What If This Were Enough? Page 11
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 our 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.
the popularity contest
Lately I keep thinking about the Count, the puppet from the 1970s educational kids’ show Sesame Street. He looked like Count Dracula, but he didn’t want to suck your blood. All he wanted was to count things. This made him something of a social pariah. He couldn’t make small talk. He never asked anyone about their day. All he cared about was numbers. If you tried to introduce him to your kids, he’d ignore their names and yell “ONE CHILD, TWO CHILDREN!”
He seemed cheerful, but he couldn’t focus. He was constantly distracted by counting. His head was full of numbers. His whole life was passing him by, but he didn’t notice. Numbers were everything to him. There was nothing else.
I know the feeling. These days, most of us offer up pieces of ourselves online—photos of our dogs, links to articles we read, opinions, jokes, announcements about future events, memes, clever turns of phrase—and they’re translated into a number. Their value is quantified and they’re emptied of meaning. All we have are the numbers: likes, retweets, more followers, fewer followers. Everything we have to offer is assigned a number. The number tells us how popular we are, and how popular our thoughts and experiences and opinions are.
What amazes me is how thoroughly this filter of numbers has invaded my worldview and the worldviews of those around me. I am asked to give a signal boost to almost every creative person I know, because my identifying Twitter number seems high enough that I could make a small difference. My number is privilege. I can tweet something stupid and a few people will like it, despite the fact that it’s stupid. My number means I am seen. I am not being ignored. There is hope among professionals whose fortunes are linked to mine that my number will continue to grow, and my endeavors will continue to succeed.
My number provides the dangerous illusion that there’s a crowd waiting to hear my next thought. (A small crowd, though I was told by a publicist that my number includes an “alarming percentage of influencers,” which made me feel proud of myself, but in an empty way that left a strange, sour aftertaste.) The whole experience feels tempting and seductive and also stupid and embarrassing. But a small percentage of my acquaintances value these things, and they lament that their number is too low, and they ask me how I do it, even though my number isn’t that impressive. I sometimes enjoy the fact that they feel tortured by this, possibly because I’m a bad person.
So how do I do it? What is my trick?
My trick is that I’m sometimes willing to interrupt real-life interactions with real people in order to stare at imaginary numbers instead. I tell myself I’m just filling my time with something fun. I tell myself that this is how I stay on top of the latest news. I tell myself that I work hard and I deserve an empty distraction.
Even though I’m not obsessed with status in general, for some messed-up reason I do like to look at these numbers. I enjoy the illusion of a waiting audience. It makes me feel less invisible and irrelevant, and those are maybe the saddest, stupidest words I’ve ever written.
I often seem cheerful, but I can’t focus. I’m constantly distracted by my numbers. And sometimes it feels like I’m slowly going crazy along with all of the other ambivalent puppet people of social media. Our whole lives are passing us by, but we hardly notice. We are emptying out everything in our lives in exchange for meaningless figures on a screen. We are disappearing in plain sight.
* * *
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For four years as The Cut’s “Ask Polly” columnist, and for years before that on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve fielded letters from young people looking for advice. I’ve noticed certain themes coming up over and over again, so much so that lately, I’m starting to believe that many of our basic assumptions about millennials—that they’re spoiled and entitled, that they’re overconfident in their abilities, that they’re digital natives utterly unconflicted about privacy and social media and living much of their lives online—are wrong. What I discover in my email in-box each morning are dispatches from young people who feel guilty and inadequate at every turn and who compare themselves relentlessly to others. They are turned inside out, day after day, by social media. From my vantage point, it looks tougher to be a young person today than it has been for decades.
Of course, I’m dealing with a small, demographically skewed sample (though no more so, probably, than our “millennial” stereotype, so skewed toward the affluent and white). And my sample is self-selecting, too; I hear mostly from those who are struggling. Even so, their testimonies are heart-wrenching. The same words and phrases and expressions of self-consciousness and self-doubt show up in letter after letter: “I often feel overwhelmingly middle ground or average in [my coworkers’] eyes,” one writer confesses. Another asks, “When is he going to realize that I am an anxious mess who overthinks everything and hates herself, like, a lot of the time?” “I think my primary emotion is guilt,” another writes. “When I am happy, it only takes moments before I feel guilty about it—I feel desperately unworthy of my happiness, guilty for receiving it out of the pure chaotic luck of the universe.”
Many of these anxieties take the same shape: An external mob is watching and judging and withholding approval. It’s impossible to matter, to be interesting enough. Many young people describe others as “a better version of me.” This is how it feels today to be young and fully invested in our new popularity contest: No matter how hard you try, someone else out there is taking the same raw ingredients and making a better life out of them. The curated version of you that lives online also feels hopelessly polished and inaccurate—and you feel, somehow, that you alone are the inauthentic one.
Far from spoiled, the young people who have written to me don’t seem to feel like they deserve happiness. They feel self-conscious and guilty about everything they do. They can’t move forward without feeling like they’re stepping on someone’s toes. They often resolve to seem better, to work harder, to keep their mouths shut at the exact moments when they need to speak up and tell the truth in order to feel right with the world. They feel afraid of showing their true selves because they’re sure they’ll be shamed for it. Everyone is waiting to be exposed as a fake. As far as I can tell, twentysomethings don’t embody the self-assured, self-promotional values of social media any more than Gen-Xers like me do; it’s just that they’ve learned that one should never publicly reveal one’s doubts, anxieties, and ambivalence. I have spent years peeking behind the stage curtain, and I can see how excruciatingly difficult it is for them to hold that pose.
I started writing advice at the early webzine Suck.com in May 2001. I had been writing cartoons for the site for years; the advice was just an experiment. But I continued to answer advice letters on my blog when Suck went under a month later. Back then, advice columns were more prescriptive, pedantic, problem-focused. I was less interested in such concrete hazards than I was in the broader poisons of our culture, how we ingest and metabolize them until they feel like a part of us, yet we still can’t figure out why we’re sick. “Avoiding confrontation is bad for you,” I wrote in one ear
ly blog post. “Dishonesty in one of your relationships tends to leak into all the others.” I was thirty-one years old, unemployed, a little depressed, and avoiding confrontation with the older divorced guy I was dating. I wanted to be honest, but I also wanted to be loved. These things were already starting to seem like they might be at odds with each other.
But there was still some breathing room for messiness back then, at least online. These days, it’s not hard to notice how careful image management and aggressive self-promotion and anxieties about “staying on brand” have seeped into the online mix. We’ve integrated all the pressures of the commercial realm into our personal lives, applying the same competitive expectations to love, friendship, family, and even our internal state of mind. Teenagers and twentysomethings have grown up with social media, which means they have been doing this their whole lives. And the pressure that creates is enormous: Not only do many of us now expect to make money at creative careers that used to be seen as the poverty-stricken purview of a small handful of artists, but we also expect to establish a name for ourselves quickly, to find our work deeply satisfying, and to become famous overnight—or at least to have tens of thousands of followers. This pervasive, subconscious longing is the background noise generated by the new digital realm, like the terrible hiss and hum of an old refrigerator. And it affects all of us, even if the pain it causes is most visible in the young. It tells us that no matter what our circumstances might be, we should be dressing like fashion bloggers and vacationing like celebrities and eating like food critics and fucking like porn stars, and if we aren’t, we’re losers who are doomed to non-greatness forever and ever.
Most people don’t consciously believe any of these things, of course—teenagers or fifty-year-olds. We may believe that we just want to muddle through the day without screwing up or embarrassing ourselves. But screwing up and embarrassing ourselves turn out to be the meat of what many of us experience these days, because behind the hazy filter of our conscious desires lie those obscenely inflated expectations. And merely muddling through, doing your best, seeing friends when you can, trying to enjoy yourself as much as possible is, according to the reigning dictates of today’s culture, tantamount to failure. You must live your best life and be the best version of yourself; otherwise you’re nothing and no one.
It gets worse. We now recognize that getting the lives we want depends on cultivating the right attitude, so we beat ourselves up every time our state of mind is less than 100 percent optimistic. If there’s a mass religion of global culture, it’s the high-capitalist belief, trumpeted at every turn by every single voice in the spotlight, that by believing in yourself without fail, you can get everything you’ve ever dreamed of. It all depends on your faith, your ability to squelch the doubts in your head that arise when yet another glamorous on-brand winner pops up in your Instagram feed.
Very few people tell you anymore that those doubts in your head are part of the noise you hear when you’re alive, full stop. Very few people explain that success rarely happens quickly, and that even if it does, there are still lingering worries and bad days and hours and hours of tedious work involved. There aren’t many inspirational quotes about how discouragement will plague you as you work and that’s just how it feels to work at something difficult. There aren’t many memes reminding you that you won’t get everything you dream of—and that getting everything you dream of might not make you happy anyway, no matter what that constantly scrolling feed of highly curated “best lives” seems to imply.
Obviously, as an advice columnist, I’m often at risk of becoming part of the problem. I tell people to believe in the lives they really want, to set their expectations high and strive tirelessly to achieve their dreams. But I also want to say to them, time after time, that there is no “better version” of you waiting in the future. The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment. Shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now.
tag and release
Today I have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my driver’s license renewed. My current license photo is ten years old, so old that the carefree woman in the picture always takes me by surprise. Her hair looks unnaturally shiny. Her smile says, “I have nowhere in particular to be. Let’s go grab a cocktail!” Today I have to say goodbye to that lighthearted girl, and welcome her older, more harried replacement. Today I have to stand in poorly marked lines with impatient strangers, reading signs about what we can and cannot do, what we should and should not expect.
Last time I got my license renewed, the first picture was so bad that the DMV guy laughed out loud. I was young and carefree then, so it didn’t bother me. “Show me,” I commanded. He turned the screen around. My eyes were half-closed and my mouth was screwed up in a weird knot. Remember that scene in the movie Election where they pause the image just as Tracy Flick, the wannabe school president played by Reese Witherspoon, looks drunk and deranged? It was like that. The next photo turned out great, though, because I couldn’t stop smiling about the first one.
That’s not the mood I’m in today. Today, if the same thing happens, I’ll grumble. They’ll take a second crappy photo of me and no one will be laughing. To them, I’ll be just another angry lady to tag and release back onto the wild freeways of Los Angeles. When you visit the DMV, you realize that you can bestride the narrow world like a colossus for only so long—namely, until you’re about thirty-nine. After that, you’re not special anymore. You’re just another indistinct face in a sea of the nobodies.
I have all of my father’s old driver’s licenses. That’s the kind of thing you save when somebody dies—not their unpublished papers, not their shelves full of books. You save the evidence of their trips to the DMV. Something about those little snapshots of my dad’s face, four years older, and then four years older again, standing up against that dark-red background they once used in North Carolina, slows my pulse a little and makes me find the nearest chair. My father was not one to smile for these photos. He did, however, open his eyes a little wider as the years went by, possibly to make himself look less old and grouchy.
On March 5, 1973, he wore a red gingham shirt and matching red tie. He was about to turn thirty-four. On March 10, 1981, he wore a V-neck sweater over a maroon shirt. He was about to turn forty-two, and he looked fitter than he was at age thirty-four. On March 14, 1985, my father looked as tan as George Hamilton. On March 13, 1989, he was about to turn fifty, and he took his glasses off before they took the picture, maybe so he would look younger. His face was more calm and open than it was in the other shots. In his last license photo, taken on March 15, 1993, he had let his hair go gray, and he looked relaxed and happy. Two and a half years later, he went to bed feeling a little bit sick and died in his sleep of his first heart attack.
The fact of someone’s premature death shouldn’t make everything they ever did seem tragic, but sometimes it does anyway. I wish I had a slightly more uplifting story at the ready whenever I shuffled through these laminated cards. I wish I didn’t feel quite so melancholy about his life, neatly sliced into four-year intervals, his face transforming from young to older to oldest. What was he feeling at each moment when the camera flashed in his face? What buried shame or sadness bubbled up, what bit of longing worked its way to the surface in the bleak light of that DMV office?
My father talked a lot about not wanting to get old. He visited his parents regularly, but it often depressed him. He didn’t want to live the way they did, growing stooped and wrinkled, smoking and bickering as they circled the drain. Maybe he had an unusually strong fear of aging and death. He was very fit, and he was always juggling several girlfriends at once, most of them under thirty-five. Aging made him anxious.
Twenty-odd years later, I realize that most people are anxious about growing older, so much so that they’re hesitant to say it out loud. We can’t
quite believe that we’re mortal and we’ll age just like everybody else. At a certain point, we start counting the years we might have left, if we’re lucky. We become more pragmatic. We take what we can get. We don’t need big signs to tell us what we should and should not expect.
* * *
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Ten years ago, when that last driver’s license photo was taken, I was thirty-three years old and I weighed 125 pounds. In the photo, my face is lean and tan because I went hiking every single morning. I worked from home and made good money as a freelance writer. I read a lot. I adopted houseplants. I wrote songs on my guitar. I was so young. I had no idea how young I was.
But before you go flipping between the thirty-three-year-old, with her broad smile, and the forty-three-year-old, with her vague look of world-weariness, keep in mind all the things that happened in the ten years in between: I dumped my boyfriend. I found a full-time job. I bought a house. I got married. My stepson moved in. I had a daughter. I wrote a book. I had another daughter. I quit my job. A close friend died of cancer.
When you glance from one license to the next, you don’t see the long nights I spent tossing and turning, working up the courage to ditch my boyfriend. You don’t see me painting the walls of my house alone, trying to accept my uncertain future. You can’t see me driving through the south of Spain with my future husband, or see me big and pregnant a year later, pulling weeds out of our front yard in a fit of hormonal mania. You don’t see me crying in the car after I left the baby at day care for the first time. You don’t see me at the beach with my kids, smearing sunscreen on my face and hoping that no one eats sand when I’m not looking. You don’t see my hands shaking as I crush up pills, trying to help my friend die a peaceful death, wondering if there even is such a thing.