my beef with malaise

I wild out about: the new me, my year of R&R, the worst person in the world

The life you live is the one that you construct. All beautiful things spring from the imagination. When we look to heroes and we look to men who live better lives, the only useful question to ask of them is what did they dream? and what did they think could be possible? This is how anything is made: having a vision and then rising to the occasion of that vision. We live in a time, right now, where the actually, somewhat simple, makings of an embodied, purposeful existence seem like far-fetched fantasy and completely inaccessible.

I am an unmoored young woman. I keep saying I’m on sabbatical. In truth, circumstance has pushed me out of the life I spent years building for myself - my work, my home, my routines, my proximity to friends as well as art and music, and the leisure/ freedom afforded by hard-won independence. The place where I find myself is a confusing one that splits me in two. Sometimes I think I’m about 90% of the way back into a good, stable job, and into the type of work-life balance where I can paint ruthlessly and write like a maniac. But I also feel totally ungrounded and like I’m starting all over again. Maybe I’m not close at all. Maybe this is an entirely blank slate — and I further engage in mitosis, dividing myself, where the part that believes I’m at the beginning is also split, one smaller part believing this is a good thing, and the other believing this is absolutely terrible. It is troubling not knowing where your life is going.

Like all things, this is temporary. Even if it’s only because we die one day. It’s all temporary.

I’m back in the Midwest staying with my parents and trying to piece things together. This is a position that many young people are in right now, with a recession(?) occurring(?) or looming(?), with people losing their jobs and unable to find dignified work, and the cost of living rising. When I look around, I do not see many people in the young middle establishing themselves. I see a lot of people getting by and surviving. And, essentially, stealing away the occasional luxury like a vacation, a designer outfit, nice dinners out. We do not have a ton of cultural models for what it looks like for your average person to be living an embodied, satisfied life. The broader culture enforces the idea that you have to be gifted in some way - a striver, famous, a very particular type of smart, or extremely lucky - in order to have day-to-day fulfillment and overarching purpose.

What I notice are people confined to day jobs wishing, wishing, wishing they had the know-all and availability to do something else. What I notice are people, artists, musicians, writers, suffering from a lack of resources. What I notice are social workers, teachers, nurses, graduate students - the caring class - subjected to a system that expects them to slave because they are passionate and thus meant to be self-sacrificing (live in a cardboard shoebox, accept meager pay, be whipped by your boss, commute by crawling). We cannot seem to make it work.

Many of us do not conceive of ourselves as the hero of our own story.

This idea — conceiving of yourself as the hero of your own story, and notice my careful wording, not just a hero, and not just a protagonist — is very different than main character syndrome. Main character syndrome describes viewing yourself as the lead character in the movie of your life. It necessitates a) relegating everyone else you to the role of background character b) thinking this is a part written FOR you, perhaps by an omnipotent being, God?, versus playing a part you have written for yourself and c) believing the world does revolve around you. Developing into a narcissist is not the path to fulfillment. I actually think the way to a quiet self-confidence is selflessness, and de-centering yourself. But what I see in the popularity of main character syndrome is a yearning for narrative control… that I think is kind of close to a classic hero’s journey.

I was introduced to Joseph Campbell in a really obnoxious way, that I’m just going to tell you about because I think it’s kind of funny. Years ago when I was but a machine operator at the Content Production Factory hoping the time writing Clickable Web Content would someday become grist for the mill the way Hemingway’s years as a reporter sharpened his capabilities (not fully, I’m not that naive), I was tasked with interviewing executives and business people, and then writing about it. One of these executives, who was trying to instruct me about how to write my stupid b2b blog article that at most ten people would read, told me I was an idiot for not knowing who Joseph Campbell was. I believe it was phrased: “You call yourself a writer. What kind of writer doesn’t know about Joseph Campbell??” Well, besides the point that I wasn’t writing our stupid interview into a screenplay, because the hero’s journey is mostly useful for FICTIONAL frameworks!! like uhh fucking Star Wars!! it felt frivolous and silly to imagine a real person in these epic proportions, especially a typical MidAmerican Suit.

So, I’ve not like, read Joseph Campbell, and I’m not interested in him like that (bad taste in the mouth). However, I am interested in the diagrams that appear on Google. It’s also pretty safe to say that if you’ve been immersed in western pop culture, you already have an inherent sense of the hero’s journey. Which is this:

I have not always been an unmoored young woman. At one point I was on a certain track, and I had cobbled enough pieces together that I seemed to be going somewhere. But because I was not painting, and because (even though I did not know this at the time) my love was insecure, lacking truly a promise to each other, I felt malaise. There’s a lot of media about millennial malaise and I’m going to talk about my problem with it in a second. Having just read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I was hunting for more fiction that resonated with me on that level. Other people feeling unhappy and uncertain. Other people feeling like they are not particularly special, and maybe even dull, and resigning to it.

One of the books suggested to me was The New Me by Halle Butler. I read it. I hated this book. Years later, I still hate this book.

Here’s a quick synopsis, from a few GoodReads reviews.

Emma’s 2 star review: “a brutal yet boring tale of a 30-something woman whose life is not going as she once expected - she hops from temp job to temp job, isolating herself due to her spiralling mental health issues. a strength of the new me, and for me the only strength, was that it never once shies away from the reality that for some of us, this is life in all its cyclical glory. it’s mundane, we struggle, and we lose parts of ourselves every day as we go through the same day over and over - there is no hope, even if you want there to be. due to this, i would not recommend reading it if you are struggling because it will not offer any comfort or respite, instead it will fill you with the dread that our titular character feels as she deludes herself into thinking that life is working for her the way she is living it. spoiler alert, it is not.”

Jaclyn’s 4 star review: “Give me a disaffected, apathetic, embittered female protagonist in a dead end job having an existential crisis about the meaning of life and I’m yours. ‘I try to assess the things that bring me pleasure, and how those things might bring me a fulfilling career. I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie. The questions come naturally, as if supplied by the ether, and the answer sits in my empty skull: nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.’”

Lotte’s 2 star review: “Umm okay, but what was The Point™? To me, this tried to do what Ottessa Moshfegh does really well in her books — throwing you right into the mind of an entirely unlikable, self-loathing person, making you listen to their bleak, repetitive thought spirals and then, surprisingly, remarkably, twisting it into something that completely sucks you in and makes you empathise with the protagonist without you even realising it. I think this is what Halle Butler was aiming at with this, but it didn't work in my opinion. I feel like there was a layer to the protagonist's characterisation that was missing, maybe I needed more backstory, more explanation or psychological insight, and this book didn't offer that. Instead, there was no discernible narrative arc to this book and while I really enjoyed the sharp, witty humour and underlined a few memorable passages, it all felt a bit pointless in the end.”

What stands out the most to me in my memory of The New Me is the moment she describes the grubby brown towels in her apartment, which she hates but hasn’t replaced. And when I think about it now, I think, yes, the towels are actually the problem. You will never gain control of your life until you act to control your life. And the very first thing she could do is replace the brown towels. The smallest of acts of tenacity show the universe that you are tenacious, and that signal is deeply important. You do actually have to prove that you are capable of change and resilience.

Grab a pair of scissors and cut, at random, a piece of your hair off. It will remind you that your body is yours, your life is yours, and you can do with it what you please, at literally any moment.

I can’t resist also talking about The Worst Person in the World. Although in this movie, Julie makes several attempts at finding meaning and excitement, all of her efforts are hollow. Why this is, I think, is that she never once acknowledges the seriousness of her journey to find meaning. Perhaps this is the fault of a script that does not take the supposed main character’s motivations into consideration (inherently, this movie is not feminist to me, because Julie is denied quite a bit of interiority). In contrast, her cartoonist boyfriend Axel is a much more compelling character. He loves, for real. He has a mission. He has something to say. He experiences tragedy - heartbreak, and then declining health. His story really, really means something. Julie in contrast floats in her self-indulgence. She is not a real person. Real people experience things that change them. Everyone does.

This also applies to the Barbie movie. Ken, seeking both romance and agency, is a compelling hero. Barbie, out of a screenwriter’s neurotic anxiousness about how the public now receives stories and picks them apart, gives her no desires, no real journey, and no satisfying ending. She is neither the girlboss NOR the lover.

What is wrong with The Worst Person in the World is what’s wrong with a lot of Millennial Malaise fiction. Characters are rudderless, and their desires either don’t exist or don’t make sense. There are literary purposes to this — it is meant to reflect the weird hollowness of modernity. But I don’t think this makes for a good story. And it doesn’t help at all inform our ideas about what it means to be a young person in the world today, on what is actually an age-old quest, navigating meaninglessness. We are on the salt plains alone. We do not realize that wanting to find a purpose is inherently purposeful.

Caveat. I do not believe that stories need to have a moral imperative. People who are looking for moral instruction from books and movies are better off reading Goofus and Gallant comic strips in Highlights and logging off, forever. I just think that there is a dearth of character-writing that really understands what it means to be alive — and I am not looking for stories that have “figured out what to do with malaise” but instead make an attempt to confront this difficulty. Either by selection bias, as in, it’s popular for a reason, or other selective forces, our culture does not often depict its characters as rising to face a challenge, to face the abyss. The protagonists of our stories only accept the void and yelp, “woe is me.”

What I now realize I liked about My Year of R&R was the main character’s perverted resolve to… fix this issue… debatably, by accident, just following an impulse to run away from the world. And, in a way, it worked. In Moshfegh’s novel, we see actually some conventional approaches to untying psychic knots: treating yourself gently for one (she rested(!) in such a way I can’t imagine myself doing, without senselessly beating myself over the head and feeling unproductive, lazy, worthless), reviewing early parent-childhood relationship stuff, and genuinely allowing yourself to recover from burnout. There’s a meditative sensibility here. Sometimes when faced with irresistible negative thoughts, a seasoned meditator will encourage you to lean fully into it - knowing that, once you do, the thought will evaporate, because intense attention can make the ringing statements of worthlessness boring. The main character leaned into her ugliest impulses. She felt the full extent of her own ugliness, and the ugliness resulting from choices she *had* made.

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Life, as you live it, does not take the shape of a story. On a given morning, I wake up, I take a shower, I lather shampoo into my scalp and then wring out my hair, I count the tiles in the tub, I read a little bit, which necessitates picking up a book and flipping pages, looking at words, going back to read a paragraph when I zone out, I make some toast, I spend time buttering the toast and brewing the coffee, measuring out the beans, I feel myself fully behind my eyes. I’m working on mindfulness now so I notice some thoughts, shoo some away, hold onto others like a lozenge turning over my tongue and dissolving. I cannot avoid the seconds and the minutia of being alive — unless, as I’ve experienced, I seek numbness and disassociation, because this kind of awareness, as many addicts and overthinkers have identified with me, can be extremely painful. As you live it, life does not have a clear beginning, middle and end. We are always sort of in the boredom and the fog. When we tell stories about our experiences, gathered around a campfire, or over cocktails (the epic spring break, the time we saved the day, how Johnny New Boots earned his nickname) the storytelling is obviously formulated in the retrospective. We leave out details like waiting five minutes for a text or finding a good playlist to play before racing to the hospital.

My beloved 12th grade English teacher said to me, “Life is never as interesting as it is in a novel, is it? There’s a lot of boring stuff we do every day. Authors have to condense quite a bit because nobody would want to read about that. Annie Dillard probably had to cut out a lot stuff out to write something as interesting as An American Childhood.”

However, to be psychologically healthy, I do think we have to conceive of moments in our lives as the hero’s journey with a concrete beginning, middle and end, where we rise to meet a challenge and overcome it. Where we confront the underworld, where we may have friends and mentors along the way, and where we eventually come back, changed. It does not mean that we have to be heroic. It just means we have to be courageous enough to show up for own lives — and take our undertakings seriously. The concept of the hero’s journey serves us much better main character syndrome, or giving into our malaise. Rarely do we experience fantastic intervention to relieve us from monotony, not in the way it happens in children’s books. I did not wake up today to find my dog speaks perfect English. A wealthy, dark suitor has not appeared at my door offering to whisk me away. There are no fairies materializing in my tea pot telling me that I am their kingdom’s only hope. Yet, every day we are being called. It’s a different kind of call to adventure, one that we can decide to write.

Media about millennial malaise (The New Me, The Worst Person in the World) does correctly identify a problem with our times. We live in an age where it is increasingly easy to shirk responsibility, because there are a LOT of external forces that are making life really, really hard. Working hard no longer guarantees you a roof over your head or food on the table. A career is not a given. We have been told that “if you find your passion, you will never work a day in your life,” which is a lie. We do expect a certain level of comfort — whether this level of comfort is reasonable, I actually have not made up my mind, but I am thinking about it quite a bit. I’m just going to continue listing the problems that haunt me, every day, in succession, but I think you get it. There are no more third spaces. Dating apps have atomized our sense of romance and serendipity. We are replacing connection with cheap alternatives like social media, which only fuck up our brain’s ability to feel pleasure while making us lonelier. Modern life lacks rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations. Our aesthetics are abysmal gray, white, cheaply made, imbued with the spirit of child labor and slavery. We are obviously fucking up the environment. Consumerism. Resource extraction. The degradation of product quality. Ubereats. Marx was right.

It’s garbage!

Like, dude!

I’m not even going to stake a claim that these are the worst times to be alive. It ALWAYS sucks to be alive. I don’t think the peasants had it any easier. Do you think the people living in war-tattered Europe, after both the first and the second wars, weren’t entirely disillusioned and hopeless? Of course they were! But then we had the writers in the Paris cafes making sense and beauty of it, even and especially the nihilists. At least the Cold War and the threat of nuclear catastrophe gave us … Devo. And The Smiths!!

Because if it's not love
Then it's the bomb, the bomb
The bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together

We seemed, back then, some of us at least, to take the threats to our very humanity seriously. And make art about how depraved the times are. And funny, how the art makes the times less depraved. In the same way I have always held the notion that there is no time wasted, even the most abysmal years of your life, if you are able to make art about it. For an even smaller example of this — there is so much beautiful music about suffering from writer’s block. Cecilia by Simon and Garfunkle is a plea to the patron saint of music. Even Need 2 by Pinegrove is about this indomitable human creation drive.

It’s a problem then, that in our stories of confronting millennial malaise, our characters continue to amble, lost. They accept the small life. They resign to uncertainty and pointlessness. As much as our reality informs our art, art also informs our reality, reinforcing certain narratives about people and our choices. When I look around, at myself and at my peers, I can’t tell if adults have always been like this. But something feels deeply wrong about the self-infantilizing hecking doggo! millennial who will assert: “nobody knows what they are doing, and everyone is faking it til they make it,” and yes, there is even something wrong with the infantilizing style of coquette-core (which, I do like), and the line of thinking behind “I’m just a girl,” and “I’m baby.”

This is cope.

It’s harsh, but being an adult is about taking responsibility for your own life. Many of us are adrift. As I’ve argued, given the conditions, it’s more than reasonable to be adrift. This is an age of digital separation and disillusionment. This is late stage capitalism at work. But adulthood isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about feeling answerable. We need stories where characters do not fully resign. And we, ourselves, need to see the worthwhile burden in resisting the void. Of course I feel paralyzed when faced with my absolute freedom. There are an infinite number of choices I can make at a given moment. What path will bring me the greatest happiness? Who is the one meant for me? What career will give me what I desire?

When I think about people I know who really do seem to be satisfied, and not in the superficial ways, they are all people who engage with realities of their circumstances. Good friends of mine, too. A friend who is on the “returning home” tail end of the hero’s journey, having now synthesized a long, meandering road into a life of security and meaning, where all previous missteps now finally make sense, because they have led to something. A friend who is in the midst of real trial and tribulation, who remains steadfastly confident in her own ability to work through it, to see the opportunities for growth, and to find happiness on the other side. A friend who has spent a life imagining true love, and has made the right sacrifices to obtain it, refusing to settle for lesser offers even when walking away was hard. I wonder, what is unique about these friends? They play the cards they are given. They are aware they are playing a game.

I think I sometimes grasp the truth: there is no one correct decision. There are endless possible careers, lovers, and locations that could be good for you. The only right decision is the one that you make work. It does not mean the decision is arbitrary.

My friend Cosi always says, “we are co-authors with the universe.” We are invited to pick up the pen.