Exactly How It Should Be

Though she has some fame, I didn't know the name Heather Havrilesky before reading her essay collection What If This Were Enough? I enjoyed what she has to say enough, though, that I want to capture some of it here. I'll start with my brief review.

That's my territory: gratitude and anger, anger and gratitude.

3.5 stars.

A collection of cultural critiques that are acerbic and insightful, deconstructing the supposedly happy ends to which so many of our entertainments and activities lead us to aspire, demonstrating them as false and harmful. In realm after realm, Havrilesky encourages us to give up the never-satisfying and fruitless pursuit, to instead find ways to appreciate the joys of what we already have. She is entertaining and eloquent, with many bits that delighted me purely for the quality of the writing. I only wish she hadn't spent the vast majority of most of her essays negatively complaining about the current state of affairs and had instead offered more positive descriptions about what things would look life if we found them enough.

Here are the bits I pulled out. The four-paragraph quote in the middle is the real keeper.

Yet this chirpy insistence on positivity has a strange way of enhancing the dread and anxiety and melancholy that lie just beneath the surface of things.

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When everything is bent into a jolly shape, everything feels more mournful than it should.

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My disappointment had a clear source. I would try to make things perfect and I would fail, over and over again. I couldn't just love someone and be loved back. That was too easy. That didn't feel right. I was more familiar with dissatisfaction. I was more at home with longing. As I moved my things into that dusty, tiny, haunted house, I looked around and thought, "This will never be enough." It was exactly what I wanted.

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Adults are not always so fun. Sometimes I go to parties filled with mature people who know things and act their age and I'm quickly filled with despair. I walk in the door and greet the host and mill about, but in the pit of my stomach I know that leaving home was a mistake. I will not be surprised and delighted. I will not learn something new. I will not even enjoy the sound of my own voice. I will be lulled into a state of excruciating paralysis and self-hatred and other-people hatred.

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Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn't get any better than this.

Feeling that way doesn't require money. It doesn't require the perfect scenery. All that's required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: this is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can't simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable--even divine.

The sky is gray. A fly lands on you hand. Your cocktail is lukewarm. And still, for some reason, if you slow down and accept reality enough, it starts to feel right. Better than right. You are not comparing reality to some imagined perfect alternative. You are welcoming reality for what it already is.

And what if you have no cocktail, because you're sober now? And what if your neck is aching? Maybe you're running late. Maybe you feel anxious. Still, you pay attention to each little fold, each disappointment, each impatient attempt by mind and body to "fix" what already is. And then surrender to all of it. These details are irreplaceable. They give the moment its value. The chance to soak in this mundane, uneven moment is the purest luxury of all.

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That's my territory: gratitude and anger, anger and gratitude.

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The more I have, the more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the center of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.

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Maybe that's why the pastoral narrative requires such sharp teeth: If all lives include suffering, we'd like to suffer for valid reasons, and not because our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the apps on our iPhones won't load quickly enough.

When it comes to imaginary hardship, nothing quite beats the apocalypse. If you want your dread and angst to feel more romantic and heroic, "This job is slowly killing me" doesn't hold a candle to "This zombie might slowly eat me alive." And sometimes nothing short of an apocalypse will align the world with your fantasies.

And I liked "Land of Heroic Villains" enough that I've reproduced a good bit of it below. Some of it is similar to what I wrote at the end of Identity & Privilege: A Few Thoughts.

American exceptionalism, which always included some talk of bravery and honor but also privileged winners over loser and haves over have-nots, may have finally curdled into this craven survivalist brutality. TV reflects our culture's fundamentalist roots leavened by an almost surreal disentanglement from our long-held standards of behavior. It's not just a void of ethics that we're witnessing, though; it's the celebration of that void. Many of our most popular narratives sidestep unwieldy talk of values, a seemingly outmoded term, in favor of a recurring struggle to dominate, or else to avoid domination. Brutality, mercilessness, lack of concern for principles--these are painted as prerequisites. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, British documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux remarked on the U.S. president, "Trump saw through so much. For all his awfulness, I can't but help admire his shamelessness, in an odd way. Or maybe not admire, but be fascinated by it and maybe envy it. In a shame culture he seems to have figured out that if you refuse to be shamed, it gives you enormous power."

In other words, power is admirable no matter the source. If being terrible makes it possible to win, then it makes perfect sense to be terrible. Terribleness itself becomes admirable.

More than just our triumphant, pioneering spirit, or the heroes we made of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, perhaps it's America's long embrace of rebellion that should answer for our current moment. Because no culture has conflated knee-jerk defiance with heroic independence and tenacity quite like America has, from John Wayne to Marlon Brando to James Dean to Elvis to Fonzie. We've metabolized decades of stories in which the day must always be saved by a renegade who exists above the law. The heroes of our dramas, movies, reality TV--and now our celebrities and political leaders--share a lack of respect for traditional limits guiding their behavior. Rules are there merely to be broken. . . .

It's not hard to chart America's moral decline in retrospect, just by examining our cultural artifacts. But many of us didn't realize until 2017 that the self-serving villains and sociopaths on our screens also populated our real-life offices and schools and neighborhoods. . . .

When you really slow down the tape on Weinstein--or Donald Trump, or Bill Cosby, or Bill O'Reilly, or Roger Ailes--what you see more than anything else is a profound lack of connection to other human beings. It's not just that women, or strangers, or people of color, or children of immigrants, or Muslims (or a combination thereof), don't rate in their world. It's that these people are utterly irrelevant. A person is either useful and part of the club, or else that person is cast out like trash. The second someone ceases to be useful, they are forgotten. No big deal, time to finish your sandwich.

Harvey Weinstein's trail of victims allows us to appreciate the collateral damage of those monsters we, too, readily glorified on our screens. By sympathizing with a steady flow of merciless men, we've unwittingly transformed out shared notion of what makes a man powerful, what makes a man admirable, what makes a man truly free. It's tempting to believe that we can live inside this illusion, and blot the victims out of sight when their presence becomes inconvenient or uncomfortable for us. It's tempting to believe that there will be no cost to our recklessness and our abandonment of principle. It's easier not to worry about these things. But the dark truth of what we've been avoiding for years now seems to be rising before our eyes. The fantasy world we created, in which villains triumph and are lauded as heroes, slowly led us to a new, nightmarish reality. But unlike our fictional villains, we will be forced to reckon with our sins, whether we want to or not.