by Karen Karbo
Chapter 9
Why Yes, and . . .
The formula of happiness and success is just being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.
—Meryl Streep
What happens after you stop devoting so much time to self-improvement, after you say fuck it all and eat a giant carnitas burrito with extra sour cream, stay up late reading a thick biography of Frida Kahlo, skip obligatory and torturous “gatherings,” stop forcing yourself to watch the prestige show du jour because it’s a load of pretentious twaddle, stop pretending to care about your sister’s kitchen remodel, stop texting your college sophomore to make sure he turned in his paper on the Teapot Dome Scandal, while spending more time hanging out with friends, napping, catching up on thrillers, walking the dog around the neighborhood, building a prized collection of succulents, or otherwise indulging in some eccentric passion that serves no purpose other than giving you pleasure? What happens after you’ve coaxed True Self out of hiding and send phony-baloney best self packing?
You’ve gotten your social media under control by blocking the sponsored ads and unfollowing the FLEBs and micro-influencers whose lives make you feel like crap. You’ve freed yourself from best-self dysmorphia disorder by becoming acquainted and making peace with True Self. You’ve realized that all women receive the message that they are too much and not enough, which only serves to keep us feeling bad about ourselves and endlessly self-improving, buying stuff we don’t need that only makes other people rich. You’ve minimized the time, energy, and money you spend on the fourth shift. You’ve figured out how to take care of True Self in a way that you can maintain, and you’ve started hanging out with other women who are living their best fuck-it-all lives. You’ve sworn off self-improvement, have learned to say fuck it all with verve and sass, and are a model citizen of Yeahnonothappeningville.
Now what?
Stanford professor emerita Patricia Ryan Madson tells a story about her first teaching job. With a graduate degree in theater, she was hired as an assistant professor at Denison University in Ohio. Madson was a smart girl and a good girl. By her own admission, she was a firm believer in “going by the script,” and to earn tenure, her most cherished dream, she followed the script to the letter. For a woman in academia, this meant being accommodating, cheerful, and doing more than her share. While teaching nine classes, she volunteered, served on committees, and took a “prestigious assignment” as director of a regional university arts organization. She befriended the right people, filled the gaps and patched the holes, and was the best utility player in the department. She even won an award for her teaching. And yet, when the time came, she was denied tenure. Reason given: that her teaching “lacked intellectual distinction.”
After Madson recovered from the heartbreak, she realized that she was surprised but not shocked. She knew she had never taken a chance in her work, never heeded an impulse that might have led to an exciting discovery. She thought this was the end of her academic career, but instead Penn State offered her an assistant professorship in their drama department, teaching voice and acting. Grateful for a do-over, Madson promised herself that this time she would only make choices that felt true to herself. She would only try to make friends with people she liked, would only sit on committees that interested her. She would spend her free time—she had free time now that she wasn’t so focused on getting ahead and volunteering for everything—traveling and studying tai chi and pursuing whatever new passions she stumbled upon. Two years later Stanford University offered her a position as director of their undergraduate acting program.
Madson recounts all this in her slim 2005 guide to living, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up. By the time she took up the reins at Stanford, she was deep into the world of improv. When most of us think of improv we think of Robin Williams going off on one of his genius rants, or Whose Line Is It Anyway? where the troupe, led by Wayne Brady, is passing around a toilet brush and trying to come up with (hilarious) alternative uses.
Improv as applied to life by Madson is the love child of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and Eastern philosophy. It’s about jettisoning overplanning, entering each moment just as you are, finding freedom in the no-pressure attitude of being average and feeling free to make mistakes. It’s not surprising, given the outcome of her experience at Denison, where she did everything that was expected of her and was still refused, that she embraced the power of just showing up.
I emailed Madson to tell her that I am one of her biggest fans, to enumerate in embarrassing detail how often I’ve given Improv Wisdom away as a gift, which necessitated purchasing another copy for myself, and also to ask her how we might adapt improv wisdom for the compulsive urge to improve ourselves.
She wrote: “Eventually it becomes clear that any mania for self-improvement is unwarranted and a waste of time. We are so hopelessly self-absorbed. That’s the deep problem. One of the reasons that improv is a helpful fix is that it trains the mind to focus outward on what others are doing and saying and indicating. You simply cannot improvise if you are thinking up interesting things to do or say. I start my classes by loudly announcing: the important thing you need to know about improv is ‘it is not about you.’”
It’s tricky to say yes, and . . . in a world ruled by the internet.
Yes and . . .
. . . let me watch just one more dog video, rewatch the installments of James Corden’s carpool karaoke (Michelle Obama!), quickly retake all the quizzes that reveal which Game of Thrones character I am (I keep getting Daenerys Targaryen, yikes), and catch up on my friend’s cooking-school adventures in Tuscany.
Jenny Odell, digital artist and author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, makes a convincing case for regrounding ourselves in the physical world, for taking the time to “do nothing” as a way of resisting the forces that gobble up our time and attention. The same case can be made for doing nothing as an antidote to the urge to self-improve.
Based in Oakland, every day Odell goes to a local public rose garden, where she sits on a bench and watches birds. She has become a mad bird-watcher, something she never expected. In a lecture she gave concerning her work, she said, “Observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. It’s sort of the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds. You can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. All you can do is walk and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree trying to use your animal senses to figure out where and what it is. In my experience, time kind of stops. (You can ask anyone who knows me—doing this regularly makes me late to things.)”
There is no reason for Odell to do this, other than it feels good to pay attention.
Saying yes, and . . . makes life the grand adventure it should be, where we’re surprised and enriched by the variety of what’s out there in the physical world. It’s everything happening around us that we’ve been too self-absorbed to notice. Simple things that make us feel good about being alive. The things to which people who’ve received a terminal diagnosis start paying attention. News flash: you don’t have to wait!
When we’re in thrall to self-improvement we do so much that doesn’t feel good. We have the aerobics movement of the 1980s to thank for Jane Fonda’s mantra “feel the burn,” where unless you’re holding back tears while exercising it’s considered a waste of time. Likewise, the masochistic nature of all pure and holy eating regimens. If, when downing that bright green smoothie, you fail to experience a slight gag reflex, you’re not eating clean enough. Kombucha. High colonics. Those knobby foam rollers for “deep tissue massage” that have been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Yeah, no, so totally not happening.
Factor in our screen addictions, where we live hunched over in the 2-D world, squinting at our phones for hours on end, and the simple human joy of living in our five senses, available to all of us at every minute of the day, is diminished if not forgotten. Diane Ackerman, writing in
A Natural History of the Senses, calls our world sense-luscious. “When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day’s sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay’s call, ice melting, and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind, and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else’s heart.”
You can self-administer a squirt of joy by tuning in to what you’re hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting, and seeing right this minute. I’m working in a tiny apartment in the south of France. Outside, past our terrace, with its white enamel tables and tiny metal chairs, I see terra-cotta roofs of different heights and angles, reminding me that Picasso began his cubist phase in this part of the world. A pair of mourning doves are sitting on a chimney. The sky is blue, with a few high white clouds like delicate scarves. I hear the burble of French at the Wednesday farmers market and the laughter of the young woman who works at the nougat shop on the ground floor of our building. She laughs all day long, and when she laughs, I find myself smiling. I can smell the butter in the croissants baking at the boulangerie across the street. The chair I’m sitting on is one of those tiny metal chairs from the terrace. My large American ass is not built for such a chair and my back is killing me. Tuned in to our senses, the imperfection of life around us reminds us of our role in it. It reminds us there is no need to improve anything. (Except possibly my desk chair.)
The irony of the eternal quest for self-improvement is that not only is the experience tedious, but it also shuts down our imagination. There’s a lot of talk about imagining a better you, but unless that better you fits into the current culturally approved stereotype of womanhood, you are at risk of believing you’ve improved nothing. If we don’t say yes, and . . . to opportunities that come along that don’t fit in with our images of our perfect selves, we pass up the chance to find out something new about ourselves, something we never expected. We miss out on the adventure of self-discovery.
Not long after I swore off self-improvement, I received an email from the Great Pyrenees Rescue Society (GPRS). We had adopted two giant shedding machines from them a few years earlier, Penny and Desmond.* They were Great Pyrenees/Labrador retriever mutts, rescued from a kill shelter in Texas, where Desmond was born. Penny’s saga was like the hokiest country and western song: she was a stray who was picked up by the dog catcher after she’d broken her leg. In the kill shelter (dogs have one week before they’re euthanized), she had a small litter of puppies. The GPRS pulled Penny and her puppies from the shelter, and all of them died of parvo but Desmond.
The GPRS is based in a suburb of Houston. It’s run by a hardworking, no-nonsense doctor’s daughter and staffed completely by volunteers. Great Pyrenees are known escape artists, can climb over a five-foot fence, and can dig a hole in your backyard big enough to bury a basketball player in under a minute. The dogs are always getting out and running away. Or people leave them by the side of the road. Or people move and leave the dog tied up to a tree. It’s always raining Pyrs in Texas. Twice a month, a transport van departs Texas for the Pacific Northwest, where dogs ready to be adopted are fostered before being placed with their forever families. The email I received from GPRS that day was asking for volunteers to foster. Before I swore off self-improvement this is not something I would have done. I was too busy. I had daily workouts, an ongoing battle with the kitchen and trying to find a way to care about cooking when I did not, my bullet journal and my regular journal, my failing meditation practice. Writing teacher Natalie Goldberg said writing in your journal could also be considered meditation, but that felt like cheating.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but my fantasy best self also was too urbane and intellectual to be part of a dog rescue, much less one based in Texas. Best self was a slender literary writer sitting in a Parisian café in dark-wash jeans and tall boots, somehow also smoking, which I didn’t do. She was never hungry and had a flat stomach; she was serene, accomplished, an effortless cook, and a fluent speaker of French.* Her smooth curls escaped from beneath a—I don’t know, some kind of an attractive hat. The best-self fantasy insisted on a hat, even though I would have to have a head transplant to wear one without looking like a Polish bowling champion in mourning.
Now that I had sworn off self-improvement and dumped this best self, I was all in. Without a moment’s thought I wrote back and said yes, and . . . what else can I do to help?
We fostered a dog, whom we ended up adopting as well (the aforementioned Rita, with whom I play Dead Hand first thing in the morning). I went on to become a screener, helping to evaluate applications and place the right dog in the right household. People routinely assume Great Pyrenees are white golden retrievers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pyrs are an ancient livestock guardian dog, bred to live outside with their flocks all year long. Their independent nature makes them difficult to train—they really don’t care about your crappy-ass Costco treat—however, they will stand up on their hind legs and eat an entire pot roast off the counter. If you leave your back gate unlatched for two seconds, a dozing Pyr will crack an eye, see his means of escape, nose it open with his strong muzzle, and gallop into the sunset.
The GPRS volunteers are stay-at-home moms, Realtors, nurses, dog trainers, and veterans. They’re Christians and atheists, Democrats and Republicans, well-educated and not so much. The great divide that is depressing everyone in the nation does not seem to affect us. We respect one another, and the hours we put in to save the lives of these majestic, stubborn, difficult dogs.
Helping rehome these dogs is one of the most gratifying things I do with my time. It’s collaborative and challenging, and when you make the perfect placement, you feel as if you’ve done something meaningful. And here’s a surprise: it’s meaning that makes us happy, not a two-thousand-dollar Peloton.
Am I saying something as cornball as get your ass out from in front of your computer and go volunteer? Yeah, I am.
When I began writing this book, I thought there was a way to avoid the capitalistic consumer pressures to fritter away our limited resources trying to improve ourselves, without having to alter our online habits. I believed I was being realistic. And this book is about nothing if it’s not about being realistic. What’s the harm, if that’s how we want to spend our precious time? The time is ours to waste, if we want to. I am, in fact, pro wasting time. I believed that despite the dozens of times a day we popped onto Instagram for a quick scroll, plummeting down the rabbit hole of the fantasies of other people’s lives, we could still pay heed, the first and necessary step in knowing how and what to say yes to. We could be bilingual, as it were, fluent in losing ourselves for hours on the internet, while also speaking the old language of real-world experiences that bring us genuine joy and a sense of who we are.
But to say yes to the glories and mysteries of our human natures, to have a prayer of figuring out who we are and how to spend our time wisely, we must rethink our social media habit. I resisted coming to this conclusion for a long time. I was always the person at happy hour who ordered another round of margaritas while arguing that the internet is merely the Gutenberg printing press of our time, pass the chips and salsa please. The only thing I knew about the Gutenberg press was that it came along in the fifteenth century and allowed for the mass printing of books. I was pretty sure there were naysayers, just as there were about the rise of the internet. My argument was as unoriginal as it was inaccurate, that just because there will always be technological advances, all technological advances carry the same weight.
We’ve all been turned on to great stuff online. I’ve discovered new authors, TV shows, movies, and music I never would have known about otherwise. Podcasts in French, stylish yet comfy pants to wear on long-haul flights, a superb recipe for pie crust—all life-enriching goodies that have come my way because of the internet. But the question we need to ask ourselves is whethe
r that’s enough, given how the whole experience messes with our sense of self. Getting out now—by which I mean drastically reducing your time spent on social media—isn’t the worst idea, and not just because life is easier and more enjoyable when we’re not stuffing ourselves with images that trigger our compulsion to improve ourselves.
Deleting our social media accounts is unrealistic. We’re too far down the road, and there are too many things, good things, that we love about the whole scene. It really has connected us to friends and family in a way that wasn’t possible before. The rise of the gig economy has dovetailed nicely with the rise of tech—every freelancer, consultant, and small business needs a social media presence, or at least a website that links to it. It’s here to stay, but we don’t have to be enslaved to it. Breaking the habit of mindlessly picking up your phone to check likes etc. is the first and best thing you can do to reclaim your sense of self and your ability to know what is worth your time, energy, and focus.
Speaking of disengaging from the internet, let’s not forget our daughters. Their habits are not yet formed. If you have a twelve-year-old with a smartphone, go tear that thing out of her hand right now. Rip out the battery and smash it to bits as if you’re a kidnapper and you’ve caught the hostage trying to order an Uber. She will hate you, but chances are she already does anyway. Which is as it should be.