Trouble don’t last always
Euphoria, existentialism, and playing with the poetry.
There is an episode of Euphoria that I watched a few months ago and, since then, have thought about at least once a week. It is called ‘Trouble Don’t Last Always’ and is one of two specials released after the first season. In the 54 minute episode, teen drug addict Rue Bennett (Zendaya) and her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, Ali (Colman Domingo) sit at a diner eating pancakes on Christmas Eve. Rue is high as she tells Ali she is sober. He sees straight through her and they eventually get to the point. There are twelve steps of NA and it is the second that Rue can’t reconcile: believing that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. Ali, a recovered addict who found Islam, asks Rue to name anything more powerful than herself. She lists the ocean and any song by Otis Redding. Ali says this list won’t cut it. “You have to create a new god, or gods, or whatever you can, but it is imperative that you believe in something, something greater than yourself,” he said. “And it can’t be the ocean or your favourite song. And it can’t be in the movement, or the people, or the words. You’ve got to believe in the poetry. Because everything else in your life will fail you, including yourself.”
Existentialism is a philosophical school of thought that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. The term is believed to have originated with the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and was later popularised by Jean-Paul Sartre, with other existential philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism is, in short, the belief that we are born into a meaningless, illogical world but each of us has the ability and free will to create our own sense of meaning within it. On the surface, the outlook can seem depressing, but when you spend a little more time with it, it can be an entirely liberating force. As Nietzsche argued, with existentialism one can move beyond finding value in the human existence and, instead, focus on creating value and meaning in their own life.
There is a growing sense of existential dread making its way into the art of our times. I’ve noticed, in particular, a widening genre of existential fiction emerging. These novels are usually written by white, middle-class women pondering both the precarity of our times and the point of life itself. There’s The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood, Weather by Jenny Offill, and Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Each heroine - an adjunct English professor, a librarian, and a journalist respectively - seems to be grappling with how exactly to move forward in a world they deem relatively pointless. They join the same club as Maria Wyeth, the main character in Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, Play It As It Lays. Wyeth is an out of work actress living in Los Angeles, coming to terms with the inherent meaninglessness of the world as she perpetually drives the freeway. Maria may have summed up the entire genre best when she said: “One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.” So, how do you create meaning in a meaningless world? How do you keep playing in the nothingness with a sense of joy and purpose?
In Sally Rooney’s new book, Beautiful World, Where Are You - which also contributes to this growing genre - Alice, a 30-year-old novelist whose work has risen to immediate critical acclaim and caused her to have a mental breakdown, writes an email to her best friend, Eileen, about commitment. “People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life,” she wrote. “It was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
Commitment is defined as both ‘the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause’ and ‘an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action’. While the defining feature of my generation has, perhaps, been the prioritisation of freedom over commitment, a commitment is a way of connecting with something bigger than ourselves. The psychotherapist Esther Perel believes that with the rise of the individual and the rise of secularism, our commitments have been reduced down to our romantic relationships and work. In a podcast episode from The Cut, Perel said: “Love and work have become the hubs where we actually go to fulfill some of our most important existential needs.” Yet when our commitments are reduced down to these two streams, we flatten ourselves. We also place an exhausting amount of pressure on these two avenues of our lives succeeding. “When work is the place where you outdo yourself, where you search for self-worth, it becomes unrelenting,” said Perel. “If work structures your life to that extent, then the inability to meet the demands will translate into burnout.”
Before our culture was defined by workism and individualism and secularism, our commitments extended into the broader community and our sense of higher purpose was found in religion. Our commitments existed in multitudes and, as a result, so did our sources of meaning. In other words, we had more than two eggs in the basket. Perel argues that by diversifying our commitments again, by placing more eggs in the basket, we create more avenues for meaning in our lives. “[Meaning] doesn’t only come through what you do at work,” said Perel. “Art, nature, community, volunteerism, activism… There’s lots of ways that you can connect to something bigger than you.” When we commit to more than just our partner or our work, when we commit to the people around us in a broader sense, meaning isn’t just found in what happens at home or at the desk. It is found in that conversation at the park, in the way the light hits the leaves just so on our walk, in the good deed done and the perspective gained from it. When we widen our commitments we also broaden the lens with which we view the world. Through this lens, we are more willing to see the beauty in the idiosyncrasies; in the small, random moments that are only made more beautiful by the fact that they exist within an illogical, meaningless world. Which brings me back to Rue.
Rue Bennett doesn’t want to get sober because when she is clean and present and really here in this world, she doesn’t want to be here. “The world’s just really fucking ugly, you know. It’s just really fucking ugly and everybody seems to be OK with it. The anger, the level of anger, everyone’s just out to make everyone else not seem human and I don’t really want to be a part of it. I don’t even want to witness it,” she told Ali in the diner as they ate pancakes on Christmas Eve. “You don’t want to be a part of it, Rue, because you care about the big things in life,” he replied. “You obviously don’t care about the small things… This is what I was talking about earlier. You’ve got to believe in the poetry. The value of two people sitting in a diner on Christmas eve talking about life, addiction, loss.” Rue lost her father to cancer when she was a child. What plagues her mind more than anything is the fact she is still here, when there are so many other people more deserving of her place. “Why are you, Rue Bennett, sitting here while other 17-year-olds, 17-year-olds that are better, or kinder, or more respectful than you, not sitting here?” says Ali. “I don’t know. That’s the mystery. But here we are? So what now?”
This essay contains references to addiction and mental illness. If you or anyone you know requires support, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14, BeyondBlue on 1300 46 36 or the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800. For mental health resources, visit beyondblue.org.au and blackdoginstitute.org.au.
Related (and unrelated) recommendations:
I have joined the rest of the world in reading Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney this month. It’s good, and I will leave it at that, as no one needs another Rooney hot take for a while.
This essay published by The New Yorker is going nuts online. The piece explores our obsession with the internet and what the ‘psychologically destabilising’ aspects of fame - and the pursuit of it - do to us. This line hit home in particular: ‘Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.’
Little Simz has released a new album called ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’ and it is excellent. Listen here.
My dad and I recently pulled all his old records and record player out of storage. Among the Neil Young, Dire Straits and Stevie Wonder was Sade’s 1984 album, ‘Diamond Life’. I’ve been a fan of Sade for a while and was delighted to find another in Dad. Ever since then, we’ve had her albums on repeat. ‘I Couldn’t Love You More’ on her 1992 album, ‘Love Deluxe’ is an all-time favourite.
This Refinery29 article on burnout and The Great Resignation also hit home. A new survey of 30,000 global workers has found that 41 percent are thinking of leaving their jobs this year.
While we’re on the topic, this podcast episode on The Cut titled ‘We Are All Burnt Out’ is the episode featuring Esther Perel. It’s such a good episode that they shared it again this month. They originally recorded it in April but I imagine will hit home with many of you right now.
The Netflix doco, ‘Britney vs. Spears’, which came out this week was a heartbreaking viewing exercise but I highly recommend it. This podcast episode from The Daily about her conservatorship is also worth a listen.
And if you want to make sense of the recently announced alliance between Britain, the U.S. and Australia, which pissed off France and concerns nuclear-powered submarines and China, this podcast episode will give you some context. An important listen.
Finally, the Euphoria special, ‘Trouble Don’t Last Always’. It’s available on Binge but here is a small clip which gives the title context. The Moses Sumney song that features in the episode is so incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking. Sumney has said that when he first played the song to Dan Lopatin (who later he collaborated with) Lopatin said it sounded like ‘an old lady screaming to herself in the middle of Whole Foods’. I found this particularly amusing.
Well, I think that is enough from me. See you next month. E.x
Thank you for reading. Side Note is a free newsletter that appears in your inbox on the first Friday of the month.