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A review by nyssahhhh
What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky
2.0
I wanted to love this book because I adore Heather and her advice column and her willingness to encourage all humans to embrace their imperfections. But this is not Heather's advice column. These are essays. They didn't always land. Some of them were emotional and some of them seemed like dissertations or grand research projects where the research was self-selected. I got bored; I didn't understand the point; I didn't see what connections she was making.
That said, I peppered the book with flags because there were some really good sentences buried inside. (I also thoroughly enjoyed the Tim Ferriss chapter. Because, bahahahaha.)
24: The problem with the fairy tale of constant growth and constant expansion--the central drive of all publicly traded ventures--is that companies start off with modest goals and creative business plans and then, by dint of their own success, they're cornered into following the reigning script of high-capitalist world domination, swapping out true, steady innovation for aggressive initiatives and mergers that promise the quickest route to infinity and beyond.
25: Corporations are the new world leaders, more powerful than most nations and more entitled to willfully ignore the rights of citizens in pursuit of continued dominance by reaping profits that far outstrip the economies of most countries.
52: 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.
61: Instead of chasing fickle consumer tastes and allowing the gods of supply and demand to rape the Earth and dredge the seas until all of our ecosystems are utterly destroyed, we have to learn to appreciate foods that can be grown or raised sustainably, foods that support and enrich the environment.
62: As easy as it is to be cynical about politically correct, pretentious menus that read more like essays, the choices we make now as consumers will affect how we're able to eat--not to mention survive--in the future.
79: The digital clutter of our lives doesn't merely make us anxious, interrupting our train of thought and blocking us from longer periods of silence and the deeper thinking that can go with it. Our digital clutter redesigns our world around the temporary. constant interruptions turn us into amnesiacs who are required to respond, reply, and reach from moment to moment. That is why we have so little memory of what happened last week, let alone what happened last year or twenty years ago. We are constantly threatened with interruption, so we experience each moment as something that could easily be discounted, could easily be erased or subsumed by some more important message. Our minds, in other words, are filed with the clutter of what comes next: messages and tweets and texts yet to be received. We live in a world of past and future clutter. We are boxed in. there is no space for where we are right now.
119: 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.
[...]
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.
129: ...she doesn't view these things as verdicts on her character. She knows how to savor what she has. She doesn't ask herself whether or not she has it all. She has more important things to do.
141: For decades, in books and movies and on TV, humiliation has been used to transform adult women into something lighter, perkier, less frightening. It's as if writers imagine that we're afraid of proud women and we're eager to see them humbled.
143: Because most young women, even the assertive and determined ones, still find themselves, int hose forlorn in-between years, apologizing repeatedly, blurting some muddled, half-finished thought and, finally, resolving to take up less space.
153: Being capable isn't celebrated or embraced or rewarded handsomely or, often, even noticed these days. We prefer to celebrate the valiant, charismatic leader who speaks confidently of his vision of what should come next. We don't always care who is doing the concrete work to which his grand gestures allude.
180: ...there's a sense that the more independent you are, the safer you are, that total control of our environments is the ideal, and that the institutions designed to protect us might be those from which we require protection. [...] ...this dream of purity and separation feeds the delusion that isolation is the most honorable choice, that drooping out is somehow more valiant than working slowly to reform the system and help those who truly in need.
188: You are not better than you are, though, and neither is your partner. That is romance.
193:Even when they sing the praises of meditation or richer connections with others or fighting for a better planet, like all Ferriss-branded content, their words boil down to the same quest: to minimize the tedious hassles of survival so you can spend more of your time flying first-class to surf spots around the globe with similarly enlightened extreme athletes and tech bros.
194: [Ferriss's mentors'] recommendations are often so abstract, yet so devoid of any evidence of real struggle or adversity, that it's difficult not to imagine a tech CEO with artistic photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., on his walls who, nonetheless, isn't completely sure what the point of Black Lives Matter is. There is a lot of quoting Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning but a notable absence of any attempt to address the real-life Nazis outside our doors.
196: But what is the point of all of this maximized, optimal, highly efficient, connected, charismatic effectiveness? If Ferriss himself is any indication, it's to be a cipher that stands for nothing beyond success itself, a brand that touts its best-seller status like a street barker, that boosts itself on the shoulders of other such brands, that throws a never-ending party for itself. ... More than anything else, the modern guru denies the existence of external obstacles. Racism, systemic bias, income inequality--to acknowledge these would be to deny the power of the self.
198: "The guru separates himself from the rest of us. Anything that creates separation is an illusion. In reality, we are all united, all the same, all smart parts of the same bigger thing, the universe." [Jerome Jarre]
199: Because once we learn to cultivate compassion for ourselves without improvements or upgrades, we also learn to have compassion for other people, as broken and flawed and different from us as they might be. And if we're ever going to recognize that our survival is inextricably linked, this is how we're going to get there.
206: But it's hard to sustain that feeling, even on the best of days--to keep the faith, to stay focused on what matters most--because the world continues to besiege us with messages that we are failing.
207: The chafing smooth jazz piped into the immaculate coffee joint, the fake cracks painted on the wall at the Cheesecake Factory, the smoke from fires burning thousands of acres of dry tinder, blotting out the sun--they remind us that even though our planet is in peril, we are still being teased and flattered into buying stuff that we don't need, or coaxed into forgetting the truth about our darkening reality. [...] Even natural wonders aren't what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary.
208: So much of what is created today seems engineered to numb or distract us, keeping us dependent on empty fixes indefinitely. [...] But human beings are not stupid. we can detect muddled and self-serving intentions in the artifacts we encounter.
209: Imagine being told that your talent is a miracle, and you have just one job. You don't have to be happy or successful or attractive or well-balanced as a human being. You don't have to accrue wealth or maintain lots of friendships or seem impressive in any other way. You don't have to tweet or share photos of your latest sheet music on Instagram or start a podcast about composing to increase your visibility and expand the size of your platform. You just have to do your one job to the best of your ability.
210: Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our head,s growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will be better--more successful, adore,d satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, "This is how I am," in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside. It requires conscious effort not to waste your life swimming furiously against the tide, toward some imaginary future that will never make you happy anyway.
211: so this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry. We are hurtling forward--frantic, dissatisfied, and perpetually lost.
Our bewildered state doesn't just injure us individually; it impedes our ability to work together for a better world. We can't stand for justice and effect change until we've learned to push away empty temptations, shiny dead ends, and trivial distractions. As long as we're perpetually assaulted by a barrage of news and tweets and texts, as long as commercial messages and smooth brands and profit-minded discourse are our only relief from our insecure realities, we'll never develop the ability to live in the present moment. We have to cultivate compassion for ourselves and each other. We have to connect with each other in genuine and meaningful ways. but we also have to relearn how to breathe in the late summer air and feel the sunshine, to admire the swilling pink clouds and shut out the hiss of truck brakes, to sit on the ground and look up at the trees without looking ahead to what we'll post on Facebook about it.
215: So instead of passionately embracing the things we love the most, and in so doing reveal our fragility and self-hatred and sweetness and darkness and fear and everything that makes us whole, we present a fractured, tough, protected self to the world. [...] We must reconnect with what it means to be human: fragile, intensely fallible, and constantly humbled.
217: We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities. WE are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering in an enervated, anxious state over our value and our popularity. We are called to view our actions as important, with or without consecration by forces beyond our control. [...] You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of "best"ness that will finally bring you peace.
That said, I peppered the book with flags because there were some really good sentences buried inside. (I also thoroughly enjoyed the Tim Ferriss chapter. Because, bahahahaha.)
24: The problem with the fairy tale of constant growth and constant expansion--the central drive of all publicly traded ventures--is that companies start off with modest goals and creative business plans and then, by dint of their own success, they're cornered into following the reigning script of high-capitalist world domination, swapping out true, steady innovation for aggressive initiatives and mergers that promise the quickest route to infinity and beyond.
25: Corporations are the new world leaders, more powerful than most nations and more entitled to willfully ignore the rights of citizens in pursuit of continued dominance by reaping profits that far outstrip the economies of most countries.
52: 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.
61: Instead of chasing fickle consumer tastes and allowing the gods of supply and demand to rape the Earth and dredge the seas until all of our ecosystems are utterly destroyed, we have to learn to appreciate foods that can be grown or raised sustainably, foods that support and enrich the environment.
62: As easy as it is to be cynical about politically correct, pretentious menus that read more like essays, the choices we make now as consumers will affect how we're able to eat--not to mention survive--in the future.
79: The digital clutter of our lives doesn't merely make us anxious, interrupting our train of thought and blocking us from longer periods of silence and the deeper thinking that can go with it. Our digital clutter redesigns our world around the temporary. constant interruptions turn us into amnesiacs who are required to respond, reply, and reach from moment to moment. That is why we have so little memory of what happened last week, let alone what happened last year or twenty years ago. We are constantly threatened with interruption, so we experience each moment as something that could easily be discounted, could easily be erased or subsumed by some more important message. Our minds, in other words, are filed with the clutter of what comes next: messages and tweets and texts yet to be received. We live in a world of past and future clutter. We are boxed in. there is no space for where we are right now.
119: 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.
[...]
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.
129: ...she doesn't view these things as verdicts on her character. She knows how to savor what she has. She doesn't ask herself whether or not she has it all. She has more important things to do.
141: For decades, in books and movies and on TV, humiliation has been used to transform adult women into something lighter, perkier, less frightening. It's as if writers imagine that we're afraid of proud women and we're eager to see them humbled.
143: Because most young women, even the assertive and determined ones, still find themselves, int hose forlorn in-between years, apologizing repeatedly, blurting some muddled, half-finished thought and, finally, resolving to take up less space.
153: Being capable isn't celebrated or embraced or rewarded handsomely or, often, even noticed these days. We prefer to celebrate the valiant, charismatic leader who speaks confidently of his vision of what should come next. We don't always care who is doing the concrete work to which his grand gestures allude.
180: ...there's a sense that the more independent you are, the safer you are, that total control of our environments is the ideal, and that the institutions designed to protect us might be those from which we require protection. [...] ...this dream of purity and separation feeds the delusion that isolation is the most honorable choice, that drooping out is somehow more valiant than working slowly to reform the system and help those who truly in need.
188: You are not better than you are, though, and neither is your partner. That is romance.
193:Even when they sing the praises of meditation or richer connections with others or fighting for a better planet, like all Ferriss-branded content, their words boil down to the same quest: to minimize the tedious hassles of survival so you can spend more of your time flying first-class to surf spots around the globe with similarly enlightened extreme athletes and tech bros.
194: [Ferriss's mentors'] recommendations are often so abstract, yet so devoid of any evidence of real struggle or adversity, that it's difficult not to imagine a tech CEO with artistic photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., on his walls who, nonetheless, isn't completely sure what the point of Black Lives Matter is. There is a lot of quoting Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning but a notable absence of any attempt to address the real-life Nazis outside our doors.
196: But what is the point of all of this maximized, optimal, highly efficient, connected, charismatic effectiveness? If Ferriss himself is any indication, it's to be a cipher that stands for nothing beyond success itself, a brand that touts its best-seller status like a street barker, that boosts itself on the shoulders of other such brands, that throws a never-ending party for itself. ... More than anything else, the modern guru denies the existence of external obstacles. Racism, systemic bias, income inequality--to acknowledge these would be to deny the power of the self.
198: "The guru separates himself from the rest of us. Anything that creates separation is an illusion. In reality, we are all united, all the same, all smart parts of the same bigger thing, the universe." [Jerome Jarre]
199: Because once we learn to cultivate compassion for ourselves without improvements or upgrades, we also learn to have compassion for other people, as broken and flawed and different from us as they might be. And if we're ever going to recognize that our survival is inextricably linked, this is how we're going to get there.
206: But it's hard to sustain that feeling, even on the best of days--to keep the faith, to stay focused on what matters most--because the world continues to besiege us with messages that we are failing.
207: The chafing smooth jazz piped into the immaculate coffee joint, the fake cracks painted on the wall at the Cheesecake Factory, the smoke from fires burning thousands of acres of dry tinder, blotting out the sun--they remind us that even though our planet is in peril, we are still being teased and flattered into buying stuff that we don't need, or coaxed into forgetting the truth about our darkening reality. [...] Even natural wonders aren't what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary.
208: So much of what is created today seems engineered to numb or distract us, keeping us dependent on empty fixes indefinitely. [...] But human beings are not stupid. we can detect muddled and self-serving intentions in the artifacts we encounter.
209: Imagine being told that your talent is a miracle, and you have just one job. You don't have to be happy or successful or attractive or well-balanced as a human being. You don't have to accrue wealth or maintain lots of friendships or seem impressive in any other way. You don't have to tweet or share photos of your latest sheet music on Instagram or start a podcast about composing to increase your visibility and expand the size of your platform. You just have to do your one job to the best of your ability.
210: Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our head,s growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will be better--more successful, adore,d satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, "This is how I am," in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside. It requires conscious effort not to waste your life swimming furiously against the tide, toward some imaginary future that will never make you happy anyway.
211: so this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry. We are hurtling forward--frantic, dissatisfied, and perpetually lost.
Our bewildered state doesn't just injure us individually; it impedes our ability to work together for a better world. We can't stand for justice and effect change until we've learned to push away empty temptations, shiny dead ends, and trivial distractions. As long as we're perpetually assaulted by a barrage of news and tweets and texts, as long as commercial messages and smooth brands and profit-minded discourse are our only relief from our insecure realities, we'll never develop the ability to live in the present moment. We have to cultivate compassion for ourselves and each other. We have to connect with each other in genuine and meaningful ways. but we also have to relearn how to breathe in the late summer air and feel the sunshine, to admire the swilling pink clouds and shut out the hiss of truck brakes, to sit on the ground and look up at the trees without looking ahead to what we'll post on Facebook about it.
215: So instead of passionately embracing the things we love the most, and in so doing reveal our fragility and self-hatred and sweetness and darkness and fear and everything that makes us whole, we present a fractured, tough, protected self to the world. [...] We must reconnect with what it means to be human: fragile, intensely fallible, and constantly humbled.
217: We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities. WE are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering in an enervated, anxious state over our value and our popularity. We are called to view our actions as important, with or without consecration by forces beyond our control. [...] You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of "best"ness that will finally bring you peace.