What If This Were Enough?

by Heather Havrilesky

  “It’s such an exciting time to be an American,” Gwyneth Paltrow told a crowd at the Airbnb Open conference in Los Angeles days after the election, according to the New York Post, thereby casually manifesting Postman’s dark vision of the future with all the blithe cheer of a bored audience member finally getting the big finale she deserves. “[W]e are at this amazing inflection point,” Paltrow said. “People are clearly tired of the status quo, and…it’s sort of like someone threw it all in the air and we’re going to see how it all lands.” Those with nothing to lose, in other words, welcomed our new insect overlords.

  “Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately; if he gets in then things will really explode,” a smiling Susan Sarandon told Chris Hayes in March 2016, anticipating bloodshed and upheaval as if it were a particularly thrilling episode of Game of Thrones. A few weeks later, Sarandon warned the populace that Hillary Clinton was more dangerous than Donald Trump.

  A few months after the election, when asked if she regretted her words, Sarandon refused to apologize, telling Hayes, “What we have now is a populace that is awake.” Presumably she was not referring to the people of color and Muslims and immigrants and Jews lying awake at night wondering how to protect themselves and their families from a president taking his cues from a militant horde of white supremacists, anti-Semites, and anti-immigration zealots. “Seriously, I’m not worried about a wall being built and Mexico paying for it,” Sarandon continued. “He’s not going to get rid of every Muslim living in this country.”

  Other Americans seemed a little more worried than Sarandon was. Black Americans did not seem confused about how Trump’s refusal to condemn Nazis and white supremacists throughout his campaign might predict his attitudes and policy choices as president. Likewise, many immigrants and LGBTQ people, who’d experienced hatred and prejudice firsthand, appeared to recognize the dire consequences of electing a populist firebrand who knew how to use ignorance, hatred, and bigotry to his advantage.

  But a vast swath of white Americans seemed more in touch with some fantasy in their heads than they were with reality. At least this way, something exciting will happen, they seemed to say. The dragons always save the good ones, after all. Those abandoned cupboards are always filled with cans of edible food. The bastard son in bearskins always arrives just in the nick of time.

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  A blonde woman in a hot pink spandex tank hoists a sledgehammer over her shoulders, then slams it down with a dull thud onto the big tire in front of her. Beside her, another woman swings her sledgehammer even higher, grimacing and groaning with the effort. Their faces are bright red and dripping with sweat. It’s 9:45 a.m. and eighty-five degrees outside, and the sun is glinting off the asphalt of the strip-mall parking lot where the women are laboring. “Swing it higher, above your shoulder!” a woman bellows at them, even as they gasp each time they raise their hammers, each time they let them fall.

  As one woman pauses to wipe the sweat from her eyes, she spots me studying her. I’ve been trying not to stare, but it’s a strange spectacle, this John Henry workout of theirs, hammering away in front of a women’s fitness center, just a few doors down from a smoke shop and a hair salon. It looks exhausting, and more than a little dangerous. (What if a sledgehammer slips and flies from one woman’s hands, braining her companion?) It also looks pointless. Why not join a roofing crew for a few hours instead? Surely, there’s a tunnel somewhere that needs digging, or at least some hot tar that needs pouring.

  But paying to simulate backbreaking labor under the watchful eye of a demanding authority figure seems to be a common desire in the land of the free. When I type “sledgehammer” into Google later that day, the first suggestion is “sledgehammer workout,” a search term that pours forth half a dozen enthusiastic reenactments of life on a steel-driving chain gang.

  Fitness culture couldn’t have changed more dramatically since the late 1960s. Back then, residents of my small Southern hometown would spot my father, an early jogger, and yell out of their car windows, “Keep running, hippie!” These days there aren’t that many joggers in my Los Angeles neighborhood, but every other block there’s another fitness center offering boot-camp classes or Brazilian jujitsu, with people inside punching, kicking, and yelling at one another like drill sergeants. Jim Fixx’s freewheeling running disciples have been replaced by packs of would-be Navy SEALs, sprinting up sandy hillsides with backpacks full of rocks strapped to their shoulders.

  Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons once painted exercise as something fun and faintly sexy—a lighthearted trip to a sweaty nightclub in your own living room—but fitness today isn’t supposed to be easy. The “Abdomenizer” and “8-Minute Abs” videos, which practically suggested that exercise could be squeezed in between bites of your hamburger, are now quaint punch lines. By the 1990s, when the soft curves of Ursula Andress had been replaced by the hard bodies of Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson, you worked out to prepare for the beach or the bedroom. These days, though, you aren’t preparing for fun or romance. You’re preparing for an unforeseen natural disaster, or a burning building, or Armageddon.

  “We have sought to build a program that will best prepare trainees for any physical contingency—not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable.” This dark talk passes for welcoming language on the website of CrossFit, the intense, ultracompetitive conditioning program whose motto, “Forging Elite Fitness,” reflects our current fascination with both elite athletes and elite military forces. In spite of (or because of) the fact that CrossFit is now nearly synonymous with overexertion, there are more than six thousand affiliates in the United States.

  Those stunned by CrossFit’s popularity are often surprised, given its high price, to discover its spartan ethos: Each “box” (its lingo for gym) is usually just a big empty room with medicine balls, barbells, and wooden boxes stacked along the walls. Workouts rotate daily but tend to involve free weights, sprints, and squats. In keeping with its apocalyptic mission statement, the program encourages camaraderie under duress (CrossFitters coach each other through the pain) and competition (names and scores are scrawled on a wipe board and sometimes posted online).

  Despite the risks inherent to hundreds of thousands of people dabbling in Olympic weight-lifting techniques at their local strip malls, CrossFitters seem utterly dedicated to their hard-core workouts. CrossFit’s founder, Greg Glassman, admitted in 2005 that rhabdomyolysis—a dangerous condition that can lead to kidney failure—had popped up among a few new CrossFit converts. He viewed it, in part, as evidence of CrossFit’s “dominance over traditional training protocols.” Crucially, this type of conditioning was important not just for body tone but also for responding to calamity. “Nature, combat and emergency can demand high volumes of work performed quickly for success or for survival,” Glassman wrote. “Until others join CrossFit in preparing athletes for this reality, the exertional rhabdo problem will be ours to shoulder alone.” The ideal world, in other words, is populated by pumped-up gladiators, prepared for whatever battle the future might hold. The path to this world is necessarily lined with ER visits.

  CrossFitters represent just one wave of a fitness sea change, in which well-to-do Americans abandon easy, convenient forms of exercise in favor of workouts grueling enough to resemble a kind of physical atonement. For the most privileged among us, freedom seems to oppress, and oppression feels like a kind of freedom.

  The whole notion of pushing your physical limits—popularized by early Nike ads, Navy SEAL mythos, and Lance Armstrong’s cult of personality—has attained a religiosity that’s as passionate as it is pervasive. The “extreme” version of anything is now widely assumed to be an improvement on the original, rather than a perverse amplification of it. And as with most of sports culture, there is no gray area. You win or you lose. You leave it all on the floor—or you shamefully skulk off the floor with extra gas in your tank.

/>   Our new religion has more than a little in common with the religions that brought our ancestors to America in the first place. Like the idealists and extremists who founded this country, the modern zealots of exercise turn their backs on the indulgences of our culture, seeking solace in self-abnegation and suffering. “This is the route to a better life,” they tell us, gesturing at their sledgehammers and their kettlebells, their military drills and their startling reenactments of hard labor. And in uncertain times, it doesn’t sound so bad to be prepared for some coming disaster.

  This sort of twisted logic permeated my thoughts as I read Little House in the Big Woods to my kids a few years back. As I ran on the treadmill at the gym, I wondered: Wouldn’t it be better if I were breaking a sweat not from running on this hamster wheel but from disarticulating a bear? Wouldn’t I be more serene if I spent my days pickling beets or hunching over a laundry pail? And shouldn’t my children be right here with me, sewing on their nine-patch quilts? Wouldn’t we all be happier if we spent our time together, just us and no one else, learning about what’s really important, never getting distracted by what isn’t? The fantasy enabled by Little House in the Big Woods goes beyond the pastoral’s focus on communion with nature and with your own instincts or even with the satisfaction of muscles that ache from a day of hard work. At its heart, Little House is a fantasy of total isolation and total control.

  It’s no wonder, then, that some of the most memorable scenes in the Little House series focus on temporary relief from that isolation—when, for instance, Laura and Ma and Pa and the other townspeople join together in the church to sing songs and give thanks to God for His blessings. From that vantage point, we might see CrossFit not only as a Darwinian ode to individual survival, but also as a kind of communion—a worship that includes suffering and sweating together with the drill sergeant as our new preacher.

  For today’s privileged, maybe the most grueling path seems like the one most likely to lead to divinity. When I run on Sunday mornings, I pass seven fitness boutiques, packed and bustling, and five nearly empty churches.

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  If Laura Ingalls Wilder’s nostalgic tour through a simpler time has a modern equivalent, it’s The Pioneer Woman, the personal blog of Ree Drummond, who traded in her shallow big-city existence for life on an Oklahoma ranch. It takes only a few minutes of voyeuristically perusing Drummond’s pastoral pleasure dome, with its gorgeous photographs of Drummond cooking dinner for her family or homeschooling her four towheaded children, to realize that you are a failure. Gazing at photos of Drummond’s kids riding their horses under a cloud-dappled Maxfield Parrish sky, you remember the mac and cheese from a box you fed your kids as they begged to watch the latest Lady Gaga video on your laptop. Drummond fries chicken and teaches her children algebra and shakes her luscious mane of red hair in the Oklahoma sunshine, and her pioneer children dream of tornadoes and prairie grass and lassoing cows. Your kids dream of Kung Fu Panda 2 and Space Mountain and frozen yogurt covered in gummi bears.

  But the best pages of The Pioneer Woman concern Drummond’s husband, who is a cowboy and therefore wears a cowboy hat and leather chaps, just like that guy from the Village People. Seemingly aware that her husband’s entire life is an elaborate, semi-pornographic work of performance art derived from pop images of the American West, Drummond refers to him as Marlboro Man and shoots photographs of him wearing ten-gallon hats, propping his cowboy boots on metal gates, and squinting grittily into the midday sun. Under these photographs she writes captions that land somewhere between William Carlos Williams and Playgirl: “My husband. He’s still waiting on the calves. And wearing a vest. And lighting my fire.” Elsewhere she writes, “He’s rugged and virile,” apparently prepping his dossier for his next national Chippendales tour.

  But the core of Marlboro Man’s appeal—like Pioneer Woman’s, and Ma and Pa’s before them—rests in this blurry backdrop of toil under pressure from the ever-changing seasons. Alongside the gorgeous photographs of windblown prairies and luminous skies and dinner tables arranged for twenty, there are allusions to reading lessons and vaccinating calves and doing five loads of laundry every day. Even though readers are well aware that The Pioneer Woman may not be a portal into a simpler, better life so much as a carefully art-directed, commercially sponsored fantasy, we are happy to suspend our disbelief. We watch Drummond shilling for Babycakes Mini Treat Makers and shooting spots on the Today show and wrapping her cooking show for the Food Network, even as her blog, registering more than twenty million page views per month, outlines a life of unending hard work—of homeschooling and cooking and housework.

  Drummond offers up a nostalgic vision of hard work in isolation far from the bleakness of urban life, with its concrete playgrounds and indifferent teachers and blind institutions. With The Pioneer Woman, our urban and suburban indignities dissolve into a haze of homemade doughnuts and pretty sunsets and a house packed with doting mothers-in-law and uncles and cousins.

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  When Jedediah Purdy, a homeschooled twenty-four-year-old from rural West Virginia, wrote For Common Things, his best-selling paean to agrarian living and homeschooling, back in 1999, he was mostly encountered as an outlier. But after the tragic turns of the past two decades—Enron, Katrina, 9/11, the banking crisis, the recession, Puerto Rico, the Las Vegas massacre—it’s easy for modern civic life to appear as rotten as it did during the Industrial Revolution. The resultant surge in homeschooling and urban homesteading and home births and other laborious efforts at self-sufficiency make Purdy’s writing look prescient today.

  While so many aspects of the green movement—farmers’ markets, composting, gray water, solar power—represent commendable efforts to improve life within a community, there’s a spirit of separatism that can’t be disentangled from these things. The allure of hard work and self-reliance, when paired with a distrust for modern institutions, can curdle into an impulse to divest from society altogether. Whether this impulse is manifested in the suspicions of disaster preppers or the purism of the homeschooler, there’s a sense that the more independent you are, the safer you are, that total control of our environments is the ideal, and that the institutions designed to protect us might be those from which we require protection.

  But our fear of the “other” is also more mundane than that. It’s a way of choosing the inconveniences of self-reliance over the indignities and sacrifices of compromise. Perhaps it’s better (this thinking goes) to acquire the skills to face down a hungry bear in the woods or trudge through the snow to buy a few bolts of calico than it is to expose your child to a teacher who doesn’t inspire her, or to a doctor who doesn’t listen closely enough. That’s a pastoral fantasy that easily overshadows our hunched, bleary-eyed, flickering-screen lives—but the fantasy is also a product of those lives, which create awkwardness and fear of direct confrontation in a population unaccustomed to face-to-face contact, accommodation, and collaboration.

  But most of all, this dream of purity and separation feeds the delusion that isolation is the most honorable choice, that dropping out is somehow more valiant than working slowly to reform the system and help those who are truly in need. Sometimes hope doesn’t offer the same sense of comfort that closing the cabin doors does.

  “The poet is in command of his fantasy,” Lionel Trilling wrote, “while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.” The modern mind, twitchy and inconstant, is a fertile ground for neuroticism and for fantasy. But the absolutism of fantasy has a way of snuffing out initiative: If your life pales compared to the gossamer lifestyle fairy tale, why aspire to more? Conversely, if the end of the world sounds oddly alluring, why fight it?

  Ultimately, though, it’s arrogant to imagine that going it alone is any nobler than collaborating, compromising, working within a community in order to improve it. We need each other to survive the catastr
ophes to come. But more importantly, we need each other to prevent them.

  true romance

  As an advice columnist, I sometimes get asked how people can “keep the romance alive” in their marriages. This stumps me a little because, by “romance,” I know they mean the traditional version, the one that depends on living inside a giant, suspenseful question mark. This version of romance focuses on that thrilling moment when you believe you’ve met someone who might make every single thing in the world feel delicious and amazing and right, forever and ever. The romance itself springs forth from big questions: “Can this really be what I’ve been looking for? Will I really feel loved and desired and truly adored at last? Can I finally be seen as the answer to someone else’s dream, the heroine with the glimmering eyes and sultry smile?” This version of romance peaks at the exact moment when you think, “Holy Christ, I really am going to melt right into this other person (who is a relative stranger)! It really is physically intoxicating and perfect! And it seems like we feel the exact same way about each other!”

  Traditional romance is heady and exciting precisely because—and not in spite of the fact that—there are other, more insidious questions lingering at the edges of the frame: “Will I be enough? Will you be enough? Will we be enough together?”

  But once you’ve been married for a long time, a whole new flavor of romance takes over. It’s not the romance of rom-coms, which are predicated on the question of “Will this person really love me (which seems impossible), or does this person actually hate me (which seems far more likely)?” And it’s not the romance of watching someone’s every move like a stalker, and wanting to lick his face but trying to restrain yourself. It’s not even the romance of “Whoa, you bought me flowers, you must really love me!” or “Wow, look at us here, as the sun sets, your lips on mine, we really are doing this love thing!” That’s dating romance, newlywed romance. You’re still pinching yourself. You’re still fixated on whether or not it’s really happening. You’re still kind of, sort of looking for proof. The little moments of validation bring the romance.