It’s Systemic

In popular culture, January is a month of ambition. Our best selves always seem more attainable at the beginning of the year. With the right resolutions, mindset changes, and workout regimens, we can attain those best jobs, bodies, and self-images.

Each year, we seem confident that something separates this year from past years of failing to realize that perfect success. Does it, really? No, probably not. January generally means a lot of empty optimism. It can also lead to a lot of self-focused criticism and disappointment.

There’s this pernicious idea many women have embraced too firmly: If you can’t fix something, it’s your fault.

Okay, is it sometimes your fault? Yeah. But let’s take a bigger-picture view. See that tiny dot in a giant mess of gears and pulleys? That’s you, caught in a system.

For example: Last month a fellow parent was telling me about a recently published book that excoriated excessive screen time and the way it’s ruining children. My friend had found the book’s conclusions troubling and important. He and his wife, he said, had taken the message seriously and were trying to do better by their children. Screen time is destroying childhood, he said, and we have to address it in the home, individually, in our own families. I found that assessment reasonable—in some ways.

Social media is emotionally perilous, screens can rob kids of valuable time for movement, and the tech overlords only care about habituating our children to insatiable consumption so that they will forever sustain and improve industry profits. It’s not great. Why, then, does nearly every parent with access to screens allow their kids so many hours on them? Have we all fallen into inescapable pits of laziness? Are we really just immeasurably shittier at parenting in this generation?

My fellow parent friend seemed to think so. He felt it came down to willpower. Ah. Those of you familiar with diet culture may already be acquainted with the track the willpower train heads down.

I don’t disagree with research that finds screen time of all kinds a health hazard. I do disagree with the idea that we can, on an individual level, both fix and take complete responsibility for every second spent staring at a screen.

Why is it, I asked my concerned friend, that so many parents have allowed their kids to spend excessive time in front of phones, pads, and laptops? Is it really as simple as “bad parenting”? Or is it possible there’s a larger systemic issue that’s driving the behaviors? When you have kids, is there financial, social, and logistical support in the U.S.? Not unless you personally provide it, so the answer is often “no.”

Have extremely powerful tech companies deliberately encouraged behaviors detrimental to our physical and emotional health? Absolutely! They’ve done it with zero shame or accountability.

Thus you’ve got a bunch of lonely, stressed, overworked, underpaid, exhausted parents who are themselves addicted to screens. I think we’ve moved beyond “It’s your individual responsibility to reform the system and save your family from technology” and into “What the actual fuck kind of society have we set up and perpetuated here that results in legions of parents turning to screens that they know are dangerous to help them get their kids through the days?”

Many of us are cut off from family or communities of other parents. We’re dealing with our own bad screen habits. We’re trying to work full time for companies that view limiting yourself to the job you were hired to do as slacking off. We’re also thinking on some level that if kids are at home playing Minecraft, they’re not at a school, park, or shopping mall where they might be shot.

It’s tiring. Sometimes systems feel too entrenched and byzantine to be effectively reformed. Too large and heavy to ever move or change. Take the typically immoral, unethical, and predatory behaviors of U.S. health insurers. Or the enormity of the gender gap in medical care and research. Particularly around (well, this is Hag) menopause.

When every study on perimenopause and menopause seems to conclude by saying, “Gee, there should be some more research into this stuff! It feels important!” one might be inclined to despair. To think there’s nothing to be done against centuries upon centuries of wandering uteri, inferior brains, and impure menstrual blood.

What can one dot do against all that? Well, first recognize what’s happening; recognize that you are but a dot. When we’re young and our perspective is, by virtue of inexperience, limited, it’s tempting to imagine that we all have much more control over our world than we actually do.

We tend to seek out solutions that address symptoms, not causes, mistaking one for the other. And we tend to blame ourselves for those myriad symptoms, imagining them an endless series of disconnected problems instead of finding the systemic issue that links them.

(I had a whole Whac-a-Mole comparison in there, but it involved unplugging the game entirely, which I feel has a bit more of a “burn it all down” vibe than I’d intended for this piece.)

As we age, though, we can come to realize that the burden of singlehandedly, heroically, impractically solving systemic problems doesn’t rest solely on any one person’s shoulders. That said, I know it can be comforting on some level to believe that such an awesome burden does exist, because then you could feel like your efforts might lead somewhere.

Maybe what’s particularly helpful, then, is to figure out what you can nudge. One nudge doesn’t always move much. Five nudges might mean something shifts, while a thousand nudges might knock something down. There’s never a lack of things to knock down, and sometimes their fall begins with one nudge. Your nudge.

So, sure, serious scientific work on menopause is inadequate and all of the current studies mention what a bummer it is that there isn’t much legitimate existing research to draw on. But the fact that these studies are coming out now means enough people nudged that the system had to change.

I think encouraging that kind of systemic change individually boils down to telling yourself that, while we are responsible for ourselves, we are also operating within systems. And those systems are kinda fucked up. Take responsibility for yourself: yes! There is work to be done: yes! You can become your best self in the new year and singlehandedly reform screen-time trends for your kids and fix all the problems—or else it’s your fault: no. Everything you do falls within a larger system.

Be realistic about what your nudges can do. And determine which behaviors of yours are driven by systemic problems and are not, though so many women are inclined to believe otherwise, personal failings.

Give yourself, as they say, some grace. Or, if you find yourself vaguely nauseated by that phrase, give yourself a fucking goddamned break because shit’s fucked up. Systemically.

So, this January, perhaps just find one place to nudge—while recognizing that you’re not responsible for fixing every problem in your life.

Yours in weariness of New Year’s Resolutions,

That Hag

Two Things to Consider Doing for Yourself in the New Year:

1. A personal photoshoot. To me, being part of a professional photography session for years meant nothing more than getting a last-minute deal on family photos when my nieces and nephews were in town. Or remembering my high-school era senior portraits. But there’s a growing niche in portrait photography for “protagonist photo shoots” or “goddess sessions.” Sure, they can feel a little hokey or vain. But this kind of photo session is more about visually representing who you are (or want to be) at a particular moment than glamorizing yourself. Whether that means posing inside a fantasy or memorializing what your naked body looks like at a specific time. I know I, at least, tend to look back through my camera roll periodically and wish I had more than a handful of uninspired iPhone shots where I’m clearly about to say, “No, don’t take a picture—I hate the way I look right now.”

2. Two consecutive days off with no plans beyond pleasure. Be a hedonist to whatever extent you can. Avoid or seek out the company of others, depending on your preference. Indulge, enjoy, and enrich your appreciation for feeling good. Pleasure-seeking will be different for everyone, and that is wonderful.