The Trauma Yacht
Combining preposterous subject matter, pitch-perfect humor, and an irresistible voice, Lauren Oyler’s cover story [“I Really Didn’t Want to Go,” Letter from the Celebrity Beyond, May] has been met with profuse praise. I suspect, however, that the sheer thrill of the ride—the sail?—might distract us from recognizing that the piece is also a rare, penetrating meditation on what it is to write “as a woman” on a “women’s topic.”
Oyler lists a series of tongue-in-cheek ambitions for the piece. Two of them—to produce “a swashbuckling masterpiece of magazine journalism,” and “unite irony and sincerity once and for all”—allude to David Foster Wallace’s 1996 cruise essay in Harper’s Magazine. But Oyler adds another: the assignment is an opportunity to “conquer the sexist genre of wellness writing.” This is perhaps her hardest task, and most impressive achievement.
“Vulnerability reigns” in wellness culture, Oyler writes. It reigns equally in wellness writing, whose practitioners are expected to divulge personal trauma and to arrive—preferably with some tears, after due exposure to the right pseudo-therapeutic interventions, exercise routines, and diets—at a newfound sense of self-mastery. Wallace suggested that cruises appeal to our infantile natures, the part of us that “always and indiscriminately WANTS.” Contemporary wellness culture appeals to that same part of us, but meets its demands with a new fantasy: not that one can return to the womb and do “Absolutely Nothing,” but that one deserves infinite empathy for one’s infinite pain, and stands a chance at rebirth.
Oyler does not simply reject the injunction to bear witness to suffering, or to communicate it. She questions to what purpose we do either. Showing vulnerability doesn’t have to mean admitting the debilitating effects trauma has had on one’s psyche, only to welcome aggressive attempts at reinvention. A more interesting vulnerability might be found in the willingness to treat one’s own narratives lightly, teasingly, or to admit that sometimes we are not merely victims of “deceit, lies,” and “trickery,” but its agents.
Anastasia Berg
Jerusalem
Oyler paints a picture of desperate narcissism among the spoiled classes who seek fulfillment and self-indulgence under the mantra of wellness. They are the latest suckers of the eternal American scam—snake oil, the power of positive thinking, scream therapy. For true fulfillment, I would suggest a martini. Straight up, two olives. Let the gin give a little kiss to the vermouth.
Richard Steele
Studio City, Calif.
Capital Chains
Erik Baker traces today’s legitimation crisis of work to the failed promise of the twentieth-century “entrepreneurial work ethic,” which ties the meaningfulness of work to the ways it expresses the worker’s personality and passions [“The Age of the Crisis of Work,” Essay, May]. Yet that ethic was invented by seventeenth-century Puritan ministers, who argued that a person’s calling is the occupation that best fits their talents, and that sustains their enthusiasm by affording opportunities to help other people.
Workers today are miserable because they are forced to use their talents to maximize profits at the expense of helping other people. According to the mid-twentieth-century ideal of stakeholder capitalism, firms were supposed to make profits by assisting others. But for the past forty years, the typical firm’s governing ideology—shareholder capitalism—has been that its sole purpose is to maximize profits. Software engineers are forced to design algorithms that promote hatred. Journalists are forced to produce clickbait. Health care professionals are forced to maximize billing at the expense of proper care. These misuses of talent cause moral injury and burnout.
The government of the workplace is authoritarian. If workers governed the workplace, they would not inflict moral injury on themselves, or reduce themselves to drudges.
Elizabeth Anderson
Professor of Public Philosophy, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor
Loss Leader
I share Tom Bissell’s dismay at what many popular writers have done to Stoicism as they strive to make it accessible to modern readers [“Time Is a Violent Stream,” Review, May]. Marcus Aurelius didn’t intend to console others—he wrote for himself. But, by reading Marcus’s work in a spirit of honest discernment and vulnerability, Bissell shows how “the cool white heart of classical Stoicism” still speaks to us today.
Bissell focuses on his father’s death, but there is much more in life, both joyful and sad, that Stoicism illuminates. It is a guide for the good times, showing us how to savor them without getting swept away. And some Stoics courageously face challenges even more painful than the death of a parent. Bissell concludes his piece by imagining the death of his daughter, finding the limits of philosophy in the face of such incomprehensible loss. The mortality of a child can also be a part of the natural world, and the Stoicism that Bissell channels so beautifully must confront even that. “What harm is there,” Epictetus wrote, “when you are in the midst of kissing your child, to whisper and say, ‘tomorrow you will die’ ?” Time is a violent stream. We must all be ready to swim.
Brad Inwood
Professor of Philosophy and Classics, Yale University
New Haven, Conn.
