Dear Kate,Ā
What a wonderful letter you wrote last week about prudence. The word prudence is helpful. It reminds me that there are qualities worth pursuing beyond āsuccessful.ā In a section of this interview you shared a few weeks ago, our buddy Michael J. Sandel pointed out the cultural dominance of the word āsmart.ā Lawyers are smart. Hedge fund managers are smart. Google engineers are smart. Everyone wants to be smart.
But when did smart become the only adjective we use to describe a valuable human being? What about prudent? Empathetic? Civic? Considerate? Reasonable? Wise? Industrious? Humble?Ā
Those donāt matter as much.
This might be because smart is such an easy thing to quantify. For one thing, smart people make lots of money, and money is easy to count. Anyone who has filled out OKRs or KPIs at work knows a metric only matters if you can measure it. And boy, can we measure money.Ā
How would we measure prudence? You canāt take an Instagram picture of a prudent decision. But you can pose your Mac next to a latte on a mid-century coffee table in a luxury Airbnb in Utah.Ā
We can see smart. Weāre great at measuring it. It starts when youāre 16, filling out Scantron bubbles on standardized tests, and continues when youāre 26, fielding the endless question: āSo, what do you do?ā
I, for one, have been enjoying this response: āI tend to a small basil plant on my front porch.āĀ
Iāve been thinking lately about the role work plays in our lives. Yes, itās necessary. Everyone needs to eat and shelter. But for many American knowledge workers, young people with college degrees and blue checkmarks on Twitter, work has become selfhood.Ā
Work gives us definition. Work gives us prestige. Our job title is a quick signal strangers use to determine whether or not weāre worthwhile. (We do the same to them.) At night, our work keeps the insecurities at bay. āIām on Forbes 30 Under 30. Iām worth something.āĀ
Increasingly, work is a means of avoidance.Ā Ā
āI canāt talk to my mom. I need to answer emails. I canāt chat with my neighbor. I need to jump on a Zoom. I donāt have time to call my grandparents. Weāre preparing for a round in Q1.ā
And then thereās everything else we do under the pretense of professional success.
āI need to exercise. I need to meditate. I need to intermittent fast. I need to listen to Tim Ferris. I need to grow my own audience. I need to focus. I need to tweet!ā
These distractionsāwhich feel just productive enough to become insidiousāfill every hour of the day. Weāre able to sneak out of thinking about anything else.Ā
But what are we avoiding?Ā
On my road trip, driving aimlessly across the country for thirty days, alone in the car with nothing but the radio, I found myself crying. A lot.
Iād been fine for months, working and puttering around my apartment. But suddenly, I didnāt have Slack notifications to check. I didnāt have any Zoom meetings to prepare for. I didnāt have any emails to answer. I couldnāt obsess over organizing my pantry, or planning low-calorie Trader Joeās grocery lists, or scrolling startup Twitter. I was technically unemployed, and technically homeless. I didnāt have a clear sense of purpose, a directive, or a simple explanation for how I spent my time.Ā
I just had me.
Road trip lesson No. 2: Feeling less is not feeling better.
Before I left Austin, I downloaded a 22-hour Spotify playlist. By El Paso, I was tired of it. Cell service was spotty. The radio offered two choices: Rush Limbaugh or gospel. By Arizona, I was desperately scrolling my Audible library (canceled in September to save $$$) for something I hadnāt finished reading.
I found Lori Gottliebās book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Iād downloaded it in 2019 after this interview with Terry Gross, but never finished listening. Gottlieb, a therapist, goes through a hurtful breakup. But she picks herself up. She goes back to work. She writes articles in the Atlantic. She gets a book deal! (Same.) Sheās convinced sheās fine. Six months later, grief breaks through.
āLike so many people, Iād been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction.ā
I rewound, and listened to that sentence three times: Feeling less is not feeling better. Feeling less is not feeling better. Feeling less is not feeling better.
So often, we think it is. We have so many tools and tricks just to feel less.
Work is a good trick. Productivity is a good trick. Avoiding commitment is great. Dating? A relationship? How about friends-with-benefits instead? The dreaded worst case scenario: catching feelings. Reduce vulnerability, reduce heartbreak.
Pick from the grab bag of distractions: drinking, shopping, scrolling Instagram, applying skincare, buying a Peloton, salivating over political news, watching the Real Housewives, creating to-do lists, organizing your sock drawer, or dropping Trump tweets in family group texts.Ā
After I finished Gottleibās book, I went back to Spotify. I found a playlist titled āBaeās Bash,ā something I downloaded in 2015. My friends and I would play it at pregames in college, drinking tequila and peach tea from solo cups with bendy straws. This was the era of original Kylie Jenner lip kits. (I bought Candy K.) āWhat Do You Mean.ā The Chainsmokers. Bodycon dresses. Chokers. Extendo t-shirts.Ā Winged eyeliner. Everyone wanted to be like Kanye.
At 2:00 a.m., bars would flip on the lights to kick everyone out. Without the darkness, without the senseless music, we went home. There was too much to see in the light.Ā
Driving through an empty desert six years later, I thought about my 19-year-old self in those bars, wearing that lipstick. I thought about my 22-year-old self in New York, chained to email and begging for more. I thought about my 24-year-old self, booking dinner reservations, coffee dates, Y7 classes, and calendar meetings, every moment accounted for.
How much effort have I put into feeling nothing at all?Ā
I thought about it, and I cried.
Today, I sit on my front porch with my basil plant.
I knocked it over earlier this weekārunning too fast, late to be nowhereāand its pot broke. I put the glass in the trashcan, threw the plant into the bushes, and hurried off to wherever I was going.
When I came home, my 81-year-old neighbor stopped me.
āI found your plant honey,ā she said. āI put it in my pot here with a little dirt. I watered it too. Itās doing real well! Just wanted to let you know Iām taking care of it.ā
Maybe, just maybe, caring is a good thing.
XOXO,
Ali
My book rec: Brave New World
Holy guacamole did I pick a week to start reading Aldous Huxleyās Brave New World. Written in 1932, Huxley describes a future in which God is dead and consumption is the fabric that holds society together.
When characters stub their toe or hear loud noises, itās Henry Fordās name they take in vain. āFord, how I hate them!ā one character shouts. Crosses have had their tops cut off to become Tās, an homage to the Model T.
To keep citizens in line, everyone is required to take daily doses of Soma, a euphoric drug that quells all troubles. As one Controller tells a crowd of small children: āNo pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easyāto preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.ā
The book:Ā Brave New World
My rating:Ā ššššš
Read more:Ā Aldous Huxley, Short of Sight