On point, as always. Alongside the scapegoating, I've also said how it's a desire for simplistic solutions to layered issues— it's also the crux of MAHA. Instead of addressing the intersectional issues we have with food access, lack of federal supports, environmental contaminants, let's scapegoat it with red dye and vaccines because A) it provides a clear enemy to "eliminate" and offers a (fake) silver bullet solution that B) gives the illusion of control and a choice of moralistic superiority.
It's truly a natural human instinct to seek parameters to define our realities, but we are seeing it malevolently utilized.
Love this! I just read the chapter in Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals that basically said, life is a long string of problems, we won’t ever reach a problem-free state, and we can either despair at that or accept it, and in accepting it, we might find that it can sometimes actually be fun or at least engaging.
While still falling in the “it’s always something” category, one phrase that has served me well is the concept of “seasons”, especially as a parent. It’s been discussed in the Stack before, but it helped me so much- the months after I had my second baby, I struggled to find time to exercise. I hated how my body felt and how my clothes fit. I dearly needed the mental and physical releases of exercise so I was scrabbling around for time and then beating myself up when I was too tired to do much. We had some rough patches of sleep around 9 months and one night, while I sat in my couch, post cathartic sob and dreading going in to work to pretend to be an adult when I hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep at a stretch for weeks, it hit me like a thunderbolt that now simply wasn’t the time to be worried about exercise. It wasn’t the season but I knew that it would be eventually. Letting that go felt really good and helped me to just sit in that particular struggle in a more present way. And wouldn’t you know it- I’ve been running in the woods again and coming to terms with this body exactly as it is.
This newsletter could not have come at a better time. Not necessarily because of the focus on scapegoating, but rather the focus on embracing a bit of disorder, chaos, uncertainty, etc. I feel like I’ve been living in this state the last week as my husband and I have moved into a new apartment, have had to manage a ton of little home improvement needs (buy your own place they say…), and just yesterday we had a package that was apparently stolen from inside of our apartment building (despite us literally seeing it moments before we stepped out to grab pizza and innocently decided to “grab it on our way back”). All of this while I’m 31 weeks pregnant. I am the type of person to get extremely fixated on problem solving, to the point that if there’s an issue I need to figure out a way to address it immediately and not let it linger. Yesterday, with said pizza in hand, I was writing a strongly worded email to our HOA to figure out if someone took my package by accident or if we just got got. It wasn’t until after I decided to just shower and reflect on what I was fixating on that I realized I needed to chill tf our, that sometimes inconveniences happen, and that as we get ready to have a kid, we have to be so much better at managing our disappointment when things don’t go as planned or exactly the way we were hoping they would. I need to embrace “it’s always something” as more of a symptom of being alive rather than feeling like the world is turning on me (my attempt at being more chill lolol). Thanks for putting this into perspective!!
I should add that at the moment we have actual human shit in our basement and are staying at my in-law’s (with 3 kids) for the foreseeable future until the plumber comes this week to hopefully remedy the situation. That’s life, baby!
My job is often objectively something that many people would tell me to leave. It’s extremely stressful, the environment and culture. Particularly my family’s response would be to say, find another job, because they don’t want me to suffer. But it also has many good elements. Sometimes things really suck, and something inside me still wants to stick with it, even though the clear solution would be to leave. But would it solve all of my problems to leave? I might just find new problems with a new job. This is a new phenomenon for me as someone who is trying to live in the messy middle and be okay with discomfort.
funny because when I’m in a rut I often tend to blame all my existential problems on the fact that I DON’T live in a major city and instead made the strategic decision to live in a deep red state that is close to family but completely car dependent and lacking in a most of things my partner and I care about - but this was the only way to make the economics of having a kid work! still, I know if we do move in the future, I will miss the easy access to both big living space and open outdoor space we have here
Oof, so perfect again! I laughed at the needing a yard bit because that is our white whale, and I want it *so badly*.
Also, in my inability to have a yard, I have spent the last 24 hours planning how to improve our tiny dingy house because that might fill the void. A smaller kitchen table will definitely change everything. Blackout blinds instead of this ugly curtain, that's the solve. We just need to rearrange our daughters room so her heinous dollhouse can leave our "living room" (foyer) and clear my mind. I might be on to something with that last one though.
This really hit for me today! I'm in a funky mood phase where I'm feeling low, lonely and a little hopeless. Feeling it must be that dating has not been working out for me lately and the comedown after a fun, and very busy summer. Frustrated that I'm doing all the things - working out, being social, keeping up with house chores, getting sunshine - and it's not "working"!! (i.e., getting myself out of the funk). Attempting to put into practice, in your wise words, "avoiding diagnosis" and let myself just sit with it. This piece adds another layer to that. Thanks for giving me permission to stop stressing myself out trying to solve this!!
Loved your newsletter as always. I enjoyed the micro/macro application of your message about the way we jump to scapegoating as a quick, but ultimately imprecise and unhelpful kind of pain reliever.
AND, as with every thoughtful idea, it made me think about the white space of the message, the other side. What I mean is, when you feel troubled, your heart or maybe your body or maybe both want to tell you something. The reason I am posting when I usually just read and say to myself "brilliant, as always, bravo Haley!" is because wondering if life in the big city is the problem seems a worthwhile question for anyone in your situation.
Cities can sever us from the rest of nature in ways that are unhealthy for our physical and emotional well-being. I was just yesterday (after spending the weekend in the woods at a music festival) wondering at how so many young Californians have gravitated to NYC, leaving behind the redwoods, Sierras, desert, wild northern coast and all the other sacred places that reset our souls and reconnect us to our essence and our natural ancestors. Maybe some of those places are calling your soul home! Not that you have to actually come home, but just feed your soul - and Sunny's and Avi's - that nourishment however you can.
Here's what it had me thinking about, somewhat tangentially:
I'm currently serving as a midwife of sorts to a number of large public art commissions that will be part of a large public building, as the architect collaborating with 10 artists who have never worked in architectural materials before. I met with an artist the other day who had decided to pivot his concept entirely after a manic all-nighter, and was walking us through everything he'd sketched out since our last meeting, including a beautiful concept he rushed past a few days ago and a new concept that was doing all the same things he criticized in his old concept. I gave some delicate but impassioned feedback, first giving the disclaimer that I understood he hadn't slept and was very close to this, but then trying to zoom him way out to remind him of his original goals and the themes he has been exploring, and offer that there was so much more to explore in the idea he came up with a few days ago. He talked about the challenge as an artist of finding the right concept for a large permanent public commission, when his work is normally much more ephemeral - he's trying to figure out what could possibly matter enough to literally carve it in stone. I joked "this is why I don't have tattoos - I love them but nothing seems important enough to make that declarative of statement." Later in the same conversation he pointed at the concept he had skipped over and said, "if I were going to get a tattoo of anything, it would be this."
I'm telling this story because there's an analogy to your questioning about moving away from New York, and a wisdom in the conclusions you've come to in this article. We are fickle, changing, reactive. We contain multitudes. The truth is in the direction of change, the patterns that recur over time, the gut instinct that tells us what matters to us. I told the artist not to make any decisions that day - to sleep and rest and explore and see what felt most important on the other side. I don't know where he'll end up, but I could see him trapped in the hold of his most recent idea, too under its spell to evaluate it objectively. He needs more time to see the idea from all sides. He needs a plurality of perspective.
Maybe you should leave New York. Maybe you shouldn't. You'll know over time, and the feeling is surely telling you something either way.
This is so interesting and made me think of the cultural phenomenon of pathologizing behaviors and personality traits with therapy / psychiatry speak. Whenever I meet a psychiatrist I ask them about this - how do you determine what's a real diagnosed "condition" or not, and does it even matter? We all want a scapegoat for everything!
Loved this! It resonates a lot with some deep reflection I've been doing recently, a lot of which has been inspired by Sheryl Paul's work (she focuses on complicated feelings that arise especially around transitions in life). She would refer to what you describe here as an "escape hatch fantasy" and like you, she's very clear that it's a tactic to avoid the messiness of everyday life-- the fact that we can't handcraft a life that lives up to everything we've ever dreamed of, free of problems, stress, and so forth. It's difficult to internalize especially because of the way society operates today, which you also touched on beautifully (this hyper-optimization culture, constant striving to eliminate uncertainty, etc.), but still really important to work on in order to develop the skill of being at peace with what you have.
Yup, I’m a problem-solver to my core and have little tolerance for unhappiness. I agree wholeheartedly with your message, but I don’t think I’ve developed the wisdom to know what is a passing mood/state and what is a signal to make a change. I guess time determines that? Also, I really love the idea that life isn’t happening *underneath* burdens/obstacles.
Bullseye. If one is forever looking for problems to solve then one misses the opportunity to cultivate their own peace amidst the cacophony of life- a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of self's and others' wants, needs, hopes, and desires whether in alignment or opposition.
Working within oneself one loses the requirement for an escape goat as one can adjust their perception, approach, and learning even when one is perhaps unable to affect the circumstances themselves. Thereby change is effected individually while one hopes for the best possible outcome for all.
On point, as always. Alongside the scapegoating, I've also said how it's a desire for simplistic solutions to layered issues— it's also the crux of MAHA. Instead of addressing the intersectional issues we have with food access, lack of federal supports, environmental contaminants, let's scapegoat it with red dye and vaccines because A) it provides a clear enemy to "eliminate" and offers a (fake) silver bullet solution that B) gives the illusion of control and a choice of moralistic superiority.
It's truly a natural human instinct to seek parameters to define our realities, but we are seeing it malevolently utilized.
Love this! I just read the chapter in Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals that basically said, life is a long string of problems, we won’t ever reach a problem-free state, and we can either despair at that or accept it, and in accepting it, we might find that it can sometimes actually be fun or at least engaging.
While still falling in the “it’s always something” category, one phrase that has served me well is the concept of “seasons”, especially as a parent. It’s been discussed in the Stack before, but it helped me so much- the months after I had my second baby, I struggled to find time to exercise. I hated how my body felt and how my clothes fit. I dearly needed the mental and physical releases of exercise so I was scrabbling around for time and then beating myself up when I was too tired to do much. We had some rough patches of sleep around 9 months and one night, while I sat in my couch, post cathartic sob and dreading going in to work to pretend to be an adult when I hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep at a stretch for weeks, it hit me like a thunderbolt that now simply wasn’t the time to be worried about exercise. It wasn’t the season but I knew that it would be eventually. Letting that go felt really good and helped me to just sit in that particular struggle in a more present way. And wouldn’t you know it- I’ve been running in the woods again and coming to terms with this body exactly as it is.
This newsletter could not have come at a better time. Not necessarily because of the focus on scapegoating, but rather the focus on embracing a bit of disorder, chaos, uncertainty, etc. I feel like I’ve been living in this state the last week as my husband and I have moved into a new apartment, have had to manage a ton of little home improvement needs (buy your own place they say…), and just yesterday we had a package that was apparently stolen from inside of our apartment building (despite us literally seeing it moments before we stepped out to grab pizza and innocently decided to “grab it on our way back”). All of this while I’m 31 weeks pregnant. I am the type of person to get extremely fixated on problem solving, to the point that if there’s an issue I need to figure out a way to address it immediately and not let it linger. Yesterday, with said pizza in hand, I was writing a strongly worded email to our HOA to figure out if someone took my package by accident or if we just got got. It wasn’t until after I decided to just shower and reflect on what I was fixating on that I realized I needed to chill tf our, that sometimes inconveniences happen, and that as we get ready to have a kid, we have to be so much better at managing our disappointment when things don’t go as planned or exactly the way we were hoping they would. I need to embrace “it’s always something” as more of a symptom of being alive rather than feeling like the world is turning on me (my attempt at being more chill lolol). Thanks for putting this into perspective!!
One of my favorite things you’ve written!
I should add that at the moment we have actual human shit in our basement and are staying at my in-law’s (with 3 kids) for the foreseeable future until the plumber comes this week to hopefully remedy the situation. That’s life, baby!
My job is often objectively something that many people would tell me to leave. It’s extremely stressful, the environment and culture. Particularly my family’s response would be to say, find another job, because they don’t want me to suffer. But it also has many good elements. Sometimes things really suck, and something inside me still wants to stick with it, even though the clear solution would be to leave. But would it solve all of my problems to leave? I might just find new problems with a new job. This is a new phenomenon for me as someone who is trying to live in the messy middle and be okay with discomfort.
I’m in the exact same position and I resonate with you conclusion of “will leaving remove these problems or move them elsewhere”
funny because when I’m in a rut I often tend to blame all my existential problems on the fact that I DON’T live in a major city and instead made the strategic decision to live in a deep red state that is close to family but completely car dependent and lacking in a most of things my partner and I care about - but this was the only way to make the economics of having a kid work! still, I know if we do move in the future, I will miss the easy access to both big living space and open outdoor space we have here
Oof, so perfect again! I laughed at the needing a yard bit because that is our white whale, and I want it *so badly*.
Also, in my inability to have a yard, I have spent the last 24 hours planning how to improve our tiny dingy house because that might fill the void. A smaller kitchen table will definitely change everything. Blackout blinds instead of this ugly curtain, that's the solve. We just need to rearrange our daughters room so her heinous dollhouse can leave our "living room" (foyer) and clear my mind. I might be on to something with that last one though.
This really hit for me today! I'm in a funky mood phase where I'm feeling low, lonely and a little hopeless. Feeling it must be that dating has not been working out for me lately and the comedown after a fun, and very busy summer. Frustrated that I'm doing all the things - working out, being social, keeping up with house chores, getting sunshine - and it's not "working"!! (i.e., getting myself out of the funk). Attempting to put into practice, in your wise words, "avoiding diagnosis" and let myself just sit with it. This piece adds another layer to that. Thanks for giving me permission to stop stressing myself out trying to solve this!!
Loved your newsletter as always. I enjoyed the micro/macro application of your message about the way we jump to scapegoating as a quick, but ultimately imprecise and unhelpful kind of pain reliever.
AND, as with every thoughtful idea, it made me think about the white space of the message, the other side. What I mean is, when you feel troubled, your heart or maybe your body or maybe both want to tell you something. The reason I am posting when I usually just read and say to myself "brilliant, as always, bravo Haley!" is because wondering if life in the big city is the problem seems a worthwhile question for anyone in your situation.
Cities can sever us from the rest of nature in ways that are unhealthy for our physical and emotional well-being. I was just yesterday (after spending the weekend in the woods at a music festival) wondering at how so many young Californians have gravitated to NYC, leaving behind the redwoods, Sierras, desert, wild northern coast and all the other sacred places that reset our souls and reconnect us to our essence and our natural ancestors. Maybe some of those places are calling your soul home! Not that you have to actually come home, but just feed your soul - and Sunny's and Avi's - that nourishment however you can.
PS: I get what a mom comment this is :)
Very interesting and thought-provoking piece!
Here's what it had me thinking about, somewhat tangentially:
I'm currently serving as a midwife of sorts to a number of large public art commissions that will be part of a large public building, as the architect collaborating with 10 artists who have never worked in architectural materials before. I met with an artist the other day who had decided to pivot his concept entirely after a manic all-nighter, and was walking us through everything he'd sketched out since our last meeting, including a beautiful concept he rushed past a few days ago and a new concept that was doing all the same things he criticized in his old concept. I gave some delicate but impassioned feedback, first giving the disclaimer that I understood he hadn't slept and was very close to this, but then trying to zoom him way out to remind him of his original goals and the themes he has been exploring, and offer that there was so much more to explore in the idea he came up with a few days ago. He talked about the challenge as an artist of finding the right concept for a large permanent public commission, when his work is normally much more ephemeral - he's trying to figure out what could possibly matter enough to literally carve it in stone. I joked "this is why I don't have tattoos - I love them but nothing seems important enough to make that declarative of statement." Later in the same conversation he pointed at the concept he had skipped over and said, "if I were going to get a tattoo of anything, it would be this."
I'm telling this story because there's an analogy to your questioning about moving away from New York, and a wisdom in the conclusions you've come to in this article. We are fickle, changing, reactive. We contain multitudes. The truth is in the direction of change, the patterns that recur over time, the gut instinct that tells us what matters to us. I told the artist not to make any decisions that day - to sleep and rest and explore and see what felt most important on the other side. I don't know where he'll end up, but I could see him trapped in the hold of his most recent idea, too under its spell to evaluate it objectively. He needs more time to see the idea from all sides. He needs a plurality of perspective.
Maybe you should leave New York. Maybe you shouldn't. You'll know over time, and the feeling is surely telling you something either way.
This is so interesting and made me think of the cultural phenomenon of pathologizing behaviors and personality traits with therapy / psychiatry speak. Whenever I meet a psychiatrist I ask them about this - how do you determine what's a real diagnosed "condition" or not, and does it even matter? We all want a scapegoat for everything!
Loved this! It resonates a lot with some deep reflection I've been doing recently, a lot of which has been inspired by Sheryl Paul's work (she focuses on complicated feelings that arise especially around transitions in life). She would refer to what you describe here as an "escape hatch fantasy" and like you, she's very clear that it's a tactic to avoid the messiness of everyday life-- the fact that we can't handcraft a life that lives up to everything we've ever dreamed of, free of problems, stress, and so forth. It's difficult to internalize especially because of the way society operates today, which you also touched on beautifully (this hyper-optimization culture, constant striving to eliminate uncertainty, etc.), but still really important to work on in order to develop the skill of being at peace with what you have.
Yup, I’m a problem-solver to my core and have little tolerance for unhappiness. I agree wholeheartedly with your message, but I don’t think I’ve developed the wisdom to know what is a passing mood/state and what is a signal to make a change. I guess time determines that? Also, I really love the idea that life isn’t happening *underneath* burdens/obstacles.
Bullseye. If one is forever looking for problems to solve then one misses the opportunity to cultivate their own peace amidst the cacophony of life- a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of self's and others' wants, needs, hopes, and desires whether in alignment or opposition.
Working within oneself one loses the requirement for an escape goat as one can adjust their perception, approach, and learning even when one is perhaps unable to affect the circumstances themselves. Thereby change is effected individually while one hopes for the best possible outcome for all.
Loved this and love Jessica DeFino, v excited for the pod this week!