Two quotes about the experience of life. The first from NYT’s Magazine “I’ve Always Struggled With My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning. “

Suddenly, I was slim. It was, by any measure, an incredible weight-loss success story. Even my great friend Alan texted about how good I looked. (“Did I say that?” he wrote, with a facepalm emoji, when I reminded him of the time he squeezed my love handles. “Sam, I was very inappropriate. But I still think it’s funny.”) I had achieved the great transformation — I had turned myself into the “AFTER” photo.

And now that we have that out of the way, I can tell you what I consider the most interesting thing about my weight-loss journey, a secret that you will never see in any banner ad. As the months passed, as I stuck with my healthful habits and got used to my new trim body, as the line on my Noom weight graph stayed low, I felt something amazing: I felt pretty much exactly as I had always felt my whole entire life. I was, after all that change, still only myself. My big epiphany, if I could put it into words, would be something like: “So what?”

And the second from Gawker’s ‘Failure to cope “Under capitalism”’ (newlines added by me for emphasis):

[Anne Helen] Petersen’s most acute insight is perhaps in identifying a link between relentlessly optimized childhoods designed to prevent downward mobility, and the professionally competent but profoundly enervated millennials overwhelmed by the prospect of canceling plans, of keeping plans, of cooking food, of texting their mothers. I think she is correct.

I think it’s possible that for many, considering the shape of your life and then living it with vigor is so difficult because it cannot be externally validated. Unlike education and work, it offers no socially obvious meritocratic path. The moments where, like sourdough, it proves, are largely invisible — in cooking, in walking, corresponding with a friend, in chatting with a neighbor or registering to give blood. They cannot be tallied up and put on a resume. They are never “finished.” The progress you make is spiraling rather than linear; circling steadily, slowly, around your weak points, taking two steps forward and one step back, building habits so slowly that only in retrospect can you see your life become different than it was. And there is no one who can tell you that you did it right.

But this is not the condition of life under capitalism, this is life itself. And it is a sad irony that though the fear of life may be produced by class imperatives within capitalism, the impulse to restrict it to a problem of capitalism is itself part of the same fearful rejection of the task of living.

Which also reminds me of an aside from a Bruno book, whose authorship is an American author writing about contemporary Southern France, that the French are tryhards even when contributing to a weekly dinner at home with their friends.