so what?

On Cynicism and Hope

Years ago, when I was an acquisitions editor, the marketing and sales folks at my publishing company had a test that they would put every proposal through before allowing the editor to acquire it. It was called the SO WHAT test, and it went something like this:

ME: The writing is brilliant. THEM: SO WHAT.

It’s an incredibly important subject. SO WHAT.

The author is an expert. SO WHAT.

The author has won fifteen awards. SO WHAT.

The writer has at least 200k followers on Instagram. SO WHAT.

If we don’t acquire it, it’s going to go somewhere else and you’ll regret it. SO WHAT.

In twenty years of being an acquisitions editor, I saw it all: the swaggering, strutting publishing director who had absolutely no book experience but slipped into the role because of connections, was a great issuer of SO WHATs, and was more concerned with the author’s photo than whether or not her book would be reprinted for years to come. I saw the SO WHAT test be blithely thrown around when, for example, agents set a high floor for an auction, I attempted to enter the auction, was cleared to low five figures and the book went for mid-six figures (and is still in print today, two decades later). SO WHAT said the director when I told him the outcome while he filed his nails with his feet on his desk.

As an author, I’ve been on the receiving end of SO WHAT more times than I can count. My favorite SO WHAT happened when I had a Motherland event planned, and when I arrived at the store in my home state, I asked where to put my things. The manager said, as a line was forming outside, Oh we haven’t set up yet because the author isn’t too popular and I said Um, I’m the author, and the manager rolled her eyes and said SO WHAT.

I digress.

I want to talk about the problem of cynicism, which has its roots in SO WHAT. Cynicism is quicksand: once you step into it, it’s impossible to get out. Cynicism is a trap, a snare, a trip-wire, and while it purports to bump up against attempts at humor, it is entirely unfunny. Cynicism is shameless; cynicism is chilly and unyielding, and bears, in our modern days, a flimsy connection to the philosophy of ancient Greek cynicism. Cynicism means (according to one definition) a sneering disbelief in motive. Misanthropic. Mistrustful.

A sneering disbelief.

Eyerolling incredulity.

I’m a Cancerian, and Cancerians are not known for our cynicism. We’re dyed-in-the-wool empaths, drum majorettes in the co-dependent parade, camp counselors in the overwrought Olympics. It’s hard for us to extricate ourselves from the sticky swamp of over-compassion, and it’s hard for us to even know when it occurs until it’s too late. Some years ago, a close friend of mine made a discovery about themselves that was foundationally traumatizing; I sat on their couch and listened to them tell me their story, and when my eyes welled with tears, they stopped and said to me Oh for God’s sake, what in the HELL are you crying about. (Oh nothing, I said. Your life is no longer the same and everything you knew to be true isn’t. Is that enough?) When they said it, I second-guessed myself and thought Wait — is my response appropriate, or is it nuts? It was probably the former, but it’s hard for me to know.

The three places where SO WHAT and cynicism have cropped up repeatedly in my life are spirituality, health, and recovery. For many years, I moved slowly toward some semblance of a spiritual practice; you could hear my gears creaking and grinding toward the manifestation of a contemplative life, and when I finally got there, with a regular meditation practice and time every day dedicated to that practice, it was as though someone had lifted a yoke from my shoulders and took the mask from my face, and I was able to breathe again, and to see light. I began this journey when I was very young, growing up the secular child of a traumatized father who had been raised in a devout home that was both emotionally and physically violent. When I fled my home at eighteen — it had been the site of so much rancor and existential abuse that I could not wait to leave — I discovered that I was drawn to quiet spaces. This was in the very early 1980s, when Boston (where I was going to college) and New York City were anything but quiet. A few years later, I found myself a regular visitor to the Woodstock, New York home of two longtime meditation teachers, and for a while, everything changed for me. Until the night that I was dragged by a friend to a meeting of chanting Buddhists in the East Village and was told by the exuberant leader You can chant for whatever you want! Need a new car? Chant for it! My friend and I burrowed through the packed apartment to the door, left, and went out for margaritas, which was a problem because it was also the very first time in my life that I was trying to stop drinking. But I was twenty-three, and I thought, you know, SO WHAT.

Cynicism and SO WHAT are problems of hope.

Of course, not all chanting experiences — or practices of any kind — are like this; we know that. Since that time, I’ve spent many mornings on my zafu, and many days at silent retreats. During the last one, a Zen retreat in the Hudson Valley, my mother called and when I told her from the parking lot where I was hiding behind a Volkswagen so no one would see me that I was on a silent retreat, she said SO WHAT. And I thought to myself Who the hell am I kidding? A deflation; my cynicism was instantly ignited like a fuse, and I left the retreat and came home, where I found my wife sitting on the couch with the dog, having a small Scotch.

Which is a smooth segue to the cynicism and SO WHAT of recovery. Back in 1986, around the time of the chanting evening, it had quietly occurred to me that I might have just the smallest abnormal crush on wine. It probably didn’t help that a few years later I was attending cooking school and immersing myself in the food (and wine) world, maybe by design and maybe not. I didn’t share this with anyone except for the woman I was living with, who was a health and wellness practitioner. She was completely nonplussed, probably because she had seen me fall in love with cool, crisp Burgundian whites over and over again, ostensibly matching them to the meals I was making us for dinner, as in Oh LOOK honey, I’m making seared scallops! A perfect time to open a bottle of Montrachet! She didn’t care whether I drank or not, but she herself came from a long line of beer lovers and Big-10 football fans, and neither of us thought it would be problematic for me to go out with her for margaritas and order myself sparking water until I discovered exactly how hard it was, and I said SO WHAT because I was by then twenty-four and believed that I had all the time in the world to sort myself out, assuming I had a problem at all. I was certain of this.

I was certain of this in the same way that with every passing year since, my health has changed, and every year, I am certain that I’m still in my twenties and have all the time in the world. I know full well what I’m supposed to do, and mostly, I do it. I’m a cynic about outlandish food and health trends because I know, for example, what gets sprayed on fruits and vegetables: I saw it with my own eyes while on a press trip to the Central Valley of California, where Mexican migrant workers, in 108 degree heat, wore bandanas wrapped around their faces, sweatshirt hoods undneath their straw hats, heavy boots and elbow-length rubber gloves while they hosed down acres and acres of Driscoll Berry fields with pesticides. I sat in a University of Tromsø conference room with Marion Nestle and Peter Hoffman, while the head of the Norwegian salmon council refused to tell us what they fed their farmed salmon (which is prohibited from being sold anywhere in the EU) until Marion and I actually volunteered to try the feed ourselves. We did (it looked like large-breed dog kibble) and all the salmon council people would admit to were by-products.

So I know way too much about food and food products in the way I know that The Valley of the Jolly Green Giant is and probably always was a fetid swamp. I know that eating well is almost always a crap-shoot: if you think that eating nothing but fruits and veg will keep you safe and alive into three digits, you’re mistaken, because the variables are far too variable. Also, two of the healthiest people I’ve ever met — both longtime vegetarians who did all the right things: healthy fats, etc etc — are now fighting for their lives with rare diseases. My father-in-law spread butter on his steak every night for years and dropped dead of a massive heart attack in his den while trying to move a sofa with my mother-in-law one day back in 1973. Conversely, The Queen Mother ate meat and drank gin every day of her adult life, and lived to be 101. My aunt, who was fond of spongy white bread packed with hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup, died at 102.

All of this said, I know what I need to do to stay healthy; I know what works for me and what doesn’t, but when I am in the presence of a good (or even bad) batch of fried chicken, I’ll eat it, because SO WHAT. I have a wonky liver and a fluttering heart and I had a Covid stroke in 2020, and I should be walking at minimum two miles a day, but if I’m tired because I slept badly, I downshift into SO WHAT. OH to be those women on social media who do yoga in the morning, who meditate, who begin their days with journaling, warm lemon water followed by green tea followed by a protein-enriched smoothie, and on occasion, I have been that woman. And then, on any average day, the calls start coming in bright and early from my elderly mother’s aide service and her health manager and I discover that no one is communicating with anyone else and the vitally important thing that had to be done for my mother two weeks ago was never done because her health manager forgot and now her service may be on hold, leaving her alone for several days a week: fuck yoga, and fuck meditation, and fuck my warm lemon water, and fuck getting quiet, and fuck sobriety, and fuck journaling, and fuck daily walks and good sleep because, honestly, SO WHAT. At moments like that, and there are many of them, I want to lie on the couch watching The Great British Bakeoff while drinking a goblet of white wine and eating a bucket of deep-fried, dayglo sweet and sour shrimp.

A sneering disbelief.

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Cynicism and SO WHAT are, at core, problems of hope. As we get closer and closer to the elections here in America, it’s easy to wonder What if? What if the unthinkable happens — again — and life as we know it in my country hangs by a thread? What if everything we do, read, watch, and say is watched? What if women, people of color, the LGBTQ community lose every one of our rights? I remember once saying to a friend in recovery If the world was turned upside down and you found yourself suddenly living in the modern day version of, say, 1939 Poland, would you start drinking again because, you know, WHY NOT? Would the cynic in you take over? This particular friend said Yes, of course she would. I asked another friend the same question, and she laughed and said No, she’d never go back to drinking. She equated her sobriety with having hazel eyes and wavy hair, as though it had become a part of her DNA. I asked her You wouldn’t even drink if the world was coming to an end and you had nothing to lose? She rolled her eyes and said SO WHAT? This is my life. This is who I am.

There are those of us who throw in the towel as soon as we’re able because our hope muscle is wasting away from lack of use. Usually, people who fall into this category come from a long history of chronic disappointment, and it’s impossible for them to believe that good may come, unfettered or encumbered by bad. They haven’t seen the world work that way: they haven’t seen it in love, or family relations, or business. They haven’t seen it in health, or finances, or eldercare. Recently, I was listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter in conversation with Joan Baez, on the former’s podcast, Hope is a Muscle, and one of the things they talked about was how hope can be defined as wishing/wanting, and Chapin said that making art in the times we live in is an act of hope. And I agree with her, with every fiber of my being. I wrote in Permission about how we are the art-making species; it is what we do, however we do it. It allows us to put one foot in front of the other, and move forward in this life; think about the poetry that came out of the Holocaust, written while human ash floated above an unthinkable hellscape. Think about the poetry that has come out of Ukraine, and Gaza, and Rwanda. This is hope in action, disconnected from human interference: no one says, as their home is being blown to bits, Okay, so today I’m going to write a sonnet about this horror. It just happens; it just comes.

In her podcast, Carpenter quotes Nick Cave:

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, keeps the devil down in the hole.

So maybe this is it. Maybe this is what it’s all about. Maybe cynicism and SO WHAT are just places where we hide because it’s easier, it’s familiar. It’s the simpler route because hope is exhausting work.

And yet, at the end of the day, it’s all there is.