How are you doing? I’m guessing not well!
After a few months of being a hermit, disguised as “nesting” in my new post-break-up apartment, I’m finally filling my social calendar again. Even just a year ago, the conversations over martinis and fries were all gossip and complaints. But now it’s confessions and tears that as they fall make the martinis weaker and the fries soggier.
So far I’ve heard: I’m unhappy in my relationship, I left my relationship but now I’m not sure if it was the right decision, I hate my job, I can’t find a job no matter how hard I try, I can’t motivate myself to do anything, I put in so much effort and no one seems to care, I feel disconnected from my friend group, I don’t have enough friends, I don’t care about the things I used to, the things I care about don’t seem to get me anywhere.
Everyone seems to be grappling with these personal problems—which are valid—but there seems to be little discussion of the smog that has descended upon us which is making it hard to see our situations clearly. In New York, we just got our first snowfall in two years. Eggs are $50. A presidential election between Biden and Trump looms. The media landscape is collapsing. Genocide is happening in Gaza.
I picked up the The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch after seeing it mentioned in this Granta interview between Sheila Heti and Phyllis Rose. Written in the 1970s, it’s an exploration of the cultural shift to individualism after the cultural “revolution” of the 60s, but I’ve found it shockingly, depressingly relevant.
Since “the society” has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment, to fix our eyes on our own “private performance,” to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate a “transcendental self-attention.”
There are, in my small world at least, universal anxieties, yet so few people seem to talk about them for fear of being a narcissist, of making these problems about oneself, and in doing so hide away our commonalities. And still, we wonder why we feel incapable of feeling fulfilled or like we belong.
Years ago, a friend of mine who is a therapist said that she senses a psychosis from the lack of collective mourning over COVID, a thing we are too afraid to say is over and too afraid to say is ongoing. There has been no memorial and no eulogizing for the over three million dead. One of them was on my block, and I remember seeing their body being carried away by paramedics. Ambulance sirens echoed constantly through our neighborhood. Now I’m not even sure where I can buy a COVID test, and all the allyship signs have disappeared from my neighbors’ windows.
Are you OK? I hope you are, but listen, I promise that no one is. For years I professed myself to be the only happy person in New York—the last bastion of joy that has finally fallen. I’m one of you now. Thanks for having me.
Love,
Brittany
How are you coping? Here’s how I’ve been coping lately. Suggestions welcome.
The very first thing I bought for my new apartment was a rotary cheese grater. I hate grating cheese—that’s a boyfriend’s job.
Maybe I do miss having a man in the house though, because I’ve been watching a lot of Frasier.
I couldn’t read for most of last year, to be honest. A gentleman let me borrow Nora Ephron’s essay collection I Feel Bad About My Neck, which reminded me why reading is my favorite activity in the whole world (after being read to).
Now I’m reading Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979. I’ve never been more absorbed in a tome. This playlist of all the songs mentioned is a guaranteed pleaser.
Of course I’ve taken up smoking again. Diptyque rinse-free hand wash is the most effective way to deodorize your hands, and it leaves them nice and soft.
I went to Peru for two weeks. Mountains are healing. I can see now why the Swiss make such a fuss about them.
The way the enormous number of Covid deaths has been memory-holed frightens me. At the height of the pandemic I spent 7 months as a contact tracer and it was traumatic as hell talking to extremely sick people all day. Sometimes I'd call and the patient would have died just hours earlier and I'd end up tongue-tied on the phone with their newly alone partner, trying to offer any morsel of comfort I could. What a horrible time.