But after many years of marriage, you don’t need any more proof. What you have instead—and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all—is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being. Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t eventually be abandoned, it’s maybe not 100 percent clear that any other human mortal can tolerate another human mortal. The smells. The sounds. The repetitive fixations on the same nonsense, over and over. Even as you develop a kind of a resigned glaze of oh, this again in, say, marital years one through five, you also feel faintly unnerved by your own terrible mortal humanness.
Or you should feel that way.
For example: I talk to my dogs. A lot. My husband does not comment on how much I do this. I am a true dog lady, but one who also has a husband and kids around. While the dog lady has a long conversation with her dogs, the husband and kids are the ones who stand by, cocking their heads quizzically, trying to understand. When I walk in the door after being gone all day, I greet the dogs first. I say things like, “Oh, did you miss your mommy? Oh, you missed your mommy a lot! You needed Mommy but Mommy wasn’t here! Poor puppies!” Then I say things to my kids like, “Hey. What’s up.” There’s a tonal shift; I am less enthusiastic, possibly because I’m unwell. My kids don’t seem to mind. It takes me longer to warm up and cuddle with them, possibly because they’re sometimes whining or yelling about something, or asking hard questions about playdates with kids I don’t like, and I can’t answer their questions until I take my shoes off like Mr. Rogers and lie prone for a few minutes and pour beer into my face.
That’s when I notice my husband. He missed Mommy, too.
But my husband doesn’t yell what the hell? at me like he could. He doesn’t sneer. He doesn’t roll his eyes. I am clearly unwell, but he makes no sounds to this effect. Instead, he hugs me and smiles and says, “How was your day, baby?” He acts like he doesn’t even notice that I should be locked away forever and ever in some bad, drafty place that serves only American cheese.
And now I’m going to tell you the most romantic story of all. I was very sick out of the blue with some form of dysentery. It hit overnight. I got up to go to the bathroom, and I fainted on the way and cracked my ribs on the side of the bathtub. My husband discovered me there, passed out, in a scene that…well, imagine what would happen if you let Todd Solondz direct an episode of Game of Thrones. Think about what that might look like. I’m going to take your delicate sensibilities into account and resist the urge to paint a clearer picture for you.
My husband was not happy about this scene. But he handled it without complaint. That is the very definition of romance: not only not being made to feel crappy about things that are clearly out of your control, but being quietly cared for by someone who can shut up and do what needs to be done under duress. That is the definition of sexy, too. People think they want a cowboy, because cowboys are rugged and macho and they don’t whine. But almost anyone can ride a stallion across a beautiful prairie and then come home and eat a giant home-cooked steak without whining about it. Bravely entering into a wretched dysentery scene, though, will try the most stalwart and unflinching souls among us.
Now let’s tackle something even darker and more unpleasant, the seeming antithesis of our modern notion of romance: Someone is dying in their own bed, and someone’s spouse is sitting at the bedside, holding the dying person’s hand, and also handling all kinds of unspeakable things that people who aren’t drowning in gigantic piles of cash sometimes have to handle all by themselves. To me, that’s romance. Romance is surviving and then not surviving anymore, without being ashamed of any of it.
Because survival is ugly. Survival means sometimes smelling and sounding the wrong way. It’s one thing for a person to buy you flowers, to purchase a nice dinner, to prove that they truly, deeply want to have some good sweet-talky time and some touching time alone with you, and maybe they’d like to do that whole routine forever and ever and ever. That’s a heady thing. You might imagine eating out at nice restaurants and screwing, and eating out and screwing and eating out and screwing. Romance, in this view, is like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, except he’s repeating the same sexily suspenseful moment over and over again.
True romance, though, is more like the movie True Romance: Two deluded, lazy people face a bewildering sea of filth and blood and gore together, but they make it through it all somehow without losing their minds completely.
Because it’s one thing to savor the complex flavor profiles of expensive meals together. But it’s another thing entirely for a human being to listen to you try to figure out how the day went for your dogs, who cannot speak English or any other human language. (“Was it hard, being without Mommy? Yes, I think it was! I think you needed your mommy, but she wasn’t here!”) And it’s another thing entirely when you start to grow an alien in your belly, a process that renders you sharp-tongued and menacing, and then one day the alien finally comes out, all covered in white slime. That is next-level romance right there! And suddenly, all you do is talk to the hairless alien and feed it with your own body (a miracle!), bragging about how you make food from thin air like a GOD, and then, once the alien goes to bed, you say Jesus I’m exhausted and ouch my boobs hurt and then you pass out in a smelly, unattractive heap. And once you have kids, even in a first-world country, you enter a kind of simulation of third-world living. You’re feeding one kid with your body while your husband crouches on the floor of a dressing room at the mall, wiping excrement off the other kid’s butt. You and your spouse are slogging through the slop of survival together.
And it’s romantic. Mark my words.
You’re not alone together very often, and when you are, you sometimes forget how to talk like adults, how to form words about your experiences. You feel more like two herd animals bumping along, all blank stares and pensive chewing. But it’s romantic how you both have no thoughts in your heads whatsoever.
The years go by, and it gets less desperate. You get sick less often because you don’t wake up fifteen times a night. There’s less fecal matter to wipe up, and less grizzly-bear-mother rage at the ready. But now you’re getting older, so you say things like “Goddamn my ass hurts.” That is also romantic! It makes you both chuckle. You are both mortal and you’re both surviving, together, and you’re in this until the very end. You are both screwed, everything will be exactly this unexciting until one of you dies, and it’s the absolute greatest anyway.
So don’t let anyone tell you that marriage is comfortable and comforting but not romantic. Don’t let anyone tell you that living and dying together is some sad dance of codependent resignation. Our dumb culture tricks us into believing that romance is the suspense of not knowing whether someone loves you or not yet; the suspense of wanting to have sex but not being able to yet; the suspense of wanting all problems and puzzles to be solved by one person without knowing whether or not that person has any particular affinity for puzzles yet. We think romance is a mystery in which you add up clues that you will be loved. Romance must be carefully staged and art-directed, so everyone looks better than they usually do and seems sexier than they actually are, so the suspense can remain intact.
You are not better than you are, though, and neither is your partner. That is romance. Laughing at how beaten down you sometimes are, in your tireless quest to survive, is romance. It’s sexy to feel less than totally sexy and still feel like you’re sexy to one person, no matter what. Maybe suspense yields to the suspension of disbelief. Maybe looking for proof yields to finding new ways to muddle through the messes together.
But when it’s 10:00 p.m. and you crawl into bed like two old people and tell each other about the weird things that your kids said that day and crack stupid jokes and giggle and then maybe you feel like making out or maybe you just feel like playing a quick game of Candy Crush, all the while saying things like “This game is stupid, it sucks” and “Your feet are
freezing” and “My ass hurts”—that’s romantic. Because at some point, let’s be honest, death supplies the suspense. How long can this glorious thing last? your eyes sometimes seem to ask each other. You, for one, really hope this lasts a whole hell of a lot longer. You savor the repetitive, deliciously mundane rhythms of survival, and you want to keep surviving. You want to muddle through the messiness of life together as long as you possibly can. That is the summit. Savor it. That is the very definition of romance.
a scourge of gurus
When the gurus on your block outnumber the tradespeople or teachers or artists, surely that’s a sign that the world has lost its footing. Because even as the guru seduces you with his wicked poetry of self-actualization, each lesson is filthy with reminders of your relative shortcomings. There is always the faintest hint that you haven’t arrived yet, that you can and should do better, and that if you fail, you deserve your fate. There is always the not-so-subtle implication that you have already squandered your gifts and will continue to do so until you learn to exert control over every dimension of your existence. But if you do somehow manage to rise above your current circumstances, there will be no more suffering or second-guessing, no more rage or injustice, and the bounty of the earth will be yours to plunder. The guru’s words are haunted by the looming shadow of your so-called best life, an implicit rejection of the life you’re living right now.
The guru is not an expert in happiness or inner peace, although he plays one on the internet. He is not a role model in the realm of fighting injustice or saving the world from disease or throwing his body onto the battlefield. He is a champion of the self. His livelihood relies not only on the defeat of human emotions, but on a denial of the existence of prejudice, of resistance, of the machinery of oppression, of the impenetrable forces that maintain the status quo, of the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, of the disastrously callous habits of the overclass and the bought-out legislators who serve them. The guru will not instruct you on how to navigate a world that distrusts or despises you, nor will he acknowledge that the landscape you inhabit was built to keep you poor, powerless, and suspect.
In other words, the guru is an expert at gaming privilege. Many of his so-called life hacks are just that, hacks—sly methods of disrupting other people’s resources for the sake of your own. If you happen to have a few demographic advantages, plus the raw self-loathing and lack of affection for humanity that tend to accompany any sustained imperative to maximize your own delicious supremacy behind fortress walls, the guru can make you king or queen of all that you survey. Everyone else can, of course, get fucked.
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Wildly popular guru Timothy Ferriss is undoubtedly a smart, driven human being with countless helpful tips on how neurotic slackers trussed up in business casual like himself can jimmy the locks on the realm of the elite. Even though Ferriss’s publishing success began with that paean to lazy privilege and its spoils The 4-Hour Workweek, then moved on to interval training, “increasing fat-loss 300%,” and inciting “The 15-Minute Female Orgasm” in The 4-Hour Body, he has since broadened his appeal to gather wisdom from an unwieldy gaggle of tech CEOs, chess masters, athletes, hedge fund managers, poker players, and a few fellow gurus. In his new book, Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World, Ferriss fires the same eleven questions at each of his “mentors,” and their answers—short or long, concise or rambling—are printed and sold (with Ferriss, we can safely assume, pocketing the profits). A similar harvesting occurs on his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which often features guests holding forth at
length with no interruptions from our host, calling to mind a hastily prepared TedX Talk or a not very well-produced infomercial. Like Ferriss’s blog and podcast, much of the material in Tribe of Mentors focuses on pragmatic methods of “extracting your max” (as a language-slaughtering guru might put it): “What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life?”; “In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?”; “What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?”; “How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for success?”
But whether Ferriss’s mentors answer questions about what message they would write on a giant billboard or what advice they’d give to college students about to enter the “real world,” they can’t help to conjure the same self-optimizing flavor of Timothy Ferriss himself. Even when they sing the praises of meditation or richer connections with others or fighting for a better planet, like all Ferriss-branded content, their words boil down to the same quest: to minimize the tedious hassles of survival so you can spend more of your time flying first-class to surf spots around the globe with similarly enlightened extreme athletes and tech bros.
“Greatness is not a final destination,” Maurice Ashley, the chess master, author, and ESPN commentator, advises Tribe readers, “but a series of small acts done daily in order to constantly rejuvenate and refresh our skills in [an] effort to become a better version of ourselves.” “When I am feeling unfocused, the first question I ask myself is, ‘Am I rehearsing my best self?’ ” offers Adam Robinson, cofounder of the Princeton Review, “And if the answer is no, I ask myself how can I reset.” “Social media works best when you provide massive value. I paid attention to analytics (likes, dislikes, views, etc.) and curbed my postings to fit what was trending (what was most valuable),” says Jon Call, who has apparently leveraged this approach to secure a career as an “anabolic acrobat.”
For hundreds of pages, we encounter a vast range of secrets and tips and suggestions, some of them useful (Chef Eric Ripert advocates “altruistic actions” and “being mindful of others” as the way to true inner happiness), others less so (Call recommends the use of smelling salts when you “can’t get your mind off sex and have no way to release”). But somehow after perusing advice about eliminating inefficient meetings and the futility of endurance cardio and the importance of good personality tests for evaluating hires, it’s hard to ignore how many of these “mentors” were selected in Ferriss’s image. Even if they care deeply about solving the world’s ills, they repeatedly return most enthusiastically to enhancing the self, as if the self were a stock portfolio that needed better diversification.
After a while, it’s hard to avoid the sensation that many of Ferriss’s mentors are the sorts of people who read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance over and over again but never read other works of fiction or essays or even the morning paper. Their recommendations are often so abstract, yet so devoid of any evidence of real struggle or adversity, that it’s difficult not to imagine a tech CEO with artistic photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., on his walls who, nonetheless, isn’t completely sure what the point of Black Lives Matter is. There is a lot of quoting Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning but a notable absence of any attempt to address the real-life nazis outside our doors.
But maybe that’s just how warped their intentions become when their words are curated by Ferriss—or by whichever stooge he’s outsourced for such tedium while he’s either sampling the fine wines of the world or retaking his own 30-Day No Booze No Masturbating Challenge. The demonic shadow of your best life that haunts everything Timothy Ferriss touches, in other words, is actually Timothy Ferriss’s best life.
This is why, on each page, instead of reaching for some higher realm of consciousness, we seem to be reminded of the oddly bland but hopelessly macho hustle this Übermensch has managed to pull off, day after day. But isn’t that the true mark of the successful guru? His sole aim is to become an unimpeachable brand with a central message that boils down to no message at all. Any real, substantive message—political or emotional or philosophical—would only expose him to disapproval. Instead, what the guru stands for is simple greatness, bestness, aspiration itself. This is why we’re so often treated to photos of Ferriss online posing with Jamie Foxx, Laird Hamilton, or Arnold S
chwarzenegger, and offered footage of all of his megarich and powerful bromances.
Considering the large volume of Timothy-Ferriss-branded material currently in circulation, we know relatively little about Ferriss’s inner life, his struggles, his emotional connection to what he creates. We rarely hear about his politics, or whether he’s depressed or energized by the state of the world. We know enough to grok that his friendships often double as cobranding opportunities and his most heartfelt sentiments often double as marketing messages. And we know that, instead of being suspicious of those who never share their wealth or their energy with the poor or the oppressed, Ferriss is suspicious of those who haven’t professed loyalty to his brand. In one episode of his podcast, he brings up another fitness guru, adding, “He may or may not be a fan of my stuff. He’s not a fan of a lot of people. But that’s fine. I’m okay with it. Because even if he doesn’t like me, I think he’s a good resource for intermittent fasting.” He has inadvertently revealed his default operating system: Swear fealty to my brand and only then might I consider doing the same for yours.
But what is the point of all of this maximized, optimal, highly efficient, connected, charismatic effectiveness? If Ferriss himself is any indication, it’s to be a cipher that stands for nothing beyond success itself, a brand that touts its best-seller status like a street barker, that boosts itself on the shoulders of other such brands, that throws a never-ending party for itself. Like his guru ilk, Ferriss manages to be invisible, efficient, and enviable, without daring to be honorable or righteous or admirable. He is, in other words, the ultimate American hero, the Greatest of Gatsbys, an evanescent tech-bro heartthrob, an emperor with no face. If his bibles for better living could be reduced to a single phrase, it would be: “Become less human.”
What If This Were Enough? Page 17