What Does the Good Life Look Like Now?
The
cappuccinos and hair colorist. The twice-a-week Pilates. The monthly facial. I
don’t need all of it.
By Trish Hall
·
April 18, 2020, 3:00 p.m. ET
In my isolation, I frequently calculate
the cost of my old life. The once-a-week trainer. The twice-a-week Pilates
classes. The monthly facial, with the extra laser boost to work on acne scars
and wrinkles. The pedicures, as much as I hated them, because who would go
around with naked toes? The hair colorist. Regular theater tickets. Daily
cappuccinos. Salads at Sweetgreen. Dinners at a perfectly fine but not amazing
place for $70 a person, with such intense noise that conversation is
prohibited.
I know, I know. Please don’t start
silently condemning me, especially when I’m noisily condemning myself.
In the past, when friends asked why I
didn’t retire, I jokingly said that I had to keep working to pay for what
passes as a normal life among privileged New Yorkers.
Now,
after more than a month inside, I know a few things. One, I love to work and
I’m not just doing it to pay for a facial. But two, maybe I don’t need all of
these services. Maybe I could follow the lead of Peter Singer and give away at least 10 percent of
what I earn. Maybe I don’t need to always appear young and active and familiar
with everything new.
Being stuck at home isn’t so bad.
There’s the relief of having a home to be safe in, obviously, but there’s also
the realization of how frantic and expensive my lifestyle had become. I miss
some of it. But not as much as I expected.
Our household of four discusses meals
ahead of time, because shopping requires planning and orchestration. No more
running into the store every night at 5 to pick up ingredients. Now, we mostly
eat what we can make. My daughter bakes cakes if we must have dessert. Every
Friday, we roast a chicken, and every Saturday, I make stock with the leftover
bits of onion, garlic and kale stalks that I’ve held in the freezer for that
purpose. I waste much less now. If I burn the toast, I eat it anyway, because
it’s complicated and scary to shop for food.
I’m not sure when baby boomers became
so fond of spending money on restaurants and massages and travel. In the 1970s,
when I was in my 20s, I was a vegetarian and cooked all of my meals from “Diet
for a Small Planet” or “Moosewood.” I refused to buy anything, like paper
towels, that I didn’t really need. My boyfriend and I made our own couch. He
put the wood together, and I sewed covers for a foam seat and back.
He was a graduate student and I was a
journalist, and we didn’t have much money. But we also didn’t have affordable
options like Ikea or West Elm. Taste and style hadn’t been manufactured into
products for the masses. No self-respecting feminist got pedicures. Restaurants
were either pizza or special occasions.
So
how did I get here, decades later, with so many needs? Maybe it was our
generational tic of wanting to be forever young, as Bob Dylan sang, of refusing
to trust anyone over 30, of deep denial of aging and death.
We told ourselves that consuming
services and experiences was somehow better than buying stuff, that flying
halfway around the world to India and staying in luxury hotels was the peak of
sophistication while moving into a McMansion was a signifier of crass
consumerism. But the different kinds of consumption are just social markers, of
class and political leanings and education.
If I emerge alive from the pandemic —
with asthma, I’m not confident — I plan to spend less and rely on myself more.
I won’t need so much money. Which is fortunate because I will have a lot less.
Savings that were supposed to get me through retirement will be gravely dented.
But plenty of people are in far worse
shape. I feel both guilty about the people in essential jobs who are still out
there working, and worried about what will happen to them if they don’t have
jobs in a country that does so little to help them. If people like me cut back,
will that prevent the economy from recovering, and take a lot of jobs with it?
I won’t be surprised if a lot of urban
millennials, who were battered by graduating into a recession and finally made
a bit of headway only to be slammed by a pandemic, give up on the idea of
expensive big cities. Maybe their bosses will decide that remote work is fine
and they can save on office space. Maybe they will fan out to pretty little
towns where they can buy a house for the price of a studio in Brooklyn.
I grew up in the country outside of a
small undistinguished city in Pennsylvania, and I loathed it. Not nature. I
loved playing with my dolls under the weeping cherry tree in the spring. I
loved jumping from rock to rock in the stream, and looking at the tadpoles.
But it was lonely, and isolated. I
thought people would start moving to places like that when the internet was
born and promised to connect us all. Urban planners and futurists predicted
that people would move away from cities, because they could work anywhere. Not
only did that not happen — the reverse happened. The easier that technology
made it for us to leave congested, expensive urban centers, the more we
clustered together. The urban boom hasn’t really made sense, unless you figure
that cities attract companies because they want to recruit the kind of people
who live there.
But
now that we know that life at home works, will young people give up their
shabby, crowded apartments? If their work is really portable, they might.
Will I give up the facials and the
Pilates? Every woman I know says she is going to grow out her gray hair, and
yet that can’t be true, because hair dye is out of stock, just like toilet
paper.
It’s too soon to know how the definition
of a good life will change, but it’s hard to believe that it won’t.
One thing is for sure: I’ll never buy
chicken stock again.
