WHAT IF THIS WERE ENOUGH? by Heather Havrilesky

In 2018 I bought the essay book: “What if this were enough?” written by Heather Havrilesky.

By reading it, I have learned that the author was a well-known columnist at “The Cut,” and while working there, she received lots of letters from teenagers and young adults.

The following are some of her ideas from the essay “The popularity contest”:

“I’m starting to believe that many of our basic assumptions about millennials – that they’re spoiled and entitled, that they’re overconfident in their abilities, that they’re digital natives utterly unconflicted about privacy and social media and living much of their lives online – are wrong.

They are turned inside out, day after day, by social media.

From my vantage point, it looks tougher to be a young person today than it has been for decades.

Many young people describe others as “a better version of me.”
This is how it feels today to be young and fully invested in our new popularity contest: No matter how hard you try, someone else out there is taking the same raw ingredients and making a better life out of them.

They feel afraid of showing their true selves because they’re sure they’ll be shamed for it.

Teenagers and twenty somethings have grown up with social media, which means they have been doing this their whole lives.
And the pressure that creates is enormous: Not only do many of us now expect to make money at creative careers that used to be seen as the poverty-stricken purview of a small handful of artists, but we also expect to establish a name for ourselves quickly, to find our work deeply satisfying, and to become famous overnight–or at least to have tens of thousands of followers.

Very few people explain that success rarely happens quickly, and that even if it does, there are still lingering worries and bad days and hours and hours of tedious work involved.
There aren’t many inspirational quotes about how discouragement will plague you as you work and that’s just how it feels to work at something difficult.
There aren’t many memes reminding you that you won’t get everything you dream of–and that getting everything you dream of might not make you happy anyway, no matter what that constantly scrolling feed of highly curated <<best lives>> seem to imply.

Obviously, as an advice columnist, I’m often at risk of becoming part of the problem. I tell people to believe in the lives they really want, to set their expectations high and strive tirelessly to achieve their dreams. But I also want to say to them, time after time, that there is no <<better version>> of you waiting in the future.
The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment.
Shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now.”

Editura: DOUBLEDAY, New York, 2018