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It hits me like brand-new news that I could just leave. I could even leave right now. Just drive away and never come back. John wouldn’t care; if anything, he’d be delighted. I’d be a failure, I think. But suddenly the word looks so small. Okay, let’s say you run screaming and become a failure. Do you care? What if you just … let yourself fail? I almost laugh out loud at the notion of deciding to let myself fail. But it’s inside me now, even if it sounds absurd, as physically impossible as willing myself to drown.
But everyone would know I failed, I think then. If I leave this job before I’ve nailed it.
So? Let’s say two hundred people write you off as a failure, but meanwhile you’re sober and not crying all the time. Would that be a fair trade-off?
I don’t know. The word “failure” is starting to look big again and I have to back away from it. But I store away the idea that failure could be exactly what I need. I add it to a mental list I started compiling the day I discovered the strawberry stand and realized I was interested in myself: You like wooden boats and flaky salt and having dahlias at your desk. Sometimes you tell yourself mean things when you run. You feel calmer when you go outside at lunchtime. If you don’t sleep well one night, you usually do the next. Having a whole mystery series to read makes you feel safe. You always thought you weren’t tough, but you are. You really do believe failure goes on some sort of permanent record. You can get weirdly absorbed in cleaning out a drawer. You try so hard to be good at things you don’t actually want to do. You never ask yourself if maybe you should just stop doing them.
“Maybe two more years,” I say. “Two more years should be long enough to get me promoted, right?” I’ve been two years from promotion for more than a decade now, but hey. “Four more vesting cycles.” This, at least, is solid. The future may be vapor, but the cash is real.
“Fine with me,” John says. “But how do you feel when you say that?”
“Angry,” I say, with a hard stop that indicates nothing more is coming.
I heard his footsteps retreating down the hallway, down the stairs. I lifted the next item out of the box, a gray wool skirt suit. The fabric felt soft and luxe, a subtle pinstripe running top to bottom. But when I held up the matching jacket, I could tell that something about it was no longer right, theshoulders too big, the lapels too wide. This had probably been my mother’s nicest suit, the one she wore to court when she argued a big case. I held the jacket and I pictured her standing in front of judge and jury. She had been so full of life, so full of joy. How was it possible that I still had this jacket, and yet I didn’t have her?
this just feels so cliched im sorry
We entered a vast windowless space, seemingly a ballroom, though who would want to host a ball in this windowless space was a mystery. The room was filled with hundreds of booths, each with a table and a sign, a salesperson or two shilling product that was at least tangentially related to happiness. A guard at the door checked our badges; only conference attendees were allowed in.
so blah. the last sentence especially feels clunky
“I’ll finish my dissertation,” I said. I had spent so many years working up an argument that the mind was all that mattered. But I had been wrong about that, too. The body was undeniable. I was surprised to find that the idea of going back to the unfinished document on my computer made me excited. I was ready to return to a world that didn’t believe life could be so easily overwritten, so easily codified.
lol
That weekend, Jamie and I went camping. He had been in the office all month—no fieldwork—and said he wanted to get outdoors. I wasn’t sure that car camping counted, but it was the best we could do, so we drove to a campground, set up our tent on a pre-groomed square of dirt, built a fire in the premade fire pit, and grilled some steaks that we had purchased at the grocery store down the road—steaks that were decidedly not local or organic or grass-fed but came in a Styrofoam tray, bloody and absurdly cheap, the product of farm subsidies that we paid for with our tax dollars because farmland fit our vision of America as a place of plenty.
what????
By contrast technological change is very logical, as innovations provide greater efficiency and conveniences at lower costs. Our ancestors adopted the spinning wheel not as a “fad,” but because it shortened the time required to twist fibers into yarn. From this perspective cultural change appears bizarre. What were Stu and his imitators hoping to accomplish with a moptop? What changed their taste? Neither evolutionary biology nor economics can explain this behavior—the moptop has no intrinsic value over other styles, nor offers more tactile pleasure. Was the moptop a form of self-expression? If so, how did everyone know what feeling this particular haircut expressed? And why would everyone seek to express the same emotions through the same haircut at the same time?
this is sort of missing something but we'll allow it
But cultural changes are never random, nor do they befall us as plagues. Trends happen because individuals choose to take up new behaviors. And when we examine the history of cultural change, there are clear patterns in how humans move from one practice to another. Sixty years before the moptop, social scientist William Graham Sumner seemingly predicted how it would rise and fall: “A new fashion of dress seems at first to be absurd, ungraceful, or indecent. After a time this first impression of it is so dulled that all conform to the fashion.” In almost all instances, new behaviors begin as an exclusive practice of smaller social groups—whether elites or outsiders—and then eventually spread to the wider population. This is true for the diffusion of superficial hairstyles but also applies to things not considered “fashions”: practical technologies like cars and hybrid seed corn, delicacies like chocolate and gin, political and spiritual beliefs, and the succession of artistic movements in modern art. The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work—the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.
i like the concept
Once we know how to identify conventions, we’ll find them everywhere. They manifest as customs, the tacit rules of a community. Customs can be so invisible within a group that we notice them only upon encountering alternative ways of life. “There are probably young men from Nevada,” writes the journalist Calvin Trillin, “who have to be drafted and sent to an out-of-state Army camp before they realize that all laundromats are not equipped with slot machines.” We are more cognizant of conventions when they take the form of norms and manners, because we may be reluctant to follow them. Meanwhile, traditions, like lederhosen and dirndl, are conventions anchored in historical precedence that serve as explicit symbols of the community. Beliefs can also have conventional elements. This is clear for superstitions: Americans fear the number 13, while Italians believe it’s lucky.
this is dumb but made me laugh
The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis—reasons for adoption other than status seeking. Beck listened to avant-garde noise for its aesthetic charms, not just to show off indie cred. Fancy cars always tout desirable features. The ultrapremium Eldorado Brougham Cadillacs of the late 1950s came with “anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling, projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, [and] outboard exhaust ports.” Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail: ankle watches were popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they’re not a practical way to tell time. Companies that produce luxury goods, from Louis Vuitton to Tiffany, Rolex, and Dom Perignon, understand the need for alibis, and their marketing provides detailed explanations of great craftsmanship, rare materials, unsurpassed comfort, and the highest levels of quality control. And yet, luxury goods never work as luxury goods based purely on functionality. They also must have status value. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard writes, “The functionality of goods comes afterward, adjusting itself to, rationalizing and at the same time repressing these fundamental structural mechanisms.” The best proof of this can be found in the fact that luxury goods that are initially exclusive to a small segment of the population, such as nutmeg or air-conditioning, cease to be luxuries once they’re widely available—despite their quality improving over time.