You Can’t Have It All

Every so often I take a break from the various political podcasts I fill my empty headspace with (although, who are we kidding, as soon as I get my next audible credit it’s back to 44 Scotland Street for me) to listen to the Art of Manliness. This is not some weird inclination towards gender bending. It’s that the host of that podcast reads books and then has the authors of those books on to talk about them. And given that I don’t have time to read books, it makes me feel like I might some day just by the effort of listening to people talk about them now.

The book this time was Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost. Would really love to read this book but obviously I’m never going to get to it unless I live to be a hundred. The author, Mr. Bogost, lightly elucidated the premise–that if you place constraints on something, say like you would in a game, creativity and novelty rise up. Whereas, if you are constantly trying to restrain yourself from the myriad plethora insanity of choices, you actually don’t end up with creativity and maybe also no mental health. That’s my summery. Don’t knock Mr. Bogost if I got it wrong.

I already know that this is abundantly true. If you tried to arrange the furniture in the whole world you would die. But if you try to arrange the furniture in one room you end up with a satisfying moment. If you go to a regular grocery store and stand in the toothpaste aisle, you’ll probably not be able to buy toothpaste. But if you go to Aldi, where there is only one kind of toothpaste, you just buy toothpaste and go home and brush your teeth.

I applied this a while ago to my writing life. As in, I’m going to constrain myself to blog every day. Every. Single. Day. No matter how hard it gets. And I now mentally and emotionally depend on the room that has been cleared out in my own mind as a result of that constraint. I think about things 1000% (I’m so good at math) more than I did two years ago.

But I also think this principle is one of the threads that has contributed to the wretched existence of the modern woman. When sexual liberation hit women in the 60s and 70s and they chucked their aprons and went running to be fulfilled in the workforce and with all the sex there was this little ridiculous lie that was told. I’m sure you remember it. “You can have it all,” was blathered everywhere. Sure, you can have a family and a career and a perfect house and a big salary. Have it all. Have the free sex and the baby when you want one and the husband and the 80 hour work week. It’s going to be awesome. You’re going to have everything you want.

So now, however many years later (math is hard) women are beginning to see the dumbness of that lie. Lots and lots of women now make a choice between one or the other. Home or Work. They just choose. Trouble is, they are judged whichever way they land. If they stay home, the left judges them. If they go to work, the right judges them (unlike math, sweeping generalizations are easy).

But even if they make the choice–I’m going to work, or I’m staying home–the culture doesn’t allow the real narrowing that would need to take place for modern women to be mentally healthy. When a woman decides to stay home, she has to justify this constraining choice to herself and the world by adding Pinterest and homeschooling. If she goes to work she has to add in all the hours and still keep up with life at home, even if she manages to pair it back. Her phone dings all the time. The Internet relentlessly pursues her.

I was waving my arms and shouting at my husband, as I am wont to do, that it’s possible for him to do all his work and go to bed anxiety free at night, but it’s literally impossible for me to do all of mine. There is no human way for me to do all the things that have been allotted to me, even though I have paired them way way way back. So I careen from important moment to important moment, chucking things along the way. I’m not really complaining, it’s just the way the world is now.

But I blame that original lie for this current reality. I think we’re still living with its effects even though we know it isn’t true. We can’t have it all. We shouldn’t want to. We should be allowed to constrain ourselves so that creativity and health may flourish.

Incidentally, and this would be a whole different thought, if you can’t place internal constraints on yourself, you have to build them up from the outside. And that is a devastating cultural place to be, as we are daily observing.