I work three days a week as a psychotherapist in private practice. I established this three-day work week out of necessity early on in my career. Unable to pay upwards of eight hundred dollars a month for my own office, I sublet one. It was only available Friday through Sunday, so those were the days I saw clients. I quickly came to appreciate the very firm boundary that my office — my space — set around my time. This was before COVID, back when I loathed video conferencing and never offered it. …

Five years ago, on 20 November 2015, one of my best friends collided neck-first with a utility pole. He’d just had a lunch date with his wife and was riding his motorcycle to a business meeting. A young woman in an SUV didn’t see my friend as she merged into his lane, forcing him off the road and into an entirely different kind of life. One second he was fine, a thirty-three-year-old restauranteur brimming with ambition, and the next second he was a quadriplegic, unable to do almost anything, including breathe, on his own. I remember thinking, once my grief subsided enough for me to think, “Well, shit, if something this awful can happen just like that, we are clearly not supposed to take life very seriously. If life can deal a good guy such a bullshit hand, then life is not something I want to put much stock in.” …

My dear friend has been dealing with infertility recently, and hearing her talk about her “options” has reminded me of my own difficulties in that realm, now some eight years past. At thirty, I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure and told that my best shot at having a baby was in vitro fertilization (IVF) with a donor egg. My husband’s sperm would fertilize some other woman’s ovum and be implanted in my uterus. But there was no guarantee that a viable pregnancy would result.

I wasn’t interested in such science experiments — the hell of hormone treatments and doctor visits, and the money I’d have to pay (which I didn’t have, anyway), and how it might all be for naught in the end. What’s more, I’d been conflicted since I was a teenager about bringing a child into this terrible, already grossly overpopulated world, and I really didn’t want to force the poor kid to join us here if it wasn’t in the cards to happen naturally. I also had no interest in adoption. I wanted my baby to be my baby. …

“What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.”

This sentence ends the first section of Amy Hempel’s short story, “The Harvest,” which, in an incongruity Hempel herself might appreciate, has little else to do with the essay before you. It only relates inasmuch as it reflects a truth that most of us (hopefully) can take as consolation in times of sorrow and suffering: things could always be worse. And for many people, they are.

This comfort — not quite cold, but not exactly warm and fuzzy — is indeed the second in a list of thirty-ish provided in a treatise called The Book of Divine Consolation, written by German Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart around the year 1308. I recently borrowed an Eckhart book from a friend, excited to read some original texts from an oft-quoted master. For reasons you can probably understand unless you’re living under a rock, I found myself drawn to these “topics that ought readily to console a rational man in his sorrow.” I’ll take all the comfort I can get right now. …

“Okay, but what do you propose we do about it?”

Share your gripes about the state of the world these days, and that’s likely the response you’ll get. Seems we’re not allowed to bemoan a tragic situation unless we have a viable way to fix it. But in yet another devastating example of the irony that’s baked right into the human condition, this very line of “reasoning” is itself what needs fixing. Most of our problems as a species can be traced back to our drive to solve problems — and most of our solutions host a slew of new conundrums. Just consider the automobile. The airplane. Industrialized agriculture. Electricity. Western medicine. …

I once interned at an eating disorders treatment center, where I taught clients in the intensive outpatient program how to knit. Those who liked it (the majority) cited the same reason: it gave them something to do with their hands. Beneath this simple appreciation lay the root of our collective, post-industrial anxiety, of which eating disorders are just one symptom.

Our hands — our bodies — have been robbed of purpose. They are meant to be doing things. Walking, pushing, pulling, lifting, twisting, throwing, jumping, digging, reaching, scrubbing, stirring, folding, chopping, kneading… The body is designed for such activities. Yes, the body also enables us to experience pleasure and pain, but it’s equally intended as a machine of sorts, built for completing the very tasks whose completion its sustenance depends on. …

I quit social media cold turkey two weeks ago after watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix. I’d had misgivings about Facebook and Instagram (my preferred platforms) for years. The film just gave me the nudge I needed to be done with all of it forever.

Starting in 2017 with the white nationalist march in Charlottesville — seeing friendships end before my eyes in one increasingly impassioned and indignant Facebook comment after another — my awareness of social media’s polarizing powers had been steadily deepening. The world kept offering people things to be appalled by and terrified of, reasons to stand in opposition to one another. …