realism, optimism, and letting go of guilt
I read a lot of good stuff on the internet this week; there are lots of links below, and that’s after I culled down the list, too. But I want to highlight two that stuck with me all week.
One was a passage in an Atlantic article about what the future will look like (spoiler: we’re not going back to normal anytime soon) about how Admiral James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war for seven years during the Vietnam War, managed to persevere through that time and make it out on the other side, seven years later.
The key is to confront the most brutal facts of reality unflinchingly, while maintaining an unwavering hope for the future. This is called the Stockdale paradox, after Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who survived years of torture as a prisoner of war. In a conversation with Jim Collins, Stockdale later attributed his survival to the fact that he “never lost faith in the end of the story,” unlike those “who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Stockdale’s strategy really struck me because I’ve had a lot of moments this week where I thought I had hit a wall. This past week was our fifth week of lockdown, and I was getting restless and increasingly depressed about my inability to live my normal life beyond the walls of my apartment. Perhaps my failure was being too optimistic: in March, I began lockdown thinking this would just be a few weeks — surely we’d go back to our normal lives by April or May. Now, it’s become clearer that we won’t be back to “normal” in April, or May, or probably any time in the next several months. Lockdown may end, but normalcy won’t come with it, at least not for a while. And so I’ve adjusted my expectations: instead of pushing the deadline in my head and hoping that we’ll be back to normal by summer so I can resume the plans I had made, I’m trying to be more of a realist instead — mentally preparing myself for the truth that this could take a year or two to fully return to normal, but knowing that it will someday go back to normal.
The second piece that really stayed with me this week was an essay in Medium’s GEN magazine, about how social media sometimes feels like America is living in two separate worlds: the people who are staying home, baking banana bread, watching Tiger King, and doing yoga, and the people who are sick and whose lives have become consumed hospitals and ventilators and doctors and nurses and trying to recover.
For those of us lucky enough to be in the former group, we can sometimes feel selfish or silly talking about our lives: our concerns — boredom, missing our friends and routines, being stuck in our homes — are nothing in comparison to the concerns of those who are sick, or those who are working on the frontlines to take care of the sick. But writer Molly Oswaks notes:
And yet, I know that if I do get sick — and the plan for America, until there is a vaccine, is for many more people to get sick, just not all at the same time — I will regret having not enjoyed my life more while I was well enough to do so. I will miss tastes and smells and the distinct pleasure of watching someone act like an idiot in front of a TV camera. My childhood friend Julia Wick, who is recovering from the virus and knew she was sick when she couldn’t taste the soup she’d made herself, told me she wasn’t bored during her first two weeks of doing nothing.
She was too sick to be bored, listless in bed, too out of it to even focus on a TV show. I’m grateful for the idle time and the ways I fill it: tie-dye projects and movie marathons and Zoom dance parties with my friends on Saturday mornings.
She makes a good point: It’s okay to try to enjoy your time inside. It’s okay to feel bored. It’s okay to not do anything productive at all. It’s okay to let go of feeling guilty about being lucky while others are worse off. “We are all just making the best of a bad situation, building ritual and meaning where we can.”
This week’s quarantine cooking
Spicy-sweet sambal pork noodles. Jalapeno honey-lime steak. Maple-roasted tofu and butternut squash (I made a version of this from Melissa Clark’s “Dinner” cookbook; the version I did was the same but without the bacon and brussels sprouts). Spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts, a recipe which has now made it into my regular rotation. Bon Appetit’s best chocolate chip cookies (they really are the best - it’s the brown butter that makes them).
What I’m reading
Millennials don’t stand a chance, The Atlantic. For millennials, this is the second recession of our working lives. We’re fucked.
The art of balancing immense grief with a rich indoor life, Gen/Medium.
Adjusting to the prophylactic life, under quarantine, The New Yorker. Gary Shteyngart on our new lives of homes and screens and pantries.
The coronavirus is a disaster for feminism, The Atlantic. For hetero, dual-income couples with kids, someone now has to do all the childcare and put their career on the backburner — and most of the time, that’s women.
The social media shame machine is in overdrive right now, Buzzfeed News. If it feels like people are nastier than usual on social media, that’s probably true. Reminder: we’re all just trying to do our best.
The new normal is getting old fast, Washington Post.
In quarantine, the budding of a pastime: growing vegetable scraps on windowsills, Eater.
Domestic inferiors, Curbed. Now that we all work from home, everyone gets a peek into each other’s homes on Zoom.
The New York you once knew is gone. The one you loved remains, Gen/Medium. On staying behind in New York during a crisis.
Sitting on the couch is my new favorite hobby, The Cut. (Also good: everything in The Cut’s “Personal Projects” series, about people’s hobbies during quarantine)
After social distancing, a strange purgatory awaits, and Our pandemic summer, both from The Atlantic. Two good (if depressing, but realistic) pieces on what life will look like after this.
The Trump administration is writing a death sentence for America’s most important restaurants, Esquire. I am worried about our restaurants — the independent ones that make up local food scenes across the country.
How millions of women became the most essential workers in America, New York Times.
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