What Would Carrie Bradshaw Do?
Sometimes, when we are faced with an existential crisis, it's best to ask yourself...
You’re not really saying much when you say something like “Americans struggle with everything.”
It’s kind of like a Leonard Cohen article I recently read where the author had to make a point of prefacing what he wanted to say with an admission that words don’t mean jack shit anymore. It was one of those things where he was like “we use the phrase hero’s journey so often, it has almost lost its meaning, but…” So, I’m going to borrow this technique and do the same thing: most Americans struggle with conflicting ideas. Now, before your brain begins to dart into the dark forest of distraction, recognize that I gave that opening line its own paragraph. That’s how important that statement is to me.
I was listening intently to podcasts over my Airpods because I wanted to get a clear idea about how soundscapes are used to make the listening experience more exciting. A new episode of one of my favorites was in the queue, so I started there. Within the first two minutes, the narrator was quoting “Carrie Bradshaw” in a very honest way. She was not employing sarcasm or irony. She was essentially subscribing to the same (I use this word reluctantly) philosophy as this flawed television character.
My issue is not so much that the character is flawed–art has very few parking spots for perfect people (fictional and otherwise)–it’s just the kind of flaws she has that make me wonder. Most progressive minded people (ie: the kind that produce Top Ten podcasts) are, at least intellectually, aware of eastern principles. Most even try to espouse them. Conspicuously.
So they will post endless memes about dropping out of the rat race and giving up on the need to strive and accomplish and, yet, they will make sure everyone at the brunch in Williamsburg knows their show has ten million downloads. They will preach of the necessity to live in the moment, but they will also bemoan their Tinder dates and spend all of their free time trying to stuff anything they can into the places where they feel empty and alone. They will try to embody a fictional character like Carrie Bradshaw—a character who, while maybe not a capital N narcissist, still displays the annoying narcissism Manhattan is famous for. The kind that swings on a pendulum between the newest pair of Ferragamo’s and the inevitable result of their anxious attachment style.
Because, frankly, the tenets of eastern thought, while sage-like and true, are also for goody-goody’s. We know we should put our phone down and give our undivided attention to our children, but we scroll for hours through bullshit anyway. The fact that we spend so much of our time feeling crappy about stuff like that only reinforces the point: guilt is a western world tradition. They’ve been using it to keep the hoi polloi in check for centuries.
I’m not trying to be self-righteous, either. My personal reasons for rejecting the Carrie Bradshaw guide to western world minutiae is rooted entirely in common sense. Remember the “Greedy 80’s?” Well, in those days, the ratio of income between CEO’s and common workers was about 60 to one. Today it’s 350 to one. Take a moment to digest that. The average CEO makes 350 times more than their employees. I can promise you, the only thing standing in the way of an all out violent revolution is Twitter and Only Fans. (Three cheers for pornography for so deftly kicking religion off the “opiate of the people” throne. Porn may destroy marriages and make young men prematurely impotent, but that pales in comparison to all of the church’s contributions. And shit, at least the purveyors of perverted pictures pay their fair share of income and property tax.)
Ah, but I digress.
The point I am trying to make is that I am a person who will have to work until the morning I don’t wake up. The stars sort of lined up to make that so. For a lot of people, this might sound negative and full of hopelessness, but it doesn’t sound that way to me. As far as I’m concerned, and I believe my therapist would concur, I have a healthy relationship with reality. I never had dreams of owning a condo in Royal Palm Beach and frittering away my final days playing shuffleboard.
And even my dreams of writing and traditionally publishing fiction are starting to fall by the wayside. I won’t stop writing, obviously. I just want to divorce myself entirely from the pressure of “results.”
Just as I was getting ready to call it a night, I caught something on my newsfeed that highlights exactly what I am talking about. It said, “What if your markers for success were how well you slept at night? how many books you read? how easily you laughed? how much time you spent storytelling, feeling warm in the arms and homes of people you adore.”
As long as we’re “what if-ing,” what if we didn’t need “markers of success?” What if we didn’t feel guilty? What if we invested entirely in our own universe? What if we no longer accepted the role as a cog in a machine that was meant to eat us alive?
What if we just stopped struggling?
PHOTO BY LEA MAZZEI
So now this is my latest favorite for your blogs since fiction has its own place on the shelf. I agree with this: I never rated my worth in dollars, but i did with the work itself- good with my patients, and my students. Now I look at the quality of my sleep, eating, and vitality. The latter is most difficult lately. Thanks, Billy, for a thoughtful morning read.
This was medicinal and timely this morning.