail every single time, but something that we get merely good enough.

In The Mother of All Jobs, Christine Armstrong writes that for some working mothers ‘released’ from maternity leave, it is work, not home, that functions as their ‘safe, happy place’.

I was charmed and comforted by David Sedaris’s ‘Four Burners Theory’. In his essay, ‘Laugh, Kookaburra’, he lays out the four burners of life: family, friends, health and work. ‘In order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners,’

Happiness is transitory; it occurs at the peak of our experience. It is not something we should, or can, feel all the time. Especially not through work.

The term ‘infobesity’1 was coined in 2013 to describe the torrent of information clogging our arteries like cholesterol. It turns us into ‘pancake people’, writes the playwright Richard Foreman. ‘Spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.’

My phone morphed from a thrilling roulette – into a Tamagotchi of anxiety and dread.

In his book Walden, the nineteenth-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau cautions against living ‘thick’ with no space between our interactions. How, he writes, can we respect each other, if we ‘stumble over one other’?42

It would appear that emotions are the curse, not death. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Believing we know more than we do is called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

A troll is not born of the internet, but the internet amplifies the wolf within.