And maybe some stubborn part of me wants to be the capable one instead of the one who can’t remember what day of the week it is. Some sexist part of me thinks that it’s better to be the busy, condescending one, at home in her soft pants, talking to the dogs and rolling her eyes when she overhears the arrogant throat-clearing of a Skype conference in the next room, or shoving a pillow over her head when the snoring starts to sound like a minor-key crescendo of jet engines, taking off for Helsinki or Shanghai or Singapore.
But no one should have to choose between becoming a capable, pragmatic handmaiden who tries not to take up too much space and a disorganized dreamer with a bloated ego who steps on everyone’s toes. And I can see now that other people have ego rewards built into their daily lives—meetings, conferences, watercooler talk, accolades, long mutually congratulatory conversations with their peers. As shallow as those things can feel, after years of packing my days with as much efficient work as possible and treating any moment of self-satisfaction as shameful, it’s about time I gazed at a bookshelf filled with leather-bound journals. I want to be unabashedly proud of my work for once in my life. I want to hold my ground and acknowledge that I’m an adult now and I know some things. Instead of apologizing for being too proud or insisting that my accomplishments aren’t that big of a deal, I want to sigh contentedly as I lean way back in my swivel chair. My sighs will sound like the “Poof!” a wild mushroom makes when you step right into the middle of it for no good reason, other than you’re alone in the woods and the woods belong to you for just a moment.
I want that for my daughters—and for everyone else who ever felt small when they heard the sound of a cleared throat, one that announces its right to hold forth before it utters a single word. The capable, the hardworking, those who tackle concrete tasks with stunning efficiency deserve that flavor of bravado. We should all learn to play nicely with others, sure, but not so nicely that we’re the ones organizing and scheduling and remembering while some dude gets to wander around, unfocused but still sure of his place in the world. Sometimes when you are good at hard work, you give yourself too much of it. And with too much hard work in front of you, you might not also have the time and space to be truly brilliant.
Brilliance doesn’t depend only on talk and flair, even though we’re sometimes tempted to believe so. Brilliance depends on believing in the hard work you’re capable of doing, but it also depends on believing in your potential, believing in your mind, believing in your heart. Brilliance sometimes relies on believing in your talents before you have any evidence that they’re there. What a luxury, to take such an enormous leap of faith, without hesitation!
Because even as I’ve worked hard year after year for more than twenty years now, as I’ve polished my work and demanded steady improvement from myself and asked myself to do better, I realize that for all of the concrete skills I’ve gained, nothing takes the place of truly believing that my ideas and words have a right to be taken seriously. And if I believed enough in my talents years ago to own them, who knows what I could’ve created?
Five thousand little red hearts don’t mean much compared to that kind of faith in yourself. I want to taste that kind of faith. I want to feel it in my dirty, calloused hands. I want to know I was called to do this. I am building something big and gorgeous. I am at the center. It shouldn’t feel embarrassing to say so out loud. I am a symphony orchestra reaching a crescendo: formidable, chilling, irreplaceable.
survival fantasies
In the year 2012, every night before I peeled the plastic seal off a cup of tapioca and watched The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on my big-screen TV, I would read a chapter of Little House in the Big Woods to my daughters, who were five and three at the time. For the first few chapters, Pa mostly tramped around in the woods, shooting at things. First Pa shot a deer and smoked the meat. Next he caught a bunch of fish and salted the meat. One lucky day, he wandered up on a bear that was about to eat a pig. He shot the bear, then lugged it home, along with the bonus pig. The family celebrated!
My girls listened in stunned silence, more accustomed to picture books about Fancy Nancy and Olivia (also a pig). They never imagined that Olivia could be carved up and smoked, or that her tail might be considered a treat if fried in lard, or that her bladder might be filled with air and batted around like a ball.
But as we read on about corn husks that doubled as dolls and smoked-meat-strewn attics that doubled as playrooms, their envy of Laura and Mary became palpable, a sentiment I certainly understood. Something in the way the author lingered over the details—the meticulous smoking process, the daylong, harrowing walk into town, the way the dog bristled and growled when predators were afoot—had the power to make hardships sound soothing and delectable. But then, what girl doesn’t dream of spending a long, cold winter huddled in a tiny cabin with her staunchly religious parents, nibbling on smoked deer and lard cakes, while panthers and bears and wolves lurk outside the door?
The perverse pleasures of a pastoral narrative like Little House in the Big Woods, which was written by Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1932 (it was a precursor to Little House on the Prairie), lie in the fantasy it offers about the deeply spiritual benefits of tangling with nature, whether nature takes the shape of swaying oak trees, giant snowdrifts, or hungry predators. The pastoral genre has been around since ancient Greece, but it took a particular hold on the collective consciousness during the Industrial Revolution, when visions of a serene existence in the country were painted in sharp contrast to the indignities of urban life. The literary critic Terry Eagleton explained in The Guardian that the pastoral is “largely the creation of town dwellers. It is the myth of those for whom the country is a place to look at rather than live in.” What’s interesting about Little House in the Big Woods in particular, though, is that instead of exalting a leisurely life in the bucolic countryside, it paints hard labor and the constant threat of death in hues that make them seem as relaxing as a trip to a day spa.
Or maybe that’s just how it looked from my modern vantage point. Because after Ma and Laura narrowly escaped a run-in with a giant bear and Pa got back from town and played everyone a ditty on his fiddle, my two girls would step over a sea of plastic toys to get to their beds, and I would remove the sealed top from my tapioca and proceed to become agitated over ladies with surgically redesigned bodies who wept an endless river of tears over casual slights. Eleven hours later, I would be pouring my girls’ breakfast out of a cereal box and walking them to their respective concrete schoolyards, where they would play with Disney-princess action figures and eat off-brand Oreos at snack time, while I spent my day squinting at a computer screen until my head throbbed in sync with the drumbeat piped into my earbuds. Being stalked by wild panthers sounded sort of refreshing by comparison.
Maybe that’s why the pastoral narrative requires such sharp teeth: If all lives include suffering, we’d like to suffer for valid reasons, and not because our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the apps on our iPhones won’t load quickly enough.
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When it comes to imaginary hardship, nothing quite beats the apocalypse. If you want your dread and angst to feel more romantic and heroic, “This job is slowly killing me” doesn’t hold a candle to “This zombie might slowly eat me alive.” And sometimes nothing short of an apocalypse will align the world with your fantasies.
Take the sugary, Armageddon-flavored nuggets of NBC’s long-forgotten doomsday drama Revolution, which aired from 2012 until 2014. Unlike the cautionary tales scripted by visionaries like George Orwell or J. G. Ballard, Revolution felt more like a blatant daydream situated halfway between Dungeons & Dragons and Real Simple magazine. After all the lights go out across the globe (and batteries and gas-powered cars stop working, too, somewhat nonsensically), citizens abandon their gadget-driven existences to sharpen machetes, grow sustainable crops, and engage in mixed martial arts combat.
Even the show’s CGI images of weed-strewn urban landscapes go from haunting to oddly soothing, as flocks of birds fly through the sky and serene agrarian societies spring up in the cul-de-sacs of suburban neighborhoods.
The apocalypse depicted in Revolution—like the ones depicted in the Hunger Games and Divergent books and movies—corrected a myriad of modern injustices, from laziness to sloppy living to overindulgence. For all the heroes’ battles with evil soldiers and bandits patrolling the land, it was the pre-blackout, materialistic, digitally fixated society that represented the real dystopia. It took worldwide catastrophe for TV- and iPhone-hypnotized children to morph into the resourceful, hardworking teenagers of their parents’ wishful imaginations. In a refreshing return to the brutal laws of natural selection, millionaire Google executives were reduced to awkward, cowardly geeks who stooped over to catch their breath every few minutes. The injustice of high-tech, remote-control weaponry was supplanted by the more egalitarian rigors of hand-to-hand combat. And the handsome, well-muscled teenager at the heart of Revolution soon withered into a helpless damsel in distress, sighing and pouting in captivity while his more able-bodied older sister colluded with a loosely knit band of rebel forces to overthrow the local militia and secure his freedom.
Who wouldn’t feel a rush of yearning for this simple if somewhat violent existence? The characters’ goals were so concrete: Hit the road in search of help or information; subvert your malevolent overlords—local, observable foes, as opposed to the faceless, splintered, omnipresent enemies we face today; hide your firearms and your American flags from evil outside forces. Even romance is more straightforward: Arrows shot from a crossbow at your mutual enemy are so much more direct than a winking emoji.
Although Revolution itself wasn’t around for long, it foreshadowed a broader interest in savage TV fantasies to come: Game of Thrones was the most popular show in the world in 2016, followed by The Walking Dead, with Westworld in the number four slot. According to Parrot Analytics, which measures ratings, “peer to peer sharing,” and “social media chatter,” viewers in 2016 wanted to watch (1) brutal thugs vying for the throne as zombie hordes invaded a fantastical land; (2) brutal thugs vying for food, weapons, and a safe place to hide as zombie hordes invaded the United States; and (3) robots navigating a savage fantasy world created by their brutal thug overlords.
Three out of four of our favorite shows, in other words, were dystopian visions of survival of the most merciless, characterized by extreme isolation from centralized government and mass culture. If anything, Revolution wasn’t bleak or frightening enough to satisfy our true desires. We craved a forbidding landscape where a gaggle of survivors would be forced to work together to ward off a blind, murderous horde.
This is where our modern obsession with survivalism parts ways with the pastoral strains of Laura Ingalls Wilder: Instead of peacefully coexisting, the heroes of today’s wishful dystopias struggle to cooperate with each other under duress. Someone is always trying to undermine or overpower you. Someone has a hidden agenda or a secret disease or a nefarious secret plan. Someone is actually a zombie or a robot. Someone has two dragons in the basement and she’s not afraid to use them. Someone has a baseball bat covered with barbed wire that he could whip out without warning.
Even though the dirty work of slicing up zombies or blowing the religious zealots of King’s Landing to high heaven is much darker than the high-fiving Mickey Mouse Club patriotism of Revolution, the escapist fantasy is roughly the same. When the filthy survivors of The Walking Dead discovered a gorgeous old farmhouse, the story echoed similar plotlines in Looper and Signs and countless other films intent on toying with our idealized notions about the romantic comforts of the heartland. What better place for our heroes to restore their strength, reassert their core values—hell, even fall in love with a farmer’s daughter?
But even when our dark fantasies remind us of the perils of collaborating with human beings in real time, face-to-face, to ensure our survival—something that, by all appearances, is far more difficult than the “peer to peer sharing” and “social media chatter” that typify our modern means of engagement—somehow, we’re hooked. We savor the notion of crouching in a filthy basement with a complete stranger from two towns over, eating dusty cans of soup and telling old stories, and then smearing zombie blood on our faces to survive the next invasion. We seem to treasure the idea of joining forces with people we would have no reason to talk to in our normal lives—defensive sheriffs and clairvoyant disabled children and women with Japanese sword fetishes and serene ranchers’ daughters who are actually very fierce and serene ranchers’ daughters who are actually robots. We relish the thought of forming a fragile alliance with a woman who has a way with dragons. We like to imagine almost being sliced to pieces then running like hell then hiding in the dark then crawling through the muck with an angry middle-aged domestic abuse survivor or a flinty bastard son dressed in bearskins or a dignified lady knight with an unflagging sense of loyalty that rarely serves her well as the world is falling to pieces.
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It’s not as if our viewing appetites represent a previously unheard-of strain of fantasy. The authors of apocalyptic fiction have always managed to transform their worst-case scenarios into wish fulfillment. In Zone One, Colson Whitehead empties New York City of its bustling crowds, leaving our protagonist to explore the streets and apartments and offices of the city unfettered—which sounds like something Whitehead, who’s written passionately about the city, would love to do. In The Dog Stars, Peter Heller places his protagonist against a calm, almost idyllic post-end-times landscape with access to his own plane and his own vast stretch of territory—the perfect scenario for an outdoor adventurer like Heller—then drops in an Amazonian female survivor like a care package from the Maxim gods. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road might at first appear bereft of wishful thinking. But for McCarthy, the end times present the ultimate backdrop for contemplating mortality, far more eerie and unsettling than either the scrabbly West or the Appalachian wilds. Here, among the cannibals and the drifting ashes, his stark, biblical prose can take on divine proportions.
The focus of these novels isn’t on the shape and form of the catastrophe; those details are often vague, and all of the action there lies in the past. The apocalypse mostly serves as a way to turn up the contrast on a hero’s solitary battle to adapt. Stripping away the complications and distractions of the modern world, what does our protagonist have left? The same melancholy and longing he or she always had, of course. But now there’s no need to inject desperation, romance, solitude, or morbidity into such a tale; these qualities are encoded in the apocalyptic novel’s DNA, minimizing the trivial clutter and heightening the stakes. Values and ideas about morality are stripped down to their essential nature: Kill or be killed? Conform and tolerate oppression or escape and risk death?
Even in older works like Ballard’s The Drowned World, such disturbing questions are savored and relished like two-year-old Pop-Tarts scavenged from a stranger’s kitchen. There’s an obvious delight taken in the awfulness of the transformed planet. In his survey of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss refers to this tendency of authors to concoct enviable end-times as “the cozy catastrophe.” As others suffer and die around him, our hero runs wild, enjoying the fruits of worldwide holocaust.
In most of these apocalyptic tales, whether they’re books or movies or TV shows, we find a recurring desire for simplicity and solitude, for a reconnection with the self and the land, for a private chance to determine what one needs to survive and what can be left behind. The characters rarely choose to join a large community and cooperate peacefully within its boundaries and bylaws for the common good. Because as long as it’s all fantasy, why subject yourself to the same compromises and restrictions you tolerate in real life? What kind of an imaginative exercise is that? We don’t crave the adventures of an optimistic team player. What
we want is something that the mandatory optimism and go-get-’em attitude of American culture can’t give us. We want a guilt-free escape into struggle and compromise and curmudgeonly solitude. We want a chance to understand our bare minimum requirements for survival. And underneath almost every tale, we discover the same notion: that we might be happier—or at least stronger, more focused, more admirable—if only we had much less.
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Perhaps the willful act of hara-kiri that most white American voters inflicted on themselves on November 8, 2016, was the logical end point of these desires. It was as if many Americans preferred to step off a tall cliff rather than live with the impermeable blank nothingness and precariousness of modern life. Did the passivity of our screen-led lives slowly transform us into nihilists without our noticing? Because post-election polls indicated that many voters believed that anything was better than where we had landed in 2016. And some voters seemed to crave a legitimate crisis instead of an imaginary one. People wanted “change”—whatever that was—even if the person promising change seemed capable of burning down the world by accident in his fumbled attempts to bring it.
Donald Trump certainly recognized that “change” didn’t have to mean anything concrete. It could simply mean that things were about to get unhinged and unpredictable in the manner of reality TV finales. This was the destiny that Neil Postman had predicted back in 1985 in his popular polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death: The shift from the nuances of the page and complexity of real life to the blathering incoherence of the TV screen was complete. All that mattered was that our leader continued to build suspense: Each new day, some perceived crime had just been committed, and someone was going to pay for it.
What If This Were Enough? Page 15