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

by Pandora Sykes

If we are no longer in control of everything, if we are not fully in charge of our destiny, then we can’t blame ourselves for everything that does not ‘manifest’ itself as we hoped. We can, to an extent, relax the reins. Or at least accept that they may on occasions become twisted beyond our grasp. The irony of wellness is that most enthusiasts

Take Meghan Markle. Discussion of the duchess does not centre on her as an actual person any more, but whether or not you think the critique of her is fair. She has become a canvas onto which people project their hopes, fears and dreams. Markle (too American, too Hollywood, too ambitious, too Black) is diminished, diminished and further diminished. She has been flattened into a paper doll. On one side, a victim. On the other, a hero. With nothing in between.

This must be the reason we are not happy. And so we work harder and harder to find this utopia, without realising that we are getting further and further away from what Maynard Keynes actually meant. We are on an everlasting quest to find ‘the ideal work week’, in the hope that the winning formula will bring endless happiness, fulfilment and satisfaction. Is the answer eight hours of work a week (apparently the optimum for our mental health)? Four hours (posited by bestselling educator Tim Ferriss – even more improbable)?

Kreider adds that even this ‘lamented busyness is [often] self-imposed:27 work and obligations [we’ve] taken on voluntarily’. The increase in workload has most affected those in high-status jobs, who are more ‘likely to shape the terms of public discussion and debate,’28 argue Gershuny and Sullivan – meaning that it is not an ‘objective phenomenon’ but one that adversely affects privileged people. You could say that those lucky enough to be able to work long hours – lucky that our work is desired, recognised and remunerated – are also those who complain most about feeling busy. Could it be that the truly busy are the voiceless? Those juggling multiple low-income jobs – too, well, busy to self-define as being ‘busy’?

I realised I had fallen into a circular trap: I was spending more time seeking happiness in the efficiency of my work than I was in the work itself.

wasn’t depressed – rather, I was overwhelmed by tickboxery. With more choice than ever before in the way we live, travel and work comes endless opportunity, but also an insidious obligation to ‘tick off’ everything. Tickboxery is a way of skimming the water, clocking up as much as you can without ever delving too deep. You travel to a city for thirty-six hours; read a book while listening to a podcast. The act of getting things done – a sort of flimsy, surface-level productivity – has become more important than the doing. (Shout out to Shakespeare here, who reminds us: ‘Things won are done;38 joy’s soul lies in the doing.’) My husband exhibits extreme tickboxery when it comes to travel. ‘Haven’t we “done” California?’ he remarked, before our summer holiday this year. ‘I’m riveted as to how you think one can even do California,’ I retort. ‘It’s enormous. We’ve barely touched the sides. We haven’t even come close to “doing” London, and we live here.’

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. To steal the wailings of Julius Caesar: ‘Do you not think it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander,51 at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?’

Not only does FOMOG leave no space or time for the struggle, but it also doesn’t allow for recognition of the goals that have been achieved.

But prolonged exposure to harrowing material can also make us numb. The success of true-crime documentaries and podcasts – with stomach-churning real footage and sensationalist storylines – reveals the unpalatable truth that, for many, there is a glee to be found in grimness. That one person’s difficult circumstances can be poured into pleasure for others is not a new idea. (Dickens, anyone?) But there is an argument to be made that the pleasure of watching a life less privileged than yours, as a form of entertainment, is a kind of exploitative tourism. That rather than amplifying vulnerable voices that are rarely heard, and often ignored by society, these voices are distorted and flat-screened into entertainment – and then relegated to background noise, as we half-listen while doing our laundry.

And yet boredom is being erased from our lives. We are no longer bored, we are ‘homo distractus’,25 writes Wu. Our aversion to boredom has become almost admirable. In 2014, the social psychologist Timothy Wilson asked participants to sit in a lab room and do nothing but think, for fifteen minutes. The room was empty except for a device that emitted a mild but painful electric shock. Despite all participants stating beforehand that they would pay to avoid an electric shock, 67% of male participants and 25% of women gave themselves electric shocks – in some cases,26 multiple times – simply because they were bored. Spending even fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts proved too much for many of them.

While watching Unbelievable on my laptop, I read on my iPhone the Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalism from ProPublica that inspired the Neflix series. I cast Euphoria from Netflix onto my television, while simultaneously Googling catwalk pictures of Hunter Schafer and reading Zendaya’s Twitter timeline. The media theorist Dan Harries calls this viewsing: using other media while viewing a primary source.41 He argues that rather than distracting you, reading around the

Instead of worrying (while continuing to binge-watch), it is important to remember how fortunate we are, to be able to pick between the adventures on screen, and those off – whilst acknowledging, hard as it sometimes is, that the former should never fully replace the latter. Except for on a Sunday night and then – well, you bring the snacks and I’ll see you on the sofa.

As a pretentious teenager, I went through a phase of writing down my favourite quotes in a leather-trimmed marbleised notebook, which I’d been given one Christmas and felt far too special to fill with my own flimsy words. An eclectic collection of bon mots from the likes of Milan Kundera, William Blake, Tony Blair and, er, Sharon Stone, many of the quotes dramatically interrogate the thorny concept of an authentic life. ‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know,’ from Hamlet. ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation,’ by Oscar Wilde.

In his book of the same name, the writer Joe Kennedy coins the term authentocrat to describe those who,1 like Caulfield, are not simply obsessed with their own authenticity, but also with spotting lapses in that of others. The cynic in me wonders if the millennial pursuit of authenticity – including my own – speaks less of a desire to determine a sincere self, as it does an attempt to justify behaviour by placing it in the context of morality and originality. So sue me, I’m making choices in order to live my authentic life.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters may have once written that we are amusing ourselves to death, but I wonder if we are expressing ourselves to death. Extinguished by our own self-expression.

But I rail against the idea that to be sincere, it is mandatory to spill your psychological guts. That if you share some things, you must share all things. That to be authentic, you must lay bare a personal chaos. A woman choosing not to share parts of her life should not be seen as inauthentic.

‘The woman who does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet,’18 writes the social scientist Mohadesa Najumi. Our desire for validation is far older than the internet – what is ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ if not a bid for validation? (The only response: ‘No, it is perfect, like a peach, plucked fresh from Tesco.’) People-pleasing adversely affects women, who contort themselves into strange shapes and seek reassurance in places they often shouldn’t.

It is the hinge on which authenticity squeaks. If you are a celebrity in the public eye, there comes a point at which you realise your fans don’t know, or don’t care about, who you deem your authentic self – they are merely fans of the self they constructed for you.

‘Authenticity is like charisma,’51 writes Andrew Potter in The Authenticity Hoax. ‘If you have to tell people you have it, then you probably don’t.’ It is hard even now for me to distinguish between my authentic tastes and those I absorb from my peers. The question is further complicated by the internet: how do you remain authentic when you’re constantly internalising compliments and criticism not only of yourself but of your peers – privy, as you are, to their mutating digital selves – in equal measure? For me, this has meant digital disassociation. Not so much to regularly log off my digital self, as to irregularly log on.

This is known as the Zeigarnik Effect: a psychological term that describes how we are more preoccupied with incomplete experiences than complete ones. Caught in this endless feedback loop – as impossible to complete as Snake was when I was thirteen – it is no wonder we’re feeling fraught.

But the particularly female fear about how you ‘come across’ is a significant part of many friendships between women – so that even in your most solid, enduring relationships, it can be hard not to infer acceptance

Instead of empathy, Bloom calls for radical compassion. Compassion is objective and allows decisions to be made with a level of remove, rather than from within the eye of the storm. I can think of nothing the raw nerve needs more right now.

Factfulness, writes Rosling, does not mean duping yourself into thinking everything is fine. It means acknowledging that it is unhealthy to not recognise the progress the world has made; otherwise ‘the consequent loss of hope can be devastating’.30 A necessary component of a contented life is seeking out the good news as much as the bad and reading it offline as well as on screens. We need to rework our definition of self-care: Netflix and Chill and a face mask might make for a relaxing evening, but for long-term mental peace? My bet’s on factfulness.

But the concept of ‘more’ is something we need to turn inward as much as outward. To accept that gain can involve loss; that to compromise is not the same as being compromised; that sensitivity does not eliminate resilience. While writing this book over the past year, I have been continuously interrogating my ideas not so much about what constitutes the right life, but a rightful one. I now realise that in doing so, I have moved one step closer towards it.