Life 2.0: What I've Learned

A new series about what has helped me begin again

I did a lot of homework before I left the US—not just about where to go and what to see, but more fundamentally about how to live. I wanted a clean slate, and I didn’t want to fall back into old habits. It wasn’t just my outer circumstances that needed changing. It was also the shit show going on inside of me that needed a major overhaul. Because when we are stuck in a life that doesn’t suit us, we have to examine how we got there and why we are unhappy.

We can’t just make cosmetic changes—a new job, a new house, a new city, a new partner. We have to dig deep to find the resources we need to change the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

Shortly before I left home, a dear friend from my twenties came to visit and we had a fabulous weekend in New Orleans. As we drove around town and dined out, I couldn’t stop talking about all of what I had learned from the dozens of books and podcasts I had been devouring. At one point, she turned to me and said, “You should write a book about all of this stuff. Most of us don’t have the time to do the deep dives that you’ve done.” Hmmm. There was an idea, I thought. And shelved it.

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Now all of you lovely people yearning for change have arrived in my Substack community, and I want to share what I’ve learned. I don’t know about writing a book. There are many people more qualified than I, who have studied these things more rigorously. But I do think that I have sampled and absorbed a lot from many different angles, and I can share my journey as I completely changed my mindset so that I could live a healthier, happier life.

So I’m going to start a new series called “Life 2.0: What I’ve Learned.” I will alternate these posts with discussion threads and more stories of audacious women creators in the coming months as I transition to being a student again. Today, let me start with some of my first steps toward change.

Default Life in the US and UK

If external change requires internal change, where do we begin? It starts with assessing the status quo, which for most of us is the “default life” we aspire to. Call it the “American dream” or the “Supermom ideal” or “life under late-stage capitalism” or whatever, but the default is a life measured by external things: a successful career, an Instagram-perfect family, a bikini-perfect body, a snazzy car, a nice (big, clean, magazine-shoot-ready) home, and way too much stuff.

Do Ho Suh, “Blueprint” (2014), at Modern One, in Edinburgh. I loved this exhibition. So many fascinating portrayals of homes. This one offers a fascinating contrast between a facade and the mess inside.

The default life is the factory setting of our culture. All of the marketing and social media around us props it up. Our brains get hard-wired to seek out these external measures of success that are supposed to lead to happiness. We feel that we need them in order to even feel “okay”—to be likeable/desirable women or functioning adults.

Then, if you’re burdened with the need to prove yourself (to make up for some deficiency in love, usually as a child), you will keep striving for ever-greater measures of success. You (by which I’m saying “I”) won’t be satisfied with getting a book published by a major university press. You will want another book published, this time with a better press. Then you won’t be satisfied when your book is reviewed on the cover the New York Times Book Review. You will want to write a bestseller, win a major award, become famous, become rich. The need to feel this hole with external rewards never ends. There is always something else that is bigger and better.

Even if you don’t suffer from overachiever syndrome, the pull to have more is probably still something you struggle with. But more never satisfies. The problem is that the more you have, the less you feel. Because these things don’t make us happy. They make us numb.

Opting Out of Numbing Out

Ours is a numbing-out culture. It is built on numbing us with endless supplies of ultra-processed foods, alcohol, television, movies, video games, beauty products, clothing, cars, whatever. Our economy runs on overproducing these things and creating the desire to consume them ad nauseum. That is addiction—wanting more and more and never being satisfied.

All of this numbs us out, making it harder to experience real desire and joy. The ups and downs of life are smoothed out when we have so much to distract us. Feeling down? Grab a bag of cookies. Feeling hopeless about your dead-end job? Shop for a new outfit. Fearing mortality? Buy a car.

The opportunities to numb out have only increased with the rise of the “attention economy.” Today, our economy runs increasingly on corralling and sustaining our attention, sucking us into an endless proliferation of reels, videos, tweets, updates, and news. In this environment, we are encouraged to fantasize, veg out, or get worked up about the latest outrage. Rage may be the one true emotion fostered by the attention economy—simply because it keeps us clicking.

Do Ho Suh, “Haunting Home” (2019), Modern One, Edinburgh.

One of the first things I did when I began to turn the sinking ship of my life around was get off Twitter and Facebook. The last straw for me was seeing a tweet in my feed where a guy I hardly knew was screaming at Trump. This guy was pissed and had taken to Twitter to vent. I realized that his intended target was never going to see this tweet. Instead of yelling at Trump, this guy was yelling at me.

I was the recipient of all of the online rage in my feed. And I didn’t need it. I was sick with an autoimmune disease, caused and/or exacerbated by a nervous system that was always in fight-or-flight. I wanted out of the (out)rage culture that had taken over. I didn’t want to see another online acquaintance losing their shit over Trump or Boris or J. K. Rowling.

So what did I do? I switched my drug of choice to Instagram. It felt like a step in the right direction at least. I told myself that I was looking for the inspiration I so badly needed to imagine a new life for myself in France. During the pandemic, I scrolled through seemingly infinite pictures of house porn, specifically French-countryside house porn. I mentally moved into dozens of beautiful homes over those months as I lay on the couch, wondering when I might ever get out into the real world again.

I coud have gotten stuck there in an endless loop of fantasizing about a new life. But as soon as travel to France was possible, in August 2021, I got off the couch and onto a plane. After my brother had died that spring, I had gotten serious about moving there. I didn’t want to be just a dreamer. I wanted to make a step towards a new reality.

My specific dream was to live in the Loire Valley next to fields of sunflowers. I wanted a vista from my kitchen window, preferably with a church steeple rising above a village or a chateau in the distance. I wanted to invite friends over for al fresco Sunday lunches, with a new bottle and type of wine for each course. (I actually enjoyed such a three-hour dinner on my trip. It’s common in France to spend Sundays this way with friends and/or family.)

Site of a fabulous al fresco three-course meal I enjoyed in the Loire Valley, France.

But that trip did not lead to an Instagram-worthy life in France. I think I was too stuck on external measures of happiness—a new home, in particular—when what I needed was a new life. So I decided not to make the giant leap into buying a new home in a country I had only visited twice. And here’s where I began to learn another valuable lesson.

Learning to Fail

I could have told myself that my trip to France was a failure. But really it was an experiment. I stayed with and met English-speaking expats who had made their lives in France and learned about their lives there. What I discovered is that most of them had partners, and that makes a big difference.

I would be on my own and probably too isolated. At another stage of my life, that might have been just what I wanted. But after a failed marriage, I wanted to be able to date and actually have the prospect of having a fulfilling sex life and maybe even love in my life. (That is a whole other topic that I explore in my memoir.)

So the trip was not a failure. It helped me figure out what was important to me. Although I thought I was looking for a new home, I found something more important—the desire to travel and meet new people. So that is when I began to plan my year of exploration.

Since then, my life has been a jumble of experiments, trying to figure out what I want the next stage of my life to look like. I will talk more about those experiments and getting comfortable to with “failing” in future posts.

In the meantime, I’d love to know, are there things in your life that you find you want more and more of, without ever being satisfied by them? Do you find yourself sucked into our default, numbing-out, over-achieving culture? Is there something you’d like to give up to regain control over your time, your money, your life?

I will admit that now that I have an apartment and don’t have to carry everything I own with me in a small suitcase, I’m finding myself lured back into clothes shopping. Fortunately, there are only a small wardrobe and dresser for storing clothes, and I’m determined not to exceed their capacity! I’m still sick about the walk-in-closet full of clothes I accumulated in my previous life.

But I have to say that wearing only a few mix-and-match things has lost its appeal. I found a really cute scarf and sweater yesterday and bought a soft bathrobe—a true luxury! I’m glad I bought them at charity shops, but still, I know that I need to be careful.

I look forward to reading your comments, as always!

Until next time,

Anne

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