More, faster, better

by Yaminah Reid-Morgan

My friend and I were talking about masturbation the other day. She recounted a story where she’d been trying to masturbate each night that week, only to fall asleep before or mid-session. Then she’d wake up, sex toy still in hand, unsure of what happened. I shared similar stories, lessening the shame and embarrassment we both felt about being too tired to even masturbate.

This tiredness was a wider symptom of burnout that I experienced. I also watched the same thing happen to many of my peers and colleagues. Mostly women. It’s not that the men I know aren’t busy. It’s just that women seem to suffer a particular kind of burnout, driven by this insatiable need to prove themselves. During my recovery, I reflected on how it had happened. Was it me and my propensity towards perfection, my ambition and my desire for more money? Or was it the system, one which requires an extraordinary amount from us with little in return? Then I came across the Barbara Kingsolver quote: “Everything you think is right is wrong in another place”. And I wondered if all of it, everything we had been taught to do, was just a massive scam. The government told my millennial generation that if we made it to university, we would get good jobs and be set for life. Even better off than our parents! As women, we received an extra layer of conditioning. We were taught to be selfless, show restraint, be competent yet modest about it and ultimately, prioritise others above ourselves. Fast forward fifteen years and these rules have backfired. We’re living in an existential headfuck. Never mind all the unprecedented crises we’ve lived through, many of us are exhausted, living paycheck to paycheck, without much to show for it.

Life has come to seem like a continuous cycle of working, then having to work more to pay to live and have any fun. Many of us are familiar with the analogy of life being like a race. However, I am struggling to see a finish line or figure out what the prize is without slipping into nihilistic dread. Do you run the race, working, collecting money and paying off a mortgage until you retire and then rest? The rising retirement age made this seem increasingly far away. The only other finish line I could think of was death. Which would make life a race towards an abyss where you can’t even take your pension, savings or property. It all felt too bleak to contemplate. A treadmill better encapsulated what the rules felt like. Each time you get on, the aim is to run more, as fast as you can and do better, beating your time. We live our lives within this framework, adhering to the idea that we need to be better, faster, do more and have more. Anything less is laziness and a lack of ambition or drive. Even the phrase ‘earn a living’ is problematic. Do we need to earn our right to be human, and to live? Over a decade into my working life, this doesn’t seem ideal, sustainable or enjoyable.

I wonder how many of us are genuinely told – by our loved ones and society at large – that we are good enough as we are. If we were, maybe we wouldn't spend our days running towards the next thing or better careers, bodies, relationships, homes, skin and health. Everything can be optimised – especially for women. There is an increasing societal pressure for men to look a certain way: muscular, lean and athletic. However, men can also opt out; their image doesn’t define them. And this pressure doesn’t seep into every other aspect of their life. On the other hand, the list of ways women of all ages can improve themselves is ever-growing. Filters on social media, the million pound diet and self-help industries, increasingly accessible plastic surgery, influencers (according to Google, women make up 84% of content creators), beauty products for every part of our body, anti-ageing products, idealised and competitive motherhood etc etc etc. It’s like we’re jumping over our shadows to reach the good life that we’ve been sold. However, the goalposts constantly move, meaning that there’s always more to improve or fine tune. Thinking and feeling that we are not enough is a necessity for patriarchy and capitalism. If we were to step back, take a closer look at the system and opt out, not only would businesses collapse, but society itself would require drastic changes. I guess that certain people absolutely do not want this to happen.

Not all improvement is bad, however. It can be a good thing to want to improve life for ourselves and those that come after. Arguably, if no one tried to improve anything, many of us wouldn’t be here right now doing what we’re doing. From transport to equality, sanitation, medicine, technology, health and education, our quality of life would look very different – probably worse – if people hadn’t sought to make things better. We have more ease, access and knowledge than ever before. And still, this brings a whole other set of challenges. The world is quite literally on fire, there is a mental health crisis and inequality is rising. Things have simultaneously gotten better and worse.

Maybe it is a question of motivation and language. More, faster and better are superlatives, words that seek to compare and express something of the highest quality. They can invoke a feeling of competition, comparison, and not-enoughness. How would thinking about growth shift our motivation? Growth is inevitable and important. A lot of it happens with little effort, both physical and personal, and over time. We do not consciously try to begin puberty or grow grey hairs. It just happens, simply because we are alive and living. What is growth, what is chasing our tail and where is the line between the two? What are we striving to improve and expand and who does it benefit? And what would happen if we stopped? Who would we be then?

There is, of course, the question of privilege. It can't be overlooked that gender, race and class intersect in a multitude of ways to keep some working more than others. Whilst white women fall victim to the demands of patriarchal capitalism, their proximity to whiteness also means they benefit from the labour of women of colour, particularly those who are black or indigenous. We may critique grind culture, but some of us have to work relentlessly just to survive. And I have heard black men discuss this same desire to prove themselves. In a racist society that denies their humanity, they can also end up working more than they need to in efforts to demonstrate their worth. It seems that despite differing starting points, we are all on this treadmill together. The incline may change but each of us still runs along to capitalism’s quickening rhythm, trying to reach our best selves and the best life possible. Treadmills can be endless if you let them. They can keep going and going, only ending when you decide to get off. Maybe it’s time to do just that. Our days can’t just be a series of opportunities to improve ourselves. Maybe the good life isn’t at the end of anything, maybe it is right now. To exist in itself on this Earth is no mean feat.

It’s been in us all along, the thing we’ve been chasing.

Blood feud @ the All Stars