Cruel Optimism
The Self-Help Industrial Complex (SHIC)
Maybe it was the still-twitching body she stepped over in the hallway. Possibly dead. Possibly warming up for sex.
It’s the possibilities that keep her going.
Each door she walked by numbered like days, works of art, and candles only used for birthdays.
That’s what I get for sorting hotels by furthest from the conference center just to bill the company for more expensive Ubers.
Even on the third floor, no one’s above karma, she thought to herself.
Maybe it was the acceptable but not-great complimentary breakfast she ate that morning, accompanied by free newspapers and a cleaning staff with boundary issues. She lifts her feet and under her shoes, vacuuming commences. Sucking-up shredded wheat and crumbs from the red-to-match-the-logo flat-Berber carpet under her table.
“I know they’re round. I know they’re colorful. I know they’re sweet and fruity, but these are not Fruit Loops. I don’t even care that they’re not. I’m just mad these hotel corporations lie like it’s part of the contract I signed but didn’t read when I handed over my credit card. Where does it end!?”
In a past life, she would have unionized the guests.
In this one, she disoriented a curiously parentless boy seated at the table next to her. Young enough to be eating eggs with a spoon without judgment. Old enough for this to become a core-memory that shapes personality.
Cartoons from a propped-up iPad reflected off the plastic brim of his Pixar Cars visor. His eyes, like two paralyzed raisins waking-up in oatmeal, like spring-breakers in an ice bath missing their kidneys, looked back at her as if to say, these are definitely Fruit Loops, mademoiselle, without moving his hanging mouth.
Leaving a protest-pink frosted loop floating in the milk, she tossed the Styrofoam and plastic dishware in the garbage like a prom baby the night janitor thought was a lost corsage.
Another day of going through the motions that make her tense up whenever asked, “So what do you do?” by people she likes just by their energy and the fact they’re not scratching their arms just to feel.
Pronouns of all shapes and sizes, and she doesn’t want to indirectly admit all her life choices have led her to a crisis of identity and nameless cereals.
Somewhere in Amish country, all the sundials have stopped working.
She’s back in her room. Fresh towels. Bed made.
This is what I do it for. It was never about the Fruit Loops.
Having stayed here long enough to know exactly where to throw the bath switch, like it’s hooked up to a Tesla coil, so it won’t burn her skin off.
The water pressure is better than the AC would lead you to believe.
Two hundred seventy degrees around, all the way to the left. Let it sit for two seconds. Move it up. Up. Up. Little by little until…ahhhh.
Like bags of shredded cheese, I can be grateful.
Her thoughts roll in her head like her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
I swear to God, if Amazon keeps recommending self-help books to me, I’m going to change my identity and start the algorithm over.
The Power of Now is the epitome of the cruel-optimism starter pack.
The American Dream manifest as a night terror.
Cruel optimism.
A phrase she learned from Stolen Focus, which borrowed it from Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.
A nihilist with cited sources and without a laugh track.
Cruel optimism. Sunlight on the face and wrench on the fangs of self-actualization vampires selling dreams in airport bookstores.
Cruel optimism. Synthetic hope invented by grifter-bros and endgame capitalism after a meditation weekend.
She was mad at herself for rebuying The Power of Now after she loaned the copy to a friend like she was the second coming of Oprah.
In a hotel, she was mad at the algorithm for trying to make it a hat trick.
What the fuck was I thinking? she asked herself, wondering if what she was rubbing into her hair was conditioner, as labeled.
Imagine being depressed, sick, poor, and told this book will change your life?
You’re on a bus home from your sixteenth hour of work, reading this book like a suicide note in reverse.
Told this book will change your life.
Told this book has changed lives.
Told it’s your turn to change your life. With this book. It’s all you need, and you get:
“You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes. What remains is the sky. The beingness that you are. When you realize that you are not the thinker but the awareness behind the thought, you shift from being lost in the content of your mind to being the witness of it. The mind then loses its compulsive quality because you are no longer energizing it through identification. Thought subsides, and you experience the stillness that has always been there beneath the noise.”
You re-read it to make sure you’re not having a stroke.
The irony of being present: when you can afford it, you don’t need it.
When you can’t afford it, it doesn’t help.