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

by Pandora Sykes

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.

‘Doing it for my self-care’ has become a phrase that makes anyone challenging your choices cruel and unfeeling.

That self-care and the self as a marketable product are related is a crucial pillar of Western wellness.

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 minute the phrase “having it all”26 lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces,’ writes Brodesser-Akner. ‘It was a way to reorient ourselves – we were not in service to anyone else, and we were worthy subjects of our own care.’

The thing that often strikes me about my generation is that we are savvier and more cynical than ever – with a meticulous eye for wrongdoing and injustice – but we are also incredibly naive. We are desperate to believe that there is a universal cure for the incurable human condition.

wellness plays into a dangerous purity myth where the good are well and the bad are ill. That sickness is retribution for moral failure, and that the ‘good vibes’ of wellness, notes Laura Thomas, nutritionist and author of Just Eat It, could cure you ‘if you just try hard enough’.

Self-care has become a default way to maintain a sense of control in a chaotic world.

I refuse to accept the supremacy of wellness, as if without it you are shapeless and slovenly. Eat the açaí bowl, sure; but don’t view it as redemption.

It is now better to look like someone else than to risk looking again like you’re failing at modern life.

The flattening and fragmenting of women is so entrenched that even those of us who by dint of privilege and opportunity should have all the answers struggle to feel pride in who we are.

If accommodating this flux in ourselves is a challenge, tolerating it in others is even more difficult. Our generosity needs to extend beyond our own

fragmented pieces and towards those o...

We are in the midst of a productivity crisis – in both an economic and personal sense. We have become obsessed with the idea that everything we produce should be valuable and visible, or else we’re doing life wrong.

To suggest that the only way a woman can balance work and children is to work less is not only impractical (I am the primary earner, yet no one is telling my husband to work less), it is also counter-productive. The solution to the ongoing battle women with children face in managing their workload is not for them to work less (unless, of course, they want to), but for the system to support them more.

We may stream programmes as a couple, but the bulk of us do so solo. A group of friends might all devour Game of Thrones, Top Boy and 24 – but they watch it on different nights, perhaps different weeks, even different years. (I only recently discovered Suits, for example, while my husband started Peaky Blinders.) Our binge-language might (mostly) be shared, but it is jumbled and often lonesome, as if we are learning French on entirely different curriculums, in our own tiny soundproofed booths.

We wish to be hermetically sealed into our TV shows like they are Tupperware.

Nowadays, you are as, if not more, likely to write about your most intimate personal issues online for strangers to stumble upon, as you are to tell your loved ones.

Expanding the parameters of female beauty into something more inclusive is essential. But to relate everything a woman does – even giving birth – to her appearance, does not so much ‘free’ the ‘authentic woman’ from her aesthetic confines, as re-order her within the same, limited framework. The

Aren’t we all caught between who we are and who we believe ourselves to be?

I am ‘suspended between a compulsion to do too much and a wish to do nothing’,7 as Josh Cohen puts it (a feeling not necessarily limited to our digital communications).