‘What else is there to live for?’

A beautiful answer to some questions I’ve been asking.

This is an especially busy week for me. My to-do lists are teeming. Each day’s schedule is precarious—filled with meetings that must be attended and tasks that must be completed at particular times. There’s little room for flexibility, error, or, you know, life to happen. 

And that’s why today’s newsletter is going to be pretty short and sweet. I am primarily writing to share a snippet from Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You that strongly resonated with me. It helped provide clarity to some questions I’ve wrestled with for a long time: 

Why, when it feels like the world is falling apart and there are so many things to worry about, do I worry about seemingly small things? Why do I only have so much mental energy for systemic issues? And why do I keep returning to the same topics in this newsletter: Love lost, love found, and love as a transformative power?

I have been writing My Sweet Dumb Brain for three years. In that time, a lot has happened in the world. Some of the events of the past few years have been good, surely, but it’s easy to focus on the negative ones: Catastrophic climate disasters; growing wealth and racial inequalities; and a pandemic with seemingly no end.

While I sometimes touch on these topics in my essays, I rarely attempt to offer up solutions. Sometimes, I ignore current events completely—opting to turn off my screens and spend time with my family instead. I’ve always felt a little sheepish about this. Shouldn’t I have more to say? Isn’t it my role as a former journalist to constantly consume the news? And why do I spend so much time writing about love and grief when there are bigger, more pressing issues to tackle?

Beautiful World, Where Are You centers on two friends, Eileen and Alice, and the book truly shines when they write lengthy letters to each other musing about life. Both on the cusp of turning 30, the friends talk about topics like sex, success, motherhood, ambition, and relationships. They also spend a fair amount of time contemplating the world’s impending collapse.

“Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” Alice asks Eileen.

I found Alice and Eileen’s conversations refreshing. I, too, think about how the world sometimes feels like it’s doomed. But I mostly keep these thoughts to myself. I’ll occasionally share my worries in therapy or whisper my fears to Billy, but it’s hard to imagine writing or speaking them aloud to a dear friend. I admired this aspect of their relationship.

Not surprisingly, Eileen and Alice only discuss the state of the world for so long. Soon, they’re back to chatting about matters that are more pressing in their day-to-day lives. Like me, they can’t help but wonder from time to time if they should be doing something more.

In a letter to Alice, Eileen expressed exactly what I needed to hear:

Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.

Isn’t that the loveliest thought? It is truly the sweetest approach to the apocalypse that I can imagine.

To be clear, this isn’t meant to alleviate any pressure on me to do good things or use my privilege to affect positive change; instead, it alleviates the guilt I feel about the other ways I spend my time—by writing and thinking and worrying about the seemingly small things. After all, in the end, what matters most is how much we love and care for each other.

Before I know it, this week will be over and the next one will begin. I’ll have more time to write and think and live. I’ll have more energy to give to my friends and family and, yes, maybe even a broader cause.

Until then, I’ll take care of myself by doing things like granting myself permission to write a shorter newsletter and giving myself a break from carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I hope you can be gentle with yourself, too.

As Eileen said to Alice, “So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”

xoxo
KHG

p.s. Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. If Jamie was still alive, we would have celebrated 13 years of marriage. I’m going to share some reflections about the day in Friday’s newsletter, which is for paying subscribers only.

p.p.s. This is your last chance to get 20% off a Sweet Dumb Brain subscription. Don’t miss out!

---

💖 Sharing is caring

This is one of my favorite shoutouts yet! The amazing Ariel was recently a guest on Robbie Kellman Baxter’s podcast and talked about how she appreciated being part of the Sweet Dumb Brain community. “Katie’s newsletter is one of the only things that I respond to on a regular basis, and then look to see if that ended up in the newsletter or if other people responded in similar ways,” she said. “That’s the community that I feel the most a part of in this pandemic when we feel so acutely the absence of community in so many ways.”

How sweet is that? And how great is that endorsement for the Friday subscriber-only newsletters? As Ariel said during the podcast, it’s a place to get reflections from hundreds of other people going through similar phases in life.

Word of mouth is so important in the newsletter world. Please consider sharing My Sweet Dumb Brain on social media, recommending it to a friend, or—if you haven’t yet—becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

---

My Sweet Dumb Brain is written by Katie Hawkins-Gaar. It’s edited by Rebecca Coates, who is happy—thrilled, even!—to love and worry for her friends. To her, this is what life is truly about. Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash.

This newsletter contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.